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China’s Internet Is Flowering.And It Might Be Our Future.
The New York Times
Nov. 13, 2019
The HeyTea shop in the Chaoyang district of Beijing is an expression of svelte minimalism, its LED lettering and black tiles giving off a vaguely retro vibe. On a recent weekend, one of the last truly warm days of early fall, the location was full of upmarket customers — families with strollers, Gen Z-ers in knockoff Supreme streetwear — enjoying the popular cheese tea. On the front facade, right by the door, an illustration of a hand holding a phone displayed a two-dimensional bar code, or QR code. “Scan the code to avoid lines,” a sign read.
The scene was far removed from the days 18 months earlier, when HeyTea, one of the hottest brands in China, was infamous for its long lines. Stories on WeChat, the ubiquitous Chinese social media and messaging app, of customers waiting two, three, four hours for a cup of tea only served to stoke greater demand. “I think that curiosity, the desire to wait in line because everyone else is doing it, it speaks to something fundamental in human nature,” says Peilin Chan, HeyTea’s chief technology officer. Yet as much as the shop had benefited from the viral marketing, Chan knew it was also unsustainable if HeyTea wanted to become anything more than a pop-culture gimmick. Customers were hiring people to stand in line for them (a practice known as daigou, or ‘“substitute buying”). Long delivery times were spoiling the quality of its teas. Complaints were starting to flood in online.
To solve the problem, Chan turned to the same platform that made it too big to live with. In early 2017, WeChat announced a new feature called miniprograms. Such apps are part of WeChat and don’t need to be downloaded, allowing anyone to set up a digital storefront within WeChat. Chan could have created a regular mobile app, but the integration with WeChat Pay, the platform’s mobile payment service, made billing easy, and most important, customers were already there. “At the time, we just thought that the miniprogram provided a pretty good user experience,” Chan says. The resulting miniprogram, called HeyTea Go, is opened by scanning a QR code and lets customers place orders without having to stand in line. Simultaneously, it created technological opportunities for the company, like online marketing and the collection of data about its patrons. Chan describes the adoption of the platform as — in what has been the case for hundreds of thousands of other businesses in China — “the starting point of our digital transformation.”
Slim and energetic, with the pompadour of a Korean boy-bander, Chan was born in Guangdong, part of a post-’90s generation of Chinese kids who grew up as China was transitioning from pre- to post-internet society. In 2008, the year Chan went off to college, if you ordered something online, he says, the courier would hand over your purchase, and you would hand over a wad of cash. Download speeds were slow across the country, and few people in smaller, remote cities had access to the internet. Over the next decade, Chan watched as his country went through a digital transformation as impressive as the construction boom that filled its urban skylines. E-commerce exploded. Mobile payment apps made cash obsolete.
One app in particular would come to dominate Chan’s life: WeChat. Developed by Tencent, a social media giant, WeChat got its start as a chat app before evolving into a superapp. Today it has more than a billion monthly active users and — according to a 2018 report by WalktheChat, a WeChat marketing company — hosts roughly 34 percent of all Chinese data traffic. It is a social network, a payments system, a communication medium and, perhaps most ambitious, the infrastructure for businesses like HeyTea. WeChat’s first foray into this marketplace came in 2012, with the introduction of “official accounts,” which resemble Facebook Pages. In early 2017, it introduced miniprograms.
In the two years since then, businesses have created more than a million of them, equal to half the number of iOS apps available in Apple’s App Store. They come from global conglomerates like McDonald’s and Tesla and from local businesses like restaurants, hair salons and gyms. All of them are drawn in by the gravitational pull of WeChat’s enormous number of users and its standardized software infrastructure. It resembles the European Union in the way it has evolved into a market ecosystem: Miniprogram developers benefit from a common currency (WeChat’s mobile payment system), an identification system (WeChat’s login and password) and greatly lowered barriers to trade and movement (easy integration with any number of other services on WeChat). Because miniprograms run inside WeChat, businesses’ customers don’t have to sign up, log in or add their credit card numbers.
Offline businesses looking to move online have long faced a list of challenges like payment processing and analytics. Small- and medium-size businesses in particular have struggled against ambitious tech behemoths like Amazon. But with miniprograms, some of the biggest beneficiaries are local businesses that depend on foot traffic. By scanning a QR code, customers beam details about their physical situation — I’m at a HeyTea and drinking this particular cheese tea — back to the miniprogram. Such data, which connect users’ offline behavior with their online profiles, can then help drive product decisions. In HeyTea’s case, the miniprogram gave the company access to information about the popularity of tea flavors and customer churn. By targeting new teas appropriately and cutting down on lines, HeyTea was able to “level up” in a way that a similar-size business in the United States would have had a tough time doing: Within six months of the debut of HeyTea Go, it tripled the rate at which repeat customers bought drinks.
