What does China think of Apple Pay? Let’s ask the internet!

Promotional image from Apple shows Apple Pay in use at a store in China via a NFC-enabled terminal. Issued by UnionPay, these are common in stores across the country.

Apple Pay finally rolled out in China on Thursday, and the views from pundits are already pouring in about whether or not it can stand up to incumbents Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay. My colleague Steven isn’t too sanguine about Apple Pay’s chances, but I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the opinions of Apple Pay’s target audience: Chinese tech-loving urbanites.

To do that, I read through all of the comments on a popular Sina Tech post about how the three payment platforms compare, tracking whether people said good or bad things about Apple, as well as whether WeChat Pay or Alipay got positive mentions. I didn’t track negative mentions for either Chinese payment service, and I also didn’t count anti-Apple rants that made no mention of Apple Pay specifically.

The results were kind of surprising:

This is obviously a small and unscientific sample, but the Sina Tech comments may be telling because Sina Tech’s readership demographic should be similar to the demo Apple needs to grab with Apple Pay: young, tech-savvy urbanites. The big lessons are pretty obvious: netizens are skeptical about Apple Pay and very enthusiastic about Alipay.

Among the comments there were a couple of things I found surprising. First, negative sentiment about WeChat Pay, and the lack of much positive sentiment about it, took me by surprise. I didn’t track negative WeChat sentiment for the chart but there were at least five comments that specifically criticized it. Second, although I did expect a lot of negative sentiment about Apple Pay, there was a strong undercurrent of security concerns tied to Apple’s status as an American company that I didn’t expect would be such a significant factor. More than a few commenters said they didn’t like Apple Pay because they don’t want their banking information in the hands of Americans.

To convey the overall tone of the discussion, I’ve also translated a few selected comments. By far the most upvoted comment on the article was this one: “I don’t know what Apple Pay’s like, since I haven’t used it. I can give it a shot, but between WeChat and Alipay I choose Alipay.”

Apple Pay used at a Burger King in China today to make an in-store payment.

Other comments included:

“Has [Apple Pay] been approved by the Ministry of State Security? It seems like an undue threat to China’s banking information security.”

“The best, most mature, and safest option is Alipay.”

“I’m an iPhone user, but I choose Alipay, because Apple Pay is really just storage for your bank cards. It should be called Apple UnionPay Bank Card Storage. I put money in Alipay because every day it earns interest, and I can transfer it to any bank without fees.”