WeChat + PayPal Partnership: China-maxxing's Latest Move

The Tencent–PayPal deal is about the new payment rail the Chinese central bank built

Every summer I fly back to China, and before the plane lands, I think about the same thing: will my Alipay work when I land in Hong Kong or Beijing, because my children will invariably need to a water or a pork bun.

So when I read that Tencent and PayPal announced this Tuesday that TenPay Global is now connected to PayPal World, my first instinct was: finally. In plain terms, a U.S. PayPal user landing in Beijing can open the PayPal app, point it at any WeChat Pay QR code at any merchant, and the transaction goes through. No WeChat download. No Chinese bank account. No mainland ID. The merchant does nothing different on their end.

This is big news because it’s not as if Tencent and Ant Group, which runs Alipay, haven’t tried to make it easier before. TenPay Global has existed for years as Tencent’s cross-border payments arm, a network of licensed financial institutions under Tencent that connects the WeChat ecosystem to overseas wallets and users. Until very recently, TenPay Global’s partner list looked like a tour of secondary Asian payment apps: Vietnam’s MOMO and ZaloPay, Laos’s BCEL, Mongolia’s Hipay, Thailand’s TrueMoney. You get the point. Useful if you were a Vietnamese tourist in Shanghai. Useless if you were an American tourist anywhere in China.

China is, functionally, a cashless society now. Across the board, first-tier metropolis and county-seat alike, Alipay and WeChat Pay together run more than 94% of the mobile payments market. So for anyone visiting, payment is the thing that quietly sits at the top of mind. I can’t count the conversations I’ve had with friends who either haven’t been to China or haven’t been back in five-plus years, and the worry is always the same: how do I actually access my money and pay for things. The setup has historically been glitchy, a process of linking foreign cards to apps that I genuinely cannot explain to them in a way that sounds reassuring.

It begs the question: why now?

China is the new Japan this year, the place everyone has either just been or is about to go. Tech writers, AI delegations, sovereign-wealth scouts, journalists, VC investors. The SAIL Media delegation spent ten days this spring touring DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax, Unitree, Alibaba, and more. There’s an AI/tech trek in Beijing for youngsters scheduled in a month. Lex Fridman is hitchhiking in China at the moment.

The numbers underneath the vibe are hard to ignore. In 2025, 82 million foreigners entered China, up 26% year on year. Of those, 30 million came in visa-free, up nearly 50%. China has been steadily widening unilateral visa-free access, now covering 50 countries, with the UK and Canada added this February.

It could be that China-maxxing is playing a role in all of this. The FT just ran a piece on “China-maxxing,” the soft-power moment carrying Labubu and bubble tea across the world. There are 13 HeyTea locations in New York now, a Times Square flagship doing 2,000-plus cups a day. Luckin Coffee opened its first two U.S. stores in Manhattan last June and is already up to fourteen. Pop Mart, with more than 50% of its business now coming from outside of China, posted a 204% revenue jump in the first half of 2025.

Why has it been so hard to get done?

The payment friction is that the entire mobile life-stack in China assumes a Chinese mainland national ID. Real-name verification is the invisible gate. Buying a high-speed rail ticket, reserving a slot at a popular attraction, unlocking a shared bike, hailing a cab, checking into a hotel: nearly every “getting around” scenario routes through an app, and many of those apps only recognize a national ID, not a passport. A lot of attractions now require advance in-app booking as opposed to just walk in. I wrote an entire piece about my experience trying to watch the flag-raising at Tiananmen Square last year on this very fact.

A Caixin piece puts it well: the inconveniences foreigners run into in China are not random; they are the shape of a system built around domestic identity.

The PayPal deal doesn’t solve all of the fection. It solves exactly one slice of it: payments at retail merchants, and only for U.S. PayPal users to start, with other markets to follow in phases.

Alipay has taken the opposite approach, and it is worth pausing on because it juxtaposes what Tencent just did. Ant International (which runs Alipay+) has been building the opposite kind of bridge: helping Chinese travelers pay abroad and helping regional Asian wallets pay inside China. Indonesia–China QR connectivity in May. HUMO Pay Uzbekistan last October. iFAST Global Bank in the UK earlier this month.

The plumbing matters more than the deal

The corridor that made the PayPal deal possible has been a year in the making. In July 2025, the People’s Bank of China began trial operations of the Cross-Border Interconnection Payment Gateway, or CPG: a single PBOC-supervised pipe that overseas wallets can plug into to reach China’s QR network. Before this, every foreign wallet had to negotiate access bank by bank, app by app. The CPG replaces all of that with one point of entry.

By September 2025, TenPay Global and Ant International were named the two inaugural foreign-institution partners on the CPG. PayPal is the first major Western consumer wallet on it. This is more than a corporate handshake between Tencent and PayPal; it required the central bank’s blessing. The news is that a Western wallet has finally gotten access to infrastructure the Chinese central bank built.

The timing ahead of the APEC summit Shenzhen hosts in November is not a coincidence.

So everyone is coming. The Labubus are selling out, and we all love our HeyTea. PayPal now works in a Shenzhen noodle shop, and I feel more at ease knowing that. One wall down. Could Instagram be next? I’ll be in China this summer. I’ll let you know.

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