CGTN | 19-Aug-2020
In China, WeChat, or Weixin as it’s known, is critical: it’s texting, social media, cab-hailing, payments and more, all wrapped into one app. Many Chinese businesses don’t even need to use credit cards anymore, just WeChat. It has over a billion users, owner Tencent says, mostly in China. Mobile app firms have varying estimates for U.S. downloads – in the range of 19 to 26 million.
For people in the U.S., WeChat has less functionality than it does in China. But it’s what connects immigrants and students from China to their homeland and to each other. Chinese restaurants in the U.S. use it to take food orders. Business people in the U.S. that have work in China rely on it as well.
Kurt Braybrook, who spent 22 years doing business in Shanghai before moving back to the U.S. in 2017, said the app is irreplaceable for him and his China-born wife. He could lose roughly 500 WeChat contacts, few of which he could reach without the app.
“If they banned it entirely, it will wipe out connections to my wife’s family, all our friends and my network of business contacts I built over 22 years,” said Braybrook, who now lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.