Miniprograms aren’t do-everything miracles, of course — they languish without good marketing, can be slow and still require development resources. They also tie the businesses tightly to WeChat, which may eventually work against their financial and strategic interests. But their success in China provides a fascinating look into an alternative vision of the mobile internet, one that is integrated across multiple dimensions and that is in essence a single large market. What sorts of innovations does that engender? What sorts of tensions does that create? Is it a better architecture than our Western one, in which each business has its own mobile app, existing in isolation, downloaded but idle for large chunks of the day?
The longstanding consensus about the Chinese internet is that it “decoupled” from the rest of the world 10 years ago, and that for every American tech company there is an equivalent in China. While this is largely true for applications used by consumers — the ride-sharing apps and search engines and social media sites — in reality, the two internets have yet to fully disengage from each other. Android, made by Google, and iOS, made by Apple, are still the two dominant mobile operating systems in China. Programming frameworks like React (made by Facebook) and languages like Java and Python have been adopted enthusiastically by Chinese developers. Until now, this kind of infrastructural innovation has flowed mostly from the West to China.
The so-called WeChat model may be the first time things are going in reverse. Even as the tensions between China and the United States remain strained, with much of the antagonism focused on intellectual property in technology, American tech companies have found in the WeChat internet a lot to admire — and emulate. In 2017, Google introduced “Instant Apps,” and last year Instagram unveiled shopping and payments initiatives. Mark Zuckerberg’s directive earlier this year to integrate Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram suggests superapplike ambitions. Given the political environment in the West, with big tech facing regulatory and antitrust scrutiny, the WeChat model is unlikely to be imported wholesale. But elements of its design are sure to show up in the West. Whether because of the appeal of mobile payments, or its use of QR codes, or the sheer convenience of not having to keep track of your 100th password, the WeChat model offers some undeniable improvements. The age of the mobile internet dawned in 2008 with the opening of the Apple App Store and has lasted more than a decade; the WeChat internet is almost certainly a glimpse of what comes next.
If you’re a 30-year-old office worker living in a smaller city in China today, your day might go something like this: You wake up in the morning and check your mobile phone, possibly an iPhone but more likely a late-model Xiaomi or Huawei Android that nevertheless has all the latest camera filters. You scroll through the Facebook News Feed-like Moments feature on WeChat and post a couple messages to the WeChat group chats you belong to. For breakfast, you get a jianbing, or crepe, from the vendor downstairs, and you pay with WeChat Pay. On your commute to work you check out Jinri Toutiao, an A.I.-driven news-aggregation app that recommends several articles on how to combat your acid reflux. That reminds you that you should probably see the doctor, a process that used to involve a full day of running around the hospital and waiting in lines (a familiar routine known as guahao) and then paying for prescriptions. Luckily, you can now get through all that virtually on WeChat, and even pay your medical bill there.
Finally, you get to work. The job is in sales for a midsize manufacturer, and because there’s no real separation between work life and personal life in China, and because no one uses email, all your communication with clients takes place over WeChat. On your break you swipe through Kuaishou, a short-video app, and check Weibo, the Chinese Twitter. You pay your utilities bill on WeChat and book train tickets through the China Railway miniprogram so you can go home to visit your parents for the new year. You see that a neighbor has sent your apartment complex’s WeChat group the link to a special deal on imported soy sauce — 70 percent off! — available on Pinduoduo, a social e-commerce app that offers deep discounts on bulk purchases that you split with your friends. (You go in on the deal.) After work, you go to dinner at a restaurant in the neighborhood, where you order using the restaurant’s miniprogram. When you get home, you read some new posts from your favorite “key opinion leaders” on WeChat, then are suckered into buying a zit-zapping machine on Taobao. You check the number of steps you walked today using the WeRun app before getting in bed. (Fewer than 10,000, alas.)
To spend any amount of time in China today is to understand why it’s said that people “live on WeChat” — but when it was first founded in 2011, in Guangzhou, WeChat was just a messaging app. “The country was really lacking one standard communication platform, which in the U.S., I think, is still email,” says Connie Chan, a general partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. “WeChat was something that was built for mobile specifically,” she says. “It wasn’t just taking a P.C. platform and moving it to mobile — and as a result you saw a number of mobile-friendly features from very early days: the QR code, the voice message.”
