“Scan to Pay”: A Decade Without Cash in China — What Changed, and Who Was Left Behind

On his third day in Chengdu, Thomas hit a wall at the Yulin wet market. He had come from the Netherlands to take home a bag of Sichuan peppercorns. He picked them, they were weighed — eight yuan — and he handed over a 100-yuan note. The vendor was an elderly woman in a blue apron. She rummaged through her pockets and came up with two ten-yuan bills and a handful of coins: still six yuan short. “Forget it, forget it, take them,” she said, waving him off. A woman selling ginger next door took pity and held up the QR code board from her own stall, slowing her speech the way you talk to a child: “Young man, scan it. It’s easy.” Thomas had no Alipay and no WeChat Pay. He stood there frozen: back in the Netherlands, scanning was one option at the checkout counter. Here, it felt like the only one.

The last time he had come to China was 2019. Cash had worked everywhere that trip: five yuan for a jianbing, paper bills for subway tickets, small shops handing back clinking change. Coming back in 2025, the changes caught him off guard. The hotel front desk told him his deposit would be refunded by scan. The sweet-potato vendor had taped a QR code to his roaster. The woman at the hospital registration window didn’t look up: “Book it on your phone, it’s faster.” Even the street beggars had upgraded their equipment — a small board around the neck, reading “Scan to donate.” Five years earlier, cash had kept him alive; five years later, he was the one who needed teaching.

Only later did he realize he had walked into an old argument. Over the past decade, “cashlessness” in China went from a marketing slogan to everyday reality, and from everyday reality to a debate about who gets left behind. The authorities never use the term “cashless society” — the People’s Bank of China has said again and again that the renminbi is legal tender and that no one may refuse it. Yet walking down a Chengdu street, you can be forgiven for thinking paper money is quietly retiring from daily life. What has money become in China these ten years? And who has been left behind by it? The story starts with a QR code.

A Revolution That Happened on a QR Code

China’s mobile payment revolution sprouted in an environment with “no rival to fight.” In the early 2000s, credit cards were far from universal: POS terminals didn’t fit into small restaurants, card fees stung small merchants, and most people saved with paper passbooks. While Americans were used to “buy now, pay later,” shopping online in China still felt like a bet: “You dare pay first, I dare ship.” Then in 2003, Taobao introduced escrow payments — the buyer handed money to the platform first, and the platform released it to the seller only after the goods were confirmed received. Trust moved online, and for the first time, payment became a product of the internet.

The real detonators were two accidents with the force of Spring Festival. On Chinese New Year’s Eve 2014, WeChat launched its red-packet feature; the media later described it as a “Pearl Harbor attack” on Alipay — within days, millions of users linked bank cards just to grab digital red envelopes, and social networks became payment networks overnight. The taxi-subsidy war followed immediately: Kuaidi and Didi burned billions of yuan fighting for riders, and drivers and passengers alike learned to scan-pay for the first time, all for a few yuan of subsidy. As one payment-industry veteran remembers it: “Red packets gave WeChat the users; the taxi war taught the whole country to scan.” After those two battles, the mass education of QR payment was complete.

In the years after, QR codes spread like weeds. Around 2016, Hangzhou loudly declared itself a “cashless city,” convenience stores propped up their two payment boards on the counter, and jianbing vendors taped printed codes to their carts. Then in 2017 the wind shifted: merchants began hanging “no cash accepted” signs, complaints against refusing banknotes mounted, and the central bank summoned the companies involved and shut down the loudly marketed “cashless days,” following up in July 2018 with an announcement: refusing to accept renminbi cash is against the law. The official slogan quietly changed from “cashless” to “non-cash payment.” When the pandemic hit in 2020, contactless became a necessity, and scan-to-pay completed another round of adoption.

By now the scale far exceeds “paying.” According to the People’s Bank of China, mobile payments nationwide exceeded 185 billion transactions in 2023, worth over 555 trillion yuan. In a report released in early 2025, the China Internet Network Information Center counted 1.108 billion internet users. Utility bills, hospital registration, government paperwork, electronic invoices — all of it has been folded into one small code. In China, the QR code has long stopped being just about the checkout.

