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Manga, mooncakes and monkeys: the curious world of China’s WeChat

  • WeChat is one of the most versatile forms of social media
  • It is much more than a messaging app: it acts as platform for everything else, including social sharing, payment, free video calls and a thousand other functions, but it comes with its own set of pitfalls

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WeChat application in Play Store. Photo: Shutterstock
Nicolas Groffman
I’m working on a transaction in a WeChat group called “Project Titanium”. One of the group members is a WeChat newbie: an Old Etonian corporate partner in my firm. WeChat has an English version, so he can use it perfectly well. What he finds disconcerting are the images of the participants: a grinning cartoon girl; a happy giraffe; a tank in the desert; a manga boy flicking a V; Geronimo; a plate of stuffed dumplings; Rembrandt with a mooncake … but the people behind these images are all high-flying businesspeople, bankers or lawyers, and they wear sharp suits in real life.
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WeChat is one of the most versatile forms of social media in the world. Unlike China’s equivalent of Google, a search engine called Baidu which is stuck in 2001, WeChat is as good as anything in the US. Its messaging service is second only to WhatsApp, and has a user base of around a billion. But WeChat is much more than a messaging app: it acts as platform for everything else you might want to do, including social sharing (like Instagram), payment (like ApplePay), free video calls (Skype, FaceTime) and a thousand other functions. On my last trip to Shanghai, my mother-in-law used hers to unlock a bike. Even court proceedings have, at the judge’s request, used WeChat’s text and photo-sharing features for evidence submission.

How WeChat became China’s everyday mobile app

The name is telling. Chinese society prefers the collective to the individual, the public to the private, and therefore the first person plural to the first person singular. The ubiquity of WeChat is astonishing and, to some, scary. Doom-laden Western news articles reveal how Tencent, which owns WeChat, can store users’ data without restriction, and how the Chinese government can use this data. It is mostly for security reasons that people don’t use recognisable images on their profiles.
Dancers perform underneath the logo of Tencent at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing. Photo: Reuters
Dancers perform underneath the logo of Tencent at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing. Photo: Reuters

I have been using it for around five years, cautiously “adding” close friends and family at first until I now have hundreds of contacts, many of whom I can barely remember and who probably can’t remember me. Yet if they want to see my cats sitting by the fire, they can do so at the touch of a button in my “Moments”, and then they can “like” it – or perhaps start a conversation about how cosy it looks or how I’m ruining the environment. Their comments will only be seen by people who have “added” those same people to their own WeChat groups.

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In reality you’re more likely to be exposed as a truant from work on Facebook than you are on WeChat. You can easily exclude people from your own group from seeing a particular post. Of course there’s always a risk that someone in your group will see a post in which you criticise your boss and then forward it to her – but snakes like that will get you one day anyway, even without WeChat.

China orders Tencent to clean up pornography on WeChat

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