As I write, I’m in an apartment in Beijing, constantly toggling on and off a browser extension that functions as my Virtual Private Network (VPN) here. This may seem like a strange thing to do while on vacation, but it’s the only way I can connect to the ‘outside world’ — Google, Facebook, and Twitter are banned in China, as you probably know but occasionally forget, given how central to our lives these social networks have become.
It may seem like the Chinese are missing out on a lot, but try telling them that. For Google, they have Baidu. For Facebook, they have Renren, among others. For Twitter, they have Weibo. Barring the first, I haven’t felt the need to look up the others. But nothing compares to the ubiquity of WeChat, China’s most popular messaging app. According to a recent report, it is also one of the largest standalone messaging apps in the world, with 938 million monthly active users.
It is impossible to be in China and be unaware of WeChat. It’s everywhere. I travel by the subway and see almost everyone who isn’t having a conversation with someone with their noses into their phones, and about 90% of the time they seem to be using WeChat. Every establishment, be it a restaurant, a corner store or supermarket, has a QR code that allows users to pay or transfer money via the app (whose interface some of our recently popularised digital wallets have quite faithfully ripped off, I must say — even the final notification screen after a payment has been made looks almost exactly the same as it does on PayTM, which gained prominence after the government’s move to demonetise 85% of India’s paper currency last November).
People use it to pay bills, book airline or rail or movie tickets, or call for taxis through its millions of third-party apps, which allows for media companies, celebrities, banks, and start-ups to function as standalone accounts that can ‘test’ an app on the WeChat platform before going official.
Before coming to China, I thought of WeChat as the Chinese alternative to WhatsApp, but it’s much more — it’s a closed system within itself. Small wonder then that, according to latest reports, in response to ongoing rumours about WeChat being removed from the Apple App Store for failing to comply with certain new terms, social media users in China have declared emphatically that they’d sooner throw away their iPhones than live in a world where WeChat does not exist on the App Store.
The digital revolution India seems to be aiming for is well underway here in practice. Expats living in Beijing tell me about how WeChat groups have helped them navigate life in a city where spoken English is uncommon, and how adding people on WeChat is a sort of digital ‘handshake’. People are quick to share IDs or let people scan their unique QR codes to become ‘friends’; they’re much less likely to actually give you their phone numbers. For me, this short trip has been a fascinating insight into a sub-culture that seems to be one of the key drivers of modern Chinese life.
Suprateek Chatterjee is a Mumbai-based freelance journalist who writes on film, music and popular culture, and tweets at @SupraMario