Two Groups Left at the Door: Foreigners and Grandmothers

With the codes woven this densely, did anyone get shut out? Yes — and for a while, two whole groups at once. The first were foreigners. Thomas’s experience was hardly unique: in 2023, complaint after complaint from foreigners living in China — “we have money but can’t spend it” — trended on Weibo. They couldn’t link a payment account, and cash was often impossible to break; going out felt like running a gauntlet. Once the problem landed on the table, the fix came with surprising speed: from 2023, WeChat Pay and Alipay both began accepting foreign bank cards; in March 2024, the State Council’s General Office issued the Opinions on Further Optimizing Payment Services, setting the formula of “big purchases on card, small purchases by scan, cash as the backstop”; and in 2025, the single-transaction cap for foreigners using mobile payments was raised to US$5,000. Thomas linked his foreign card with help from the hotel staff. A week later he posted: “Day four in China, and I can’t remember where my wallet is.” He patted his pocket — that 100-yuan note was untouched, well on its way to becoming a souvenir.

The second group were grandmothers. Li Shufen, 76, lives in Yangpu, Shanghai. She spent her working years at a textile mill, and after retirement her radius shrank to the vegetable market and the neighborhood clinic. In 2021 her phone stumped her for the first time: entering a supermarket required scanning a venue code. She fiddled with it for ten minutes at the door; a security guard finally let her in. Her daughter, who works in Suzhou, bought her a smartphone and taught her for three days. All she retained was one thing — “press the green circle.” Then the neighborhood opened a “silver-haired phone class,” starting from turning the phone on, connecting to Wi-Fi, and not clicking random links. She took three terms and learned video calls, scanning to buy groceries, and booking hospital appointments by phone. Her daughter also set up a WeChat “family card” for her — a 3,000-yuan monthly allowance that Shufen spends at the market on her daughter’s account while her daughter watches the bills in real time. “Now that I’ve learned it, it is convenient,” Li Shufen says. “But there will always be a 100-yuan note in my wallet. What if my phone dies?”

Li Shufen is far from alone. China’s National Bureau of Statistics puts the population aged 60 and above at roughly 310 million at the end of 2024; by CNNIC’s figures, only about half of them are truly “online.” The other half still lives outside the world of QR codes. What has caught them is not the digital age itself but a string of publicized fines for refusing cash, patient tellers at bank branches, and neighborhood phone classrooms one after another. Technology runs fast; regulation is what catches people — a clumsy pairing that, in China, has unexpectedly kept the elderly from falling through.

Wang Xiulan’s QR Code and Her Cash Pouch

The grandmother who couldn’t make change at the start of this story is Wang Xiulan, 68, who has kept a stall at the Yulin market for twenty-two years, selling dried chilies, Sichuan peppercorns, and a few greens from her own patch. Her QR code was printed and laminated by her daughter in 2020, tied to the beam of her stall. At first she didn’t trust it: when a customer scanned the code, had the money actually been paid? She couldn’t see it. Her homespun solution was to ask customers to hold up the “payment successful” screen for her to check. Her daughter laughed at her for being so standoffish; she stuck out her chin: “What if someone scans and doesn’t pay?” Then her stall upgraded to a speaker that announces each payment — the moment “WeChat, received 3.50 yuan” rang out, the stone in her heart finally lifted.

The QR code has brought her real, tangible benefits. In 2016 she accepted a counterfeit 100-yuan bill. That evening she counted the day’s take at home, her hand trembled, and she nearly cried — a whole day’s work, gone. Since going digital, fake bills can’t reach her, she needs far less loose change, and the number in her phone at closing time is the day’s accounts. But she keeps two old things: a handwritten ledger and a cloth pouch for coins and small bills. She trusts the phone’s numbers, yet she still feels “money you can’t see or touch doesn’t quite count,” so every evening, when she packs up, she copies the day’s takings into the notebook. The pouch always holds one or two hundred yuan in small change, because the first sales of the morning often come from elderly customers who can’t scan. There was a case in the market of a payment code being secretly swapped for a thief’s. Now, every morning before opening, she scans her own code board with her own phone to make sure it is hers.

“The QR code is my tool for keeping up with the times,” Wang Xiulan says. “The cash pouch is my fallback.”

When Money Became a String of Digits

Scanning has changed more than convenience, and not everything it changed sits comfortably.

Behavioral economics has confirmed over and over: paying with cash hurts the most; credit cards hurt less; scanning with a phone hurts least of all. When money stops being handed over note by note and simply becomes a shrinking string of digits, the brakes on spending loosen. Behind the scan-to-pay gate also sits a chain of credit products like Huabei and Jiebei, replacing the “insufficient balance” warning with carefully designed credit lines. For many young people, the threshold for spending an entire month’s salary is far lower than it was for their parents.