WeChat grew slowly at first, and then explosively. Its early days coincided with a major demographic shift in Chinese internet users: As the price of a smartphone in China dropped significantly this decade, internet access became available to hundreds of millions of laobaixing, or ordinary folks, in China’s interior. For many of these users, the mobile phone was their introduction to the internet. Unused to downloading other apps, they spent almost all their online time on WeChat, posting photos to Moments and chatting with their friends. Then, in 2012, the introduction of gongzhong hao, or official accounts, brought businesses and media personalities into the mix. For Chinese consumers, official accounts meant that spending time on WeChat was no longer simply a leisure diversion; the platform was also a place for commerce. Official accounts allowed Chines business to leapfrog, technologically speaking, the traditional website, putting customers within reach of a direct message.
The final ingredient would come during the Chinese New Year in 2014, when WeChat introduced a virtual “red envelope” that could be sent to friends. This internet-age update on the Chinese tradition of gifting hongbao full of cash to family and friends transcended the holiday to become a full-fledged mobile payment service, WeChat Pay. The subsequent competition between WeChat Pay and Alibaba’s Alipay precipitated China’s transformation into a cashless society. By scanning a QR code either displayed on a phone or printed on a piece of paper, customers could now pay merchants without cash or a credit card.
Having secured the two foundational needs of any digital society — identity and payments — the WeChat ecosystem flourished throughout the mid-2010s. Businesses like Air China expanded their official accounts into de facto websites. Fashion bloggers and writers made money from whatever they posted on their official accounts through donation buttons, which were plugged into WeChat Pay. While it was long-accepted wisdom in Silicon Valley that internet consumers would not pay for content, it turns out that when you make it easy for readers to make payments in small sums, they will.
In WeChat’s early years, the government allowed it to grow essentially unfettered; unlike in the United States, which is coming to see big tech as a colossus that needs to be knocked down, the Chinese government saw tech companies as economic engines to be harnessed. “In the U.S., as a politician, you answer to citizens, so you want to work on issues that get you the most number of votes,” says Yuechen Zhao, a partner at GSR Ventures. “In China, you answer to the level above you, and because there’s this huge push for tech, there’s a lot more incentive for officials to look at how they can integrate tech into their city or how they can integrate tech into public services.” As WeChat grew, it made more and more sense for various public health care, education and transportation services to piggyback on the platform, either as official accounts or miniprograms. And in the Chinese political system, where a state directive can cut through the protests of any particular corporation or individual, implementation was more straightforward. The result — a deeply integrated and extremely useful WeChat internet — is one that is difficult to imagine in a democratic West.
In February, I met with Sergi de Pablo Quesada, a Barcelona-born expat who runs a miniprogram-development venture called Out1N, in Shanghai. Unlike HeyTea, most small- and medium-size businesses don’t have the engineering resources to build their own miniprograms. Instead, they contract the making of a miniprogram to a third party, which typically charges around $2,000 or $3,000. De Pablo Quesada, 30, isn’t an engineer by background, but he coded several of his own mobile apps before starting Out1N. What he discovered was that miniprograms are at once analogous to and yet fundamentally different from native mobile apps. Native applications, like most of the apps used in the United States, are built directly on the mobile operating system (iOS or Android), which is the layer of software that interfaces with the hardware. WeChat miniprograms, on the other hand, are built on top of WeChat, an application itself built on top of the operating system.
As Apple does with its iOS operating system, WeChat provides a bundle of coding tools known as a software developer’s kit, or S.D.K., which helps programmers develop applications for specific platforms. These tools will typically include a code editor, which is sort of like Microsoft Word for programmers (it’s where the code itself is written); a compiler, which translates the human-readable code to machine-readable assembly language; and an emulator, which shows what the application will look like to the end user. The S.D.K. also provides a set of hooks, called an application programming interface (A.P.I.), that connect a miniprogram to WeChat’s payments and login infrastructure. So if you’re a third-party developer — say, HeyTea — you can download the WeChat S.D.K. onto your computer, launch the editor, have your software engineers write the code to run your miniprogram, compile it, visualize it, rinse and repeat. When the miniprogram has been completed, the developer sends the entire miniprogram to WeChat for approval.
