How to Use WeChat Pay and Alipay in China

Paying with WeChat Pay and Alipay as a foreigner

Two apps run the payment layer of an entire country, and since 2023 both of them take your card. You install WeChat and Alipay, register with the phone number you already own, photograph your passport, add a Visa or a Mastercard, and pay by QR code like the person ahead of you in the queue. No Chinese bank account, and no intermediary taking a spread to load a wallet for you.

The setup is not difficult. It is fiddly in specific places, and those places are not the ones most guides warn you about.

What WeChat Pay and Alipay actually are

WeChat Pay is a payment function inside WeChat, the messaging app that carries most of Chinese social and working life. Alipay is a standalone payments and services app from Ant Group, grown out of Taobao’s escrow system. Neither is a card. Both are QR wallets: the merchant shows a code you scan, or you show a code the merchant scans, and the money moves against whatever you have linked.

In a Chinese city, acceptance is close to total. Street stalls, taxis, metro turnstiles, temple ticket offices, hospital registration desks, the man selling roast sweet potatoes outside the subway exit. What varies is which of the two a given merchant displays, which is the whole argument for carrying both.

How to set up WeChat Pay as a foreigner

Do this at home, on your own network, before you fly. Both the app stores and the verification flow are easier there.

1. Install WeChat from your usual app store and register with your existing phone number. You will need to receive an SMS code.
2. Open the wallet. Tap Me, then Services, then Wallet. Older guides send you to Me and then straight to Wallet. That path is gone, and it is why people conclude the feature does not exist.
3. Add the card. Choose Bank Cards, then Add a Bank Card, and enter the number, expiry date and CVV. Some builds shorten those two labels to Cards and Add a Card. Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, JCB, Diners Club and UnionPay all bind.
4. Set a six digit payment password. This is what you type to approve a purchase. It is not your login password and you will use it constantly.
5. Complete real name verification by photographing your passport. Do it. Skipping it leaves you on a low cap that a single hotel bill will blow through.
6. Confirm the card with the one time code your bank sends. Make sure that code goes to a number you can actually receive on in China.

To pay, open the wallet’s pay code and let the cashier scan your screen, or use Scan to read the code taped to their counter. Small amounts go through on the password alone.

How to set up Alipay with a foreign card

Same shape, different labels, and the English is better.

1. Install Alipay and register with your phone number or email address.
2. Verify your passport first. Alipay wants real name verification done before a foreign card will bind: passport photographs, then a facial recognition check.
3. Open your account from the icon at the bottom right, choose Bank Cards, then the +.
4. Enter your name exactly as printed on the card, then the number, expiry and CVV.
5. Set a six digit payment password, then approve the small authorization charge your bank puts through to prove the card is yours.

Then do the one thing Alipay is genuinely better at. Find the transport code in the mini program section, pick your city, tap activate, and the same QR opens metro turnstiles in dozens of cities. WeChat has the feature too, city by city, with more friction.

The Alipay Tour Card, and why you probably will not need it

For years the standard advice for visitors was Alipay’s prepaid workaround: Tour Pass, since rebranded Tour Card, a virtual prepaid card issued by Bank of Shanghai inside an Alipay mini program. You load it from a foreign card, spend the balance, and the remainder is returned when it expires.

It still exists. It is no longer the route to plan around. Binding a card directly costs nothing, has no balance to manage and no expiry to track, while topping up a Tour Card carries a service fee of roughly 5% before you have bought anything at all. Any guide still presenting Tour Pass as the way tourists pay in China was written before 2023 and never revisited.

The one reason to keep it in mind is the short list of things a bound foreign card cannot do.

What WeChat Pay and Alipay cost

The wallet’s own fee is the number worth memorizing. Payments of CNY 200 or less carry no service fee. Above CNY 200 the wallet takes 3% of the transaction. That threshold is per transaction, not a daily total, and both wallets apply it.

In practice it means noodles, metro fares, taxis, convenience stores and most museum tickets cost you nothing extra, while hotel bills, high speed rail tickets and a real dinner do. CNY 200 is roughly USD 29 at about CNY 7 to the dollar.

Your card issuer’s foreign transaction fee is the second charge, usually 1% to 3%, and it lands on top of the wallet’s cut rather than instead of it. If you own a card with no foreign transaction fee, this is the trip to bring it on.

