
To Cover China, There’s No Substitute for WeChat - annefauvre
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/technology/personaltech/china-wechat.html
======
kweks
If you're a foreigner, getting a functioning WeChat account is near to
impossible these days. Validating a foreign account involves sponsorship from
a local account. Local accounts can only sponsor one user every three months.

This is a policy that has been getting steadily more and more restrictive. I
have partners who simply give westerners a telephone with a new account + Sim
loaded and bound to a local to avoid hassles.

Life in China today without WeChat is a bit like life in the USA today but
communicating only by postal mail and paying for things with traveller's
cheques. It's possible, but it's not a world you want to live in.

If WeChat is taking over the world.. it's a world without foreigners.

~~~
thetechlead
> If you're a foreigner, getting a functioning WeChat account is near to
> impossible these days.

You are confusing Wechat with Wechat Pay which is a feature of the former. You
only need a mobile phone # (foreign or domestic) to sign up for WeChat. As for
Wechat Pay, getting a bank account should be fairly easy if you live in China.

~~~
kweks
Unfortunately no longer the case. All account validations for foreigners
require the above hoops to be jumped through - at least as of yesterday when
we were jumping through them to activate the account of two EU clients - chat
only, not payments. I may be incorrect (and I hope for any other foreigners
wanting to use WeChat this is the case) - but I witnessed two data points to
the contrary yesterday.

~~~
ivalm
I signed up for wechat about a month ago in the US without any issues.

~~~
quicklime
I signed up for WeChat a few months ago, and later found out that WeChat was
warning my Chinese friends that my account was unverified and to be careful. I
had no idea it was telling them this until one of them told me.

I was also unable to log into the web/desktop client. The error message just
said that for security reasons, only verified accounts were allowed to use
WeChat through the web, but didn't give any instructions on how to get the
account verified.

~~~
yorwba
That's essentially a spam protection feature. Because WeChat has so few non-
Chinese users, most "foreign" accounts are actually made by spammers. So
you're graylisted until they become confident you're an actual human. I've
only seen that warning message about an unverified account once among the 100+
foreign WeChat contacts I have (most of them Pakistanis), but I seem to recall
that the warning also included an option to verify the contact. Obviously they
don't want to give spammers a way to directly verify themselves.

------
jandrese
The combination of Wechat and making it effectively the only option through
the Great Firewall is an amazing tool for shutting out foreign voices from
Chinese social media. The apparent policy on connecting to Wechat from outside
the mainland is "don't".

It seems incredible that people would want to use such a restrictive service
when much more open ones exist, but the others routinely have their service
degraded by the government so they aren't a viable option.

Personally, it think in the long term this sort of compartmentalization is
harmful, it too often facilitates groupthink and missing valuable input from
people with a different perspective. It's damaging to a society and is going
to have repercussions.

~~~
iOsiris
> It seems incredible that people would want to use such a restrictive service
> when much more open ones exist, but the others routinely have their service
> degraded by the government so they aren't a viable option.

Do those other options actually exist within China? I thought they were
blocked and that's why WeChat is dominate.

~~~
jandrese
I remember at least one of the popular third party chat apps like Signal or
Telegram made a big push to squeeze past the Great Firewall by hosting on AWS
and being judicious with their traffic patterns. IIRC they even manged to get
AWS shut out of China at times.

~~~
tivert
> I remember at least one of the popular third party chat apps like Signal or
> Telegram made a big push to squeeze past the Great Firewall by hosting on
> AWS and being judicious with their traffic patterns. IIRC they even manged
> to get AWS shut out of China at times.

I think you're talking about domain fronting
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting)).
IIRC, Google, Amazon, and MS all blocked it because they were _afraid_ of
getting blocked. Though I also vaguely recall that Russia was blocking big
blocks of AWS IPs for a time to try to stamp out Telegram.

I was in China recently, and Signal actually seemed to work on a local wifi
network (with cellular data disabled), so maybe they've got some new
circumvention technology in place. I didn't thoroughly try to test it since
99% of the time I just used data roaming on a foreign carrier to avoid the
firewall.

------
ConfusedDog
God forbid if I want to quit WeChat. The shit I get from my wife and relatives
if I don't post anything, reply to something they posted or give them "red
pockets" is absolutely ridiculous! It is probably the most successful social
network app/money transfer app out there... and I don't like it. Maybe I'm
turning into an old geezer or something...

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I let my wife manage all our wechat posting, I’m responsible for all the
Facebook posts. Sometimes it is hard to synchronize baby pics between the two.

~~~
briandear
If there was only a service that would allow sharing photos without WeChat or
Facebook..

Its trivial to share photos using shared galleries in iCloud. Why Facebook is
still considered valuable is beyond me. The last thing I want is photos of my
kids on a Facebook type service.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
The American relatives use Facebook, the Chinese relatives use wechat, it’s
not like we go out and tell them to use Snapchat for this.

I’m not really worried about toddler pics on Facebook. Many people have
complex conspiracy theories that they can be turned into CP or something, but
they are all pretty impractical.

~~~
dingaling
My objection to putting toddler pics on social media is that we ask friends
and relatives if it's OK to post photos of _them_ , but by the time a child is
old enough to give informed consent it's too late.

------
_bxg1
My hope is that China demonstrates to the world how terribly this kind of
digital-dystopia plays out, and serves as a cautionary tale for countries like
England and companies like Google which are already (more slowly) heading in
that direction.

~~~
landryraccoon
> terribly this kind of digital-dystopia plays out

Yeah, but what if it works? What if technology and the laws of our physical
universe really do allow efficient, permanent and total totalitarianism?

~~~
jMyles
That question provokes a need for faith. Faith that whatever is emerging in
this age represents a flavor of evolution with an appetite for the good, the
beautiful, and the true.

~~~
landryraccoon
I'd prefer that engineers and scientists made opinionated decisions to work on
technology that sustains a free, egalitarian society than just blindly being a
cog in whatever machine they work in, and allowing whatever happens to just
happen.

~~~
jMyles
Yeah, I mean me too. And I do. Every day.

But I also recognize that the universe is bigger than me, and I'm not so self-
assured as to believe that its impact on me isn't as big or bigger than my
impact on it.

I think that you can decline to work on bombs and torture and machine learning
unto psychological manipulation, etc. but also at the same time have faith
that the emergence of the internet is something natural whose essence is good
and beautiful and true.

------
nathan_long
I had to install WeChat once on my phone for business reasons. From what I
read of the Chinese government's control over it, I felt nervous that my phone
was compromised by installing it.

You could say that Facebook is just as bad, but 1) I don't install Facebook
and 2) I still trust the US Government more than the Chinese one.

~~~
landryraccoon
I'm not sure if this is still the case but Google used to not even allow
employees to bring their laptops to China. If a Googler had to go to China
they would be issued a special laptop just for that trip. I have no idea what
IT had to do to that laptop after the trip to make sure it was clean.

If I were going to China on business I'd have a separate cell phone just for
that purpose. You can just swap sim cards if you need to keep the same number.
Smartphones are so cheap nowadays you might as well have a burner for that
purpose.

~~~
tivert
> If I were going to China on business I'd have a separate cell phone just for
> that purpose. You can just swap sim cards if you need to keep the same
> number. Smartphones are so cheap nowadays you might as well have a burner
> for that purpose.

A SIM card is an independent computer that runs a stripped-down version of
Java. According to this comment
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17083221](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17083221)),
the cell network can even upload programs to it to run.

~~~
free652
Sim isn't a computer, it's just a secure data store. SIM cards predate java
afaik.

~~~
j16sdiz
There are UICC SIM card -- it is a java card emulating sim card.

for example:
[https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/131100_131199/131130/08...](https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/131100_131199/131130/08.03.00_60/ts_131130v080300p.pdf)

------
smaili
> the messaging app that’s the equivalent of WhatsApp plus Facebook plus
> PayPal plus Uber plus GrubHub plus many other things.

It's unfortunate not much of their architecture is publicly shared or
discussed. With their massive amount of users and incredibly diverse service
offerings I'd love to see their backend architecture design choices/tradeoffs.

~~~
azurezyq
Actually they shared a lot but vast majority of them in Chinese.

~~~
yorwba
Could you link to some Chinese-language resources they published?

~~~
azurezyq
Just did a brief search and found a few links:
[https://www.infoq.cn/article/the-road-of-the-growth-
weixin-b...](https://www.infoq.cn/article/the-road-of-the-growth-weixin-
background)
[https://cloud.tencent.com/developer/article/1005631](https://cloud.tencent.com/developer/article/1005631)

There seems more on cloud.tencent.com/developer.

And you can check their presentations on major per-field conferences like AI
or big data or something.

------
throw7
Reminds me of some earlier article about a chinese daughter who pursued a
"solitary life". With few chinese "social connections" it was tough for her to
get things done for her aging father? mother?. That would seem to make for a
strong driver for "digital connections" ala wechat.

Hate to break it to the author though: western companies aren't going to be
the ones doing the digital liberation. It's not like that's what their doing
here anyway.

~~~
Invictus0
I believe it was this NYT article about guanxi:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/opinion/international-
wor...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/opinion/international-world/the-
bitter-regrets-of-a-useless-chinese-daughter.amp.html)

~~~
throwaway3023
Guanxi sounds like the "Old boy network."

And "Chabuduo" sounds similar to "Fail fast, fail often."

~~~
gvhst
I'd like to respectfully provide some contrasting ideas regarding these two
points.

1\. Guanxi is related to one's network or clout, but there are several
distinct differences between the chinese concept of Guanxi and the western
notion of "old boy's network." Primarily, guanxi is more a locative phenomena
--anyone can have Guanxi within your community and business--whereas idea of
an "old boy's network" pertains to ones connections and access to society at
large. Additionally, Guanxi isn't explicitly related to a subpopulation.
Anyone can have guanxi in a specific community, not just men.

2\. Chabuduo literally means "not a big difference." More abstractly, I see it
as a thought process where "adequacy is enough." I do see the connection with
fail fast, where one doesn't wait until perfection to ship. However chabuduo
to me doesn't exemplify the pursuit of improvement that underlies "fail fast,
fail often."

------
wufufufu
The WeChat MacOS client requires some ridiculous QR code dance to login _every
time_ I open it. That alone prevents me from using it over iMessage / FB
messenger when communicating with my family.

The only time I use WeChat is if family members are in China where I assume
they have banned FB messenger and iMessage.

~~~
toephu2
That's basically 2-factor authentication. It's more secure than entering a
password. WeChat was also built as a mobile-first app, the desktop experience
was an afterthought.

~~~
Zarel
2-factor authentication generally keeps you logged in, instead of forcing you
to re-do the authentication every day.

------
omouse
And then we have things like this, where in Canada, a Liberal Party candidate
used WeChat to post a racist campaign message:
[https://globalnews.ca/news/4853439/karen-wang-liberal-
burnab...](https://globalnews.ca/news/4853439/karen-wang-liberal-burnaby-
south-candidate-wechat-message-controversy/)

How can any journalists learn about this story without a WeChat account or
without having some insider (local Chinese person) who has access to a WeChat
account?

Multiple Internets are _already_ here, and we've got to work at bridging them
all over again.

------
samstave
Serious question:

We bitch and moan in the US about NSA-Google-FB-Amazon etc spying on private
conversations/things we say outloud etc.

Why on ___EARTH_ __would you want a Chinese WeChat account, assuming you had
any privacy concerns in a country like the US?

~~~
chillacy
You say we but there is no hivemind, just a bunch of bees, and some are less
privacy conscious than others.

------
rellui
Funny that this article shows up today right after a big update (I think
within the last few days) where the most basic message notification broke.
Yep, it literally doesn't show any message notifications unless I manually
open up the app. Kinda useless in this state. This is probably not affecting
many people since I haven't see anybody complain about it.

~~~
vorg
I upgraded to v 7.0.0 a few weeks ago (when it first appeared), and WeChat
runs 2 or 3 times slower on my old phone ever since. As for payments,
sometimes it takes a few minutes to make a payment in a shop where I scan
them. I'm starting to seek out larger shops where they scan me for payments
because it's a lot quicker. I really don't want to buy a new phone because my
old one still works for everything else. Sounds like WeChat/Huawei is the
Chinese version of the old Microsoft/Intel duopoly.

------
justicezyx
Kind of funny.

WeChat is more taking over the world before ByteDance's phenomenal growth in
the past 2 years.

Now to say it's taking the world appears to show that the author has no idea
what's happening in China...

~~~
hero76
right they just released a clone of snapchat. Android client looks like a
decompilation of snapchat app

~~~
yorwba
According to Wikipedia, WeChat was first released in January 2011, while
Snapchat only came out in September 2011. I conclude that Snapchat is more
likely to be a clone of WeChat than the other way around.

Edit: To be clear, while I haven't used Snapchat, based on what I've heard
about it I'd say that the two apps are nothing alike except for having some
kind of chat functionality.

~~~
napoleond
Parent was not talking about WeChat:
[https://technode.com/2019/01/18/bytedances-snapchat-clone-
is...](https://technode.com/2019/01/18/bytedances-snapchat-clone-isnt-wechat-
killer-but-tencent-should-worry/)

~~~
yorwba
Thanks for the clarification. I read the "just" as "only" instead of "this
week" and also thought it referred to WeChat instead of Bytedance's new
Duoshan, which I totally hadn't heard of before.

------
ggm
I was in China, in the moment of activating WeChat when I put my phone down on
my RFID passport. WeChat was the app which asked for Android permission to
read the RFID tag.

I ceased installation and removed the app.

------
holoduke
Just installed in on android. 90mb for a chat app. Really wonder what's
inside. We have multiple apps with a whole lot more functionality. Never more
than 20-30mb

~~~
enedil
Oh really? And do you have built-in microblogging platform? Do you have OCR
with English-Chinese and Chinese-English translation? Do you have mobile
payments? Do you have discover people feature (by location)? Can you identify
movies by recording audio? Not only payments are possible, you can send money
to anyone in WeChat. Sadly, some of these functionality are not available for
non Chinese people (people without account in Chinese bank).

~~~
JCharante
> Can you identify movies by recording audio?

Wait how can you do this? I've tried searching in English (can't write
Chinese) to no avail.

~~~
enedil
I can read and write Chinese only partially, but that's not needed here:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/bd61em3tieo8ry0/Screenshot_2019011...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/bd61em3tieo8ry0/Screenshot_20190119-135131.png?dl=0)

------
QML
There was a recent If Then episode that commented on how China’s declining
demand of iPhones may be in part to how people there are agnostic to the
hardware and more dependent on the software apps ran on the device (WeChat,
Alipay, etc.).

------
40acres
WeChat utilitarian characteristics seem awesome, aside from it being a major
commerce platform but I've heard of features that connect you to businesses,
government, and other services that would be really helpful.

------
resouer
It's interesting and a bit scary to see how the reporter from NYT rendering
WeChat, a daily used app developed by a HK IPO-ed tech giant, into a scary,
wretched, government-controlled monitoring tool for restricting personal
freedom.

Tell me, how can a social media like Signal and WhatsApp win in a country of
billon population without even a single one local office? Just because it's
encrypted? Come on!

How to say that? Either charlatan or simpleton.

Talk with some "real" Chinese ppl, guys, and learn about what is WeChat.

~~~
Zak
Prior to its acquisition by Facebook, WhatsApp gained significant market share
in Europe, India, and Israel. The company is based in the US, and I don't
think it had local offices in those areas before it was already popular there.

So it is not obvious, or even true that a chat app needs a local office to
become popular in a given region. It _may_ be true that a chat app needs a
local office to become popular in _China_ , but it's definitely possible to
believe otherwise without being a "charlatan or simpleton".

As an aside, we don't talk to each other that way on Hacker News. Please do
not insult people, and please explain why you think someone is wrong instead
of claiming that it's obvious.

~~~
resouer
As X succeed in Europe, India, and Israel, then it's natural it should success
in China.

Sorry, my fault, I thought recognizing the diversity of things is "obvious" in
HN.

------
debt
Does anyone here have a business presence on WeChat? If so, what has your
experience been like?

~~~
jacob_rezi
Two of our Chinese partners conduct their entire business through a collection
of groups all related to careers.

Since we are a foreign firm located in South Korea - they sell our services to
their users on our behalf. Amazing how an entire company can be ran solely on
wechat

~~~
dingaling
That's terrifying. The IT section of their business continuity plan must be
empty beyond "don't get kicked off WeChat"

------
gok
Where by "the world" we of course mean "mainland China"

Edit: the title has been changed; it used to read "WeChat is taking over the
world" or something

~~~
rakoo
As someone not from the US, I can assure you the same mindset does appear on
American websites about the US.

~~~
DeonPenny
I thought american tech companies were used in most places outside of the US.
From what seen facebook, google, amazon, etc are fairly global reaching at
this point.

~~~
Markoff
Reddit it's pretty much unknown in Europe I'd you check statistics

Amazon it's also the last option i would be looking at when shopping for
something online in Europe

~~~
varjag
Right, first place would be ebay.de, .fr, .it, .co.uk..

~~~
Markoff
that's even less likely than amazon

------
dwighttk
Article title is currently the slightly less hyperbolic: "To Cover China,
There’s No Substitute for WeChat"

~~~
sctb
Yes, thanks! We've updated the headline from “WeChat taking over the world”.