Aside from some differences in coding languages and procedures, the process resembles that of making a regular app. But being a level removed from the operating system yields some benefits: Miniprogram developers do not have to make something for both iOS and Android, or decide between the two; they can just work with WeChat. Instead of having to figure out which of the top 10 Android stores to publish to — Google’s exit from China in 2010 created an enormous vacuum that was filled by hundreds of different app stores, set up by phone manufacturers like Huawei and Xiaomi, carriers like China Mobile and tech giants like Baidu and Tencent — you can just publish to WeChat. If you imagine the miniprogram as a painting, then WeChat provides canvas, brushes and wall space.
It does not provide promotion. “Not every business that wants to sell through miniprograms succeeds,” de Pablo Quesada says. The ones that do typically rely on marketing by influencers or brick-and-mortar stores, like HeyTea, that can publicize their online services. Because there isn’t an official miniprogram store, getting exposure for one is a challenge. Nevertheless, de Pablo Quesada says that his business is booming. He has built miniprograms for, among others, clients who need to automatically generate price quotes as well as for retailers like popular bakeries.
Last April, in Shanghai, I met Wang Guanchun, the 35-year-old chief executive of Laiye, the maker of A.I.-powered virtual assistants, including Xiaolai, which is available as both an official account and a miniprogram on WeChat. He started the company in 2015 when he noticed that traditional services like financial management and real estate, and not just ride-sharing and food delivery, were increasingly moving online within WeChat. “In this kind of environment, a virtual assistant would be able to expand beyond just random conversation, or a simple search,” he told me. It would be able to complete actual tasks for users.
Miniprograms enable you ‘to sell to any Chinese person that has WeChat, which is basically everyone.’
While Xiaolai shares similarities with Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant, its work is easier, in some ways. Alexa and Assistant struggle to take action in the physical world — book a taxi, order food, make a restaurant reservation or doctor’s appointment. Every one of these “skills” has an existing incumbent (Uber, Zocdoc) with which a virtual assistant needs to be integrated.
I can ask Xiaolai, on the other hand, to book plane tickets to Nanjing on June 3, and it will directly conduct a search on Air China’s WeChat miniprogram, confirm the timetables and make the purchase with WeChat Pay. Contrast this setup with Google’s Duplex, a conversational A.I. that was released to great fanfare last year. Duplex is an impressive feat of text-to-speech machine learning, an A.I. that can carry on real-time phone calls with a human on the other end being none the wiser. But in China, there wouldn’t be a human on the other end; there would be a WeChat miniprogram. When Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, introduced Duplex, he noted that 60 percent of small businesses in the United States still didn’t have an online booking system. Duplex, in other words, is predicated on the inevitability of phone calls. Xiaolai is predicated on their obsolescence.
The WeChat marketplace is not without its drawbacks. A perennial debate in tech has raged over the benefits and costs of consolidation. When I talk to businesses that are developing WeChat miniprograms, they acknowledge that the platform is feudalistic, binding them ever closer to Tencent, at the expense of their own independence. “But what can we do about it?” HeyTea’s Chan asks, pointing out that traditional mobile apps, too, are built on real estate owned by tech giants — the operating system.
Even in the West, the trend in recent years has been toward fewer large companies. Leveraging their size, their cash reserves, their ability to attract the best engineering talent and make innovations deeper in the computing stack, the breadth and depth of their user bases and product offerings, they’ve made incursions further and further afield. In the mobile internet in particular, the tollbooth operators are Apple and Google. The two companies have the power to accept or decline submissions to their respective app stores — and more subtly, by publishing the S.D.K.s, they control the technical specifications of the mobile apps themselves. With miniprograms, WeChat assumes a similar role: Developers are now designing miniprograms that fulfill WeChat’s requirements and that are subject to its approval. It has the power and privilege to police who gets access to a billion customers.
While WeChat hasn’t thus far shown the tendency to block or shut down miniprograms without cause, it’s easy to envision a future in which WeChat looks to squeeze money from the enormous marketplace it has built and begins taking a cut of every miniprogram transaction. That would make it like the Apple and Android app stores, which keep 30 percent of first-year revenues from paid apps. At that point, businesses that had spent years building up traffic to their miniprograms would have little recourse. The more prescient miniprogram users today, then, like HeyTea, often see miniprograms as training wheels for their own apps.