Both platforms also run promotions that waive the 3% on newly linked international cards, inside a window and under a daily ceiling. They come and go. Check what is live when you bind the card rather than trusting a figure from a blog post written last year.

Spending limits for foreign cards

In March 2024 the People’s Bank of China directed the platforms to raise the ceilings for foreign nationals. The single transaction limit went from USD 1,000 to USD 5,000, and the annual cumulative limit from USD 10,000 to USD 50,000. Ant Group implemented it for Alipay and WeChat Pay matched. Those are still the standing figures.

Two things follow from that. The limits are set in dollars, not yuan, so the yuan equivalent drifts with the exchange rate: at roughly CNY 7 to the dollar, USD 5,000 is about CNY 35,000 in a single payment. And you will still find guides date-stamped 2026 quoting caps of CNY 6,500 a transaction and around CNY 65,000 a year. Those are the old USD 1,000 and USD 10,000 ceilings converted at roughly CNY 6.5 to the dollar, which is both the wrong limit and the wrong exchange rate.

The high limits belong to verified accounts. An account with no passport on file sits well below them.

Topping up, transfers and red packets

Here is where a foreign card stops, and it is the part most setup guides skip.

A bound foreign card pays merchants. It does not fund a balance. You cannot top up your WeChat or Alipay balance from an overseas card, you cannot send a person to person transfer, and you cannot send or open a red packet. Those functions run on domestic banking rails and need a mainland account behind them. When the app tells you to add a debit card issued by a mainland Chinese bank, that is what it means, and no amount of retrying changes it.

The way round it is a Chinese account behind you, not a better foreign card: a friend who can push money into your balance, or the Tour Card, which is worth knowing about precisely because it is itself a Chinese account. Either way the money stays in the country. A balance does not come back out to a foreign card or an overseas account.

Moving a balance to a Chinese bank card has its own price on WeChat: every identity gets a lifetime free withdrawal allowance of CNY 1,000, and 0.1% is charged on everything after it. Most visitors never hold a balance and never meet it.

WeChat Pay vs Alipay: which to install first

Install Alipay first. Then install WeChat anyway.

Alipay is the better tourist tool. Its English is cleaner, its help center is genuinely translated so a failed payment gives you an explanation instead of a Chinese error string, and its transport section activates metro codes across dozens of cities from one screen. It opened foreign card binding earlier and the flow shows it.

WeChat Pay is the better tool for anyone staying. It sits inside the app your driver, your supplier and your hotel will actually message you on, the mini programs for ordering, ticketing and delivery live there, and a fair number of small merchants display only its QR code.

If you have the patience for one app, make it Alipay. If you are meeting anyone, buying anything serious, or staying longer than a week, set up both. They cost nothing to hold.

When a payment fails

Almost every failure is one of six things.

Your bank blocked it. A first charge in Shenzhen on a card that has never left North America is the exact pattern fraud systems stop. Tell your bank your dates before you fly.

Your passport is not verified. Unverified accounts carry a low cap and start declining at ordinary amounts. Finish the verification.

The one time code went somewhere you cannot reach. Card binding sends an OTP to the number your bank holds on file. If that is a home SIM sitting switched off in a drawer, binding fails every time. Sort out roaming, or your bank’s in-app approval, before you try.

A VPN is running. A location that contradicts where you are standing can get a payment blocked outright. Turn it off before you pay and back on afterwards.

The merchant is showing the other app’s code. Not a fault. Wrong wallet open.

That merchant’s terminal will not take your network. Rare, and the answer is the other wallet or a second card. Carry one on a different network for exactly this.

Keep a few hundred yuan in small notes as the true last resort. Since 1 February 2026 businesses in China may not refuse renminbi cash, so it always works, and a dead phone battery is the one failure no wallet solves.

What to do before you fly

Install both apps at home. Register with your own number, verify your passport, bind a card to each, and set the payment passwords while you still have a keyboard you like and a network that behaves. Bring a second card on a different network. Expect 3% above CNY 200 and nothing below it.

That is the whole job, and it takes about twenty minutes on your own sofa. It saves you the specific misery of standing at a counter in Yiwu holding a perfectly good credit card with no way to spend it.