At WalMart Stores, Inc., was opening many stores in China in the late 90s and early 2000s, I was on the 'Network Management' team. Think: 'devops' but for an e

At WalMart Stores, Inc., was opening many stores in China in the late 90s and early 2000s, I was on the 'Network Management' team. Think: 'devops' but for an enormous global network. At the time, (most) every store in the world had a 56k frame relay network connection back to the Bentonville, Arkansas home office. The main purpose of this connection was to do various credit/debit/EBT,check/etc authorizations. Stores in China had something additional: a fractional 56k frame link, the far end terminated by some other entity. Normally, in store point of sale systems sent authorizations to the then named VISA system in Bentonville. (It was called VISA but it handled most electronic transaction types. It was replaced by a far more robust and generalized system called E-Pay shortly thereafter.) In China, the POS systems also sent the transactions across that other link. We didn't know officially who was on the other side, but it was widely speculated that it was the Chinese government. My knowledge of these things is nearly 20 years old now, do take my recollections with a grain of salt. Also, I have no idea how this setup has subsequently evolved.