Why this is the first thing you do
China skipped cards and went straight to QR codes. Street food, metro, taxis, museums, convenience stores, temples — they all expect a scan. Your Visa works in international hotel chains and almost nowhere else.
Both Alipay and WeChat Pay now accept foreign cards. Set up both, before you fly.
Setting up Alipay
- Install it at home, on your normal internet. Register with your own phone number — it accepts overseas numbers.
- Switch the interface to English in settings.
- Verify your identity with your passport. Do this at home: it can need a photo and a liveness check, and it occasionally fails and needs retrying.
- Link a card — Visa, Mastercard, JCB, Amex, Diners or Discover.
- Make one small test payment if you can, so you find out about any block before you are standing at a noodle counter.
The fees, as of now
- No fee on single payments of ¥200 or less (about US$28).
- 3% on the full amount for single payments over ¥200.
- Your own bank's foreign-transaction fee applies on top.
So split big payments where you can, and use the card directly at hotels where it is accepted.
The limits
Commonly cited figures for verified foreign-card users are up to US$5,000 per transaction and US$50,000 per year, with much lower caps before you complete passport verification. These numbers come from secondary sources and vary — check the current figure in the app, and verify your passport early so you are not stuck on the low tier.
Why you also want WeChat
Less for the payments than for the mini-programs. The reservation systems for a number of major museums and attractions exist only as Chinese-language mini-programs inside WeChat. No WeChat, no National Museum of China.
Set the account up before you travel — new accounts sometimes require a scan-to-verify from an existing user, which is a miserable thing to discover on arrival.
When it fails anyway
It happens. In order:
- Use the other wallet.
- Use your own payment code and have the merchant scan you, rather than scanning their QR. Different rails; this often works when the other doesn't.
- Try a card from a different issuer. Most failures are your own bank's fraud block.
- Pay cash. Carry ¥300–500 for exactly this.
Our survival kit has a card that explains the foreign-card situation in Chinese, which saves a lot of confused gesturing.