The connected WeChat internet also brings a unique set of privacy and security issues. Christopher Balding, a former professor of economics at the Peking University HSBC School of Business in Shenzhen, cites examples of businesses selling on the black market customers’ personal information gleaned from WeChat. “A lot of stores, if you scan the QR code, it just starts sucking up enormous amounts of data,” he said, “You could probably go to a corner shop that sells noodles and say, Hey, I want to buy some data.” Some of this data will end up in the hands of internet fraudsters.
Given various official data-privacy crackdowns currently going on, a lot of it will also end up captured by the government’s own surveillance efforts. As WeChat has grown, the government has developed increasingly sophisticated techniques to use it as a way to pry into citizens’ private lives while also muzzling its potential as a political town hall. New regulations issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China in September 2017, for instance, hold WeChat chat group administrators liable for politically sensitive or pornographic messages in the groups they manage — in effect creating a system of grass-roots censorship. “They can control WeChat without having to kill it,” says Bill Bishop, a well-known China analyst, adding, “That’s what’s so fascinating — the regulators are really smart.”
The dark side of the WeChat internet is that all the factors that have made it such a vibrant ecosystem — the identity and payments data, the user engagement — also make it an incredibly dangerous tool. Mobile payments provide an easily traceable financial trail; China’s incipient “social credit” scoring system may end up analyzing users’ payment records and online activity in order to determine eligibility for various social and financial services. As the Chinese internet becomes the WeChat internet, WeChat will increasingly be treated as a public utility, subject to more and more direct interference. This is the cost that Chinese companies have always paid, but the WeChat internet arguably exacerbates it: By consolidating user activity that was previously divided among different online sites, or conducted offline, onto a single platform and onto miniprograms, they’ve made users even easier pickings.
In Shanghai this fall, I met with Thibault Genaitay, the 30-year-old head of China operations at Le Wagon, a French-founded coding boot camp with three locations in the country. Two years ago, at the very beginning of the miniprogram era, Le Wagon began investing in the miniprogram ecosystem — testing its coding framework and adding miniprogram-focused lectures to its courses. Today many of its alumni are miniprogram developers helping foreign brands expand their WeChat presence, and Le Wagon finds itself liaising between an international market eager to access WeChat’s audience and a WeChat with increasingly international ambitions. “Tencent is pushing very hard for miniprograms to have traction abroad,” Genaitay told me. “They’re hosting hackathons in Singapore and Europe. They want to have third-party providers working in conjunction with merchants to develop miniprograms, mainly for Chinese consumers abroad.” He added, “We’re talking about the diaspora of millions of WeChat users outside of China, that’s their first angle.”
In many ways, it’s an inopportune time for an international expansion by a Chinese company. United States-China relations are at their lowest point since the Cold War. Technology has become tinged by nationalism. The shaky détente between Apple and WeChat — miniprograms cut out the Apple App Store and make WeChat the only app you need on your phone — is unlikely to hold forever, and as has happened to Huawei, strategic and political currents will probably end up forcing Tencent onto its own operating system.
Yet in other ways, the time is finally right. In 2013, when it tried to expand internationally, WeChat lost out to WhatsApp, a messaging app with similar functionality but perhaps greater cultural appeal. Today, though, WeChat is no longer just a messaging app: It’s also the world’s biggest marketplace. For foreign companies that want to sell their products to Chinese consumers, miniprograms offer a shortcut through an otherwise byzantine array of middlemen, distributors and import partners. As de Pablo Quesada puts it: “It gives small businesses the opportunity to not only sell to Chinese tourists when they are in New York City, but then to be able to sustain the relationship once they go back to China. Because you have a miniprogram, you can see if your favorite painter in New York has painted anything new; you can buy it right there and have it sent back to China. That’s one of the biggest revolutions about miniprograms — that it enables you to sell to any Chinese person that has WeChat, which is basically everyone.”
Now American technology is following China’s lead. The recently introduced WhatsApp Business, a platform for local businesses to provide information and communicate with their customers, bears striking similarities to miniprograms and has been gathering momentum in Mexico and India. Mark Zuckerberg’s public references earlier this year to “the digital equivalent of the living room” and “secure payments” echo much of what already exists on WeChat. Through Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, its marquee acquisitions, Facebook is the American tech company that comes closest to WeChat: It’s a messaging app, a social network and an e-commerce platform. Like WeChat, Facebook Pages and Instagram consolidate numerous businesses under one roof. You can imagine an Instagram where each account is a storefront, sort of like a miniprogram, where users might be able to make and show off their purchases without ever leaving the app.
The gradual convergence toward the connected WeChat model speaks to a profound change in dynamic between Western