Every payment is also being recorded in another ledger. Chinese media have run the experiment repeatedly: the same hotel, the same moment, different prices depending on which phone you book from — suspicions of “big-data price discrimination” have never died down since 2018. The traces each scan leaves, stitched together, form a personal profile precise down to your taste: when you leave work, whether you like spicy food, how often you travel, how much you can afford. “The platform knows you better than you know yourself” — in the payment age, that line stopped being a joke and became a business. The fraudsters haven’t been idle either: phone calls from people posing as police, “click-to-earn” hooks, and since 2023, cases where AI face-swapping impersonated a relative and emptied hundreds of thousands of yuan from a victim in minutes. The National Anti-Fraud Center app has become standard equipment on many Chinese phones, popping up warnings before transfers: “You may be being scammed.”

So a small countercurrent has appeared. Zhou Yutong, 26, works in e-commerce operations in Shanghai. In 2024 she checked her annual spending statement and got a shock: “Sixty thousand yuan in a year, and I have no idea where it went.” She switched to a “cash envelope method”: on payday each month she withdraws 3,000 yuan and splits it into three envelopes — food, daily needs, emergencies. Spending stops when the envelopes are empty. Six weeks later she tallied up: monthly spending was down by nearly a fifth. She posts about it online — “Day 60 of using cash” — and the posts draw tens of thousands of likes. In the comments, young people share similar reasons: cash hurts when it leaves your hand; cash transactions leave no data for platforms to price-discriminate with; and, above all, cash lets you escape the silent bleed of auto-renewals and no-password micro-payments, taking back a feel for your own money. “It’s not going backward,” Zhou wrote in one post. “It’s installing brakes on a digital life.”

Did Cash Leave the Stage, or Just Move to the Wings?

Has cash actually exited the stage in China? One counterintuitive set of numbers is worth dwelling on. By the People’s Bank of China’s accounting, currency in circulation (M0) grew from about 8.4 trillion yuan at the end of 2020 to about 12.8 trillion yuan at the end of 2024 — the more sophisticated digital payments became, the more paper money was circulating, up by half in five years. Explanations abound: elderly people withdrawing pension money, the tradition of red envelopes at Spring Festival, wariness of fraud in electronic accounts… but at minimum it says this: banknotes have not disappeared. They have simply moved to the wings of the stage.

Disaster has also reminded China how fragile the electronic world is. When torrential rain drowned Zhengzhou in July 2021, districts lost both power and network, electronic payments failed en masse, and people dug out long-forgotten cash to buy water and candles — for a moment, paper money became the most reliable payment method there was. The authorities’ lasting wariness of the “cashless” narrative is not unrelated to this.

The state’s own answer is the digital yuan. In October 2020, Shenzhen’s Luohu district distributed 10 million yuan in digital-renminbi red envelopes to its citizens, and the pilot was off; today it reaches from the Xiong’an New Area to the Beijing Winter Olympics venues to more than twenty pilot cities, covering tax payments, buses, and salaries. In the central bank’s definition, the digital yuan is “digitalized cash” that will coexist with banknotes for the long term — it even supports “dual offline” payments, where both parties can complete a transaction with no network at all, designed precisely for extreme situations. It holds to the principle of “anonymous in small amounts, traceable in large ones”: everyday purchases protect privacy, large transactions are verifiable by law. What the state wants is a third form — one that combines cash’s anonymity and reliability with electronic payment’s efficiency.

The evolution of payment methods hasn’t stopped at scanning, either. Face recognition enjoyed two lively years before cooling down over privacy concerns; in 2024 Alipay launched “Tap!” (bump-to-pay), a tap of phone against payment terminal; and digital-yuan hardware wallets come as cards and wristbands you just wave and go. Chinese payment companies, meanwhile, are laying QR codes across Southeast Asia and Europe — in Bangkok’s night markets and Milan’s duty-free shops, local merchants grow ever more accustomed to collecting by QR code. Ten years ago, Chinese people went out and learned to scan; now it is the world’s turn.

A thousand years ago, the world’s first paper currency, the jiaozi, was born in Chengdu — the iron coins were too heavy, so merchants invented lighter paper. A thousand years later, Chengdu once again finds itself on the frontier of monetary change — except this time, the light thing is a QR code, and the paper money stepping offstage has become the object in need of deliberate protection. When Wang Xiulan closes her stall, she unhooks her QR code board and tucks it into her apron pocket, then locks the cash pouch in the iron chest under the counter. An age has moved her business into her phone; she has kept one hand free. That may be the true color of China’s payment story: it has not abolished cash, only turned it into an option; it ran in ten years a road others took fifty, and in its headlong rush, it has also learned to look back and wait for those it left behind. Scanning is trusting technology; handing over cash is trusting yourself — and China’s answer has never been a choice between the two.