It’s hard but we did it a week or two back for our current travels in China. Wechatpay is accepted everywhere- either by you sending money to the buyer (smaller

It’s hard but we did it a week or two back for our current travels in China. Wechatpay is accepted everywhere- either by you sending money to the buyer (smaller retailers, requires your phone to be online) or by the retailer scanning you (larger retailers, you can be offline). E.g. At a large high quality restaurant we were at yesterday we could not pay them at the table so we went to the checkout and the scanned. Credit cards are not useful except for pulling cash out of ATMs or at really western stores. Cash is only as a backstop, or perhaps to ask someone to send you wechatpay balance. I found it easier to sign up to wechat(pay) than TransferWise, who have 3 potential authentication methods and none work as advertised in my country. WeChatPay works because of the higher level of trust the app enforces. The retail economy is being run on these systems and that trust is critical. Facebook, Twitter and google have arguably thrown away any chance they had of doing universal payments through their poor ability to ensure trust - far from it.