Why Chinese vendors, large and small, are rushing to embrace cashless payments
Switch reduces risk of being robbed and they no longer have to worry about fake banknotes
Shenzhen taxi driver Xu Jialiang used to worry that the stack of banknotes he carried in his cab each night made him an easy target for robbers.
But China’s mobile payments boom has changed all that, with taxi drivers among the many people now accepting cashless transactions made using smartphone apps that scan QR codes. They and street vendors, along with bigger operations, now worry less about counterfeit notes and the risk of robbery, and the use of QR codes has even spread to churches and temples, with many now accepting donations made via cashless payment apps.
“I’d been carrying a few hundred yuan – sometimes more than a thousand – in the car every day for years because I was paid and gave change in cash,” Xu said. “In the past, robbers liked to target taxi drivers, but now, thanks to mobile payments, we are much safer because there isn’t much cash in our vehicles.
“Most passengers pay via mobile. Only the elderly and schoolchildren still use banknotes to pay their fares.”
China is now the world’s biggest cashless marketplace, and its rapid development has been hailed as proof of the country’s innovative capacity and social adaptability. Officials have described cashless mobile payment as one of China’s “four great new inventions in modern times”, along with dockless shared bicycles, high-speed trains and e-commerce, likening the quartet to the “four great inventions of ancient China – papermaking, gunpowder, printing and the compass – and saying they are proof that China’s authoritarian governance model does not hurt innovation.
