I am now just over two months old in Beijing.  The all-synapses firing, hyper awareness that is part of the condition of being new to somewhere, is gentling into habit. I am learning the codes of city living in China-2025, quite literally. While every new place necessitates becoming familiar with social and cultural codes, the central organising principle of life in Beijing is the QR code.

The scanning of these is the language of travel, transaction and translation. The city seemingly hums within the super apps (Wechat, Alipay) that house these pixels, with greater vitality than without. The outside world is increasingly sanitised – the traffic more orderly than before, the streets cleaner, the service less salty.

But inside the apps, its mayhem. This is where the energy of the marketplace, long the lifeblood of China, has decamped to. Bargains and discount coupons jostle on heaving, ontologically amorphous landing pages where you can rent a bicycle, furnish a house, get a medical diagnosis and order an oat milk latte, seemingly all at once.

WeChat’s history is a reflection of China’s broader trajectory: one of speed, scale and integration. Of building an ecosystem. Fast. The app began life in 2011, initially conceived of as a way to exchange messages à la WhatsApp. Today it combines functions that in other countries would be spread across a smorgasbord of apps – WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, PayPal, Uber, Yelp, Amazon. It has 1.3 billion plus users globally. Almost 80% of all Chinese are on it.

All of life’s needs have been telescoped into the mobile phone: a direction the rest of the world has been headed towards, but where China has seemingly already arrived. Moving to Beijing from Madrid can feel like having skipped the queue to get to the front of an insidious line that humanity – perhaps unbeknownst to itself – is standing in. It is the teleology of technology in motion.

Two of the most iconic features of the topography of the quotidian in most other countries are verging on the extinct in China: credit cards and websites. Payments are digital for everything from riding the metro to tipping erhu buskers. And instead of websites there are creatures called Mini-Programs that reside in WeChat, which you scan QR codes to join. Mini-Programs provide the information and user interface between businesses and customers that are the purview of www pages in much of the world, but which have the feel of the Jurassic about them in the Sinosphere. (There are an eyeball-spinning 4.4 million Mini-Programs available, and as of early 2024, they had 945 million monthly active users.)

Language has altered to meet this new reality, as have customs that were once central to the culture. The traditional greeting – chi fan le ma (have you eaten) – so redolent of community and concern has been replaced with, ni sao wo? (Will you scan me? The second part of the sentence implied – or should I scan you?) – a straight-to-the-point interrogation with the individual transaction at its centre. Carrying name cards, once a hoary part of advice to foreigners on doing business in China, is no longer de rigueur. No one asks if you’d like to pay with cash or with credit card. The options are, WeChat or Alipay.

The physical is in retreat. As I try and set up house in Beijing, I ask local friends (via WeChat of course) questions about where to buy linen and plants and kitchenware. The answers are unanimous: Taobao, JD, Meituan – all e-commerce businesses available as WeChat Mini-Programs. When I specify that I want brick and mortar, places where I can touch and feel things, I get digital shrugs in reply. No idea. And digital head scratches. It’s so much more convenient to order online. Why would you want to go to a store when WeChat brings the country’s stores to you?

In our first few weeks we constantly try and fail to do things in the real world. We march up to museum ticket booths, only to be shooed away and told to join the relevant Mini-Program to book out visiting slots. We try and ask for lattes at an empty coffee shop but are informed that we have a 30-minute wait, while they fill app-based delivery orders made ahead of ours. There are scores ahead of us in this invisible queue.

Some of WeChat’s success accrues to the fact that global services like Instagram, YouTube and Amazon are blocked in China. But there is the larger question of what accounts for China’s hyper enthusiastic embrace of this digital world? One reason is how (like in India) the country leapfrogged the personal computer phase of the West, straight into the smart phone era. By 2022, there were 1.05 billion people in China with access to the internet, 99.6 percent of whom did so through cellphones (according to the 50th China Statistical Report on Internet Development released by China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC)). This year, the number of 5G mobile phone users in the mainland surpassed 1.15 billion.

Another is how much easier control and surveillance is in the digital world. In China, to use WeChat and many of its Mini-Programs requires a multi-step verification process including the uploading of ID documents. Living online means you are tagged and branded, transparent and exposed.

It sounds frightening, but those I speak to are mostly appreciative of the heavy-handed vetting process required to inhabit the “app life.” People are habituated to sharing their data, so that doing so is just a banal part of existence, as routine as bathing. And the verifications go a long way in eliminating scams and increasing trust in what could otherwise be a high-risk environment.

I was amazed when I first began taking DiDis (the uber equivalent) to discover that I didn’t have to pay at the end of the journey. I could just exit the car and pay any time before my next trip. The system was that sure that I wouldn’t default.

That the Chinese are acculturated to viewing personal data not as something that protects the individual as much as something that can safeguard the larger public, is an important element of any explanation for why superapps are successful here.

Like much in China, “the app life” is a tradeoff between convenience and safety versus surveillance and privacy (with knock on implications for free speech and dissent.)

For most people, using WeChat is about shopping, commuting, socialising and being entertained. “I don’t break the law, so I don’t care,” is the standard response to queries about the surveillance that undergirds super apps.

For me too, giving up personal information is a pact I made with the Internet years ago. Outside China, it may be possible to maintain the illusion of data privacy, but it is an illusion, nonetheless.

The deeper worry that China’s app life has underscored for me is the numbing of something essential about human experience, the more that life is mediated by the phone. In China this mediation is already extreme, and yet nowhere close to any kind of end. The measure of a life even a few years ago was in the multitude of interactions that made up a day. Browsing and bargaining for a winter coat. Talking with a waitress at a restaurant about the sudden change of weather. Getting lost and relying on the kindness of a stranger to find one’s way.

Digital living smooths texture. It is seamless and pothole free, ruled by efficiency. Perhaps I am a luddite for wanting some roughness. To trip up occasionally. To look up from the screen.

What do you think?

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