So, if you’re one of those people who aren’t eligible to open a WeChat Wallet, you’re kind of stuck. It’s extremely difficult to open an account on a short-term tourist visa, so unless you’re planning to move to China for 6 months or more, you probably won’t be able to use mobile payments in China. I wish I could tell you that the steps required to open a bank account in China are simple…but they’re not. The only way to activate your WeChat Wallet or Alipay Wallet is to open a Chinese bank account. It’s unfortunate, but this is the reality. Unfortunately, neither of these methods seem to work now.Ĭhina government regulations require that an official ID be attached to each WeChat or Alipay Wallet, and for now, the only way they can do that is with a Chinese bank account. Then there was the promise that when you add a foreign credit card to WeChat, that would also activate your WeChat Wallet. It used to be that you could open a WeChat Wallet by having a friend send you a hongbao or “red envelope”. Are You Eligible to Open a WeChat Wallet? This is what trips most people up, so pay attention. You have to activate the Wallet feature it isn’t open by default. The most important thing to understand with WeChat (and Alipay for that matter) is that you can’t add or accept any amount of Chinese currency unless you have a valid WeChat Wallet. Open a WeChat Wallet to Send/Receive Money *Note* Some of the links in this article are affiliate links, which means that at no extra cost to you, I may be compensated if you choose to use some of the services listed below. residents, but it is accepted in China almost as widely as WeChat. If this is the case, I recommend looking into an alternative option known as ECARD. One more thing: you might read through this and find that WeChat Wallet won’t work for you. Once that is done, I’ll share with you a step-by-step guide for creatively adding money to your WeChat Wallet. To begin, you need to make sure you can open a WeChat Wallet. Unfortunately, most of these changes don’t benefit foreign tourists. WeChat has changed its policies so much over the past year that it’s sometimes hard to keep up. The biggest challenge, however, is figuring out how to add money to WeChat if you’re a tourist or short-term visitor. For the past couple years WeChat has become my primary form of payment! Once set up, though, it’s extremely convenient and easy to see why everybody uses it. Using mobile payments as a foreigner in China has been – and in some ways continues to be – very difficult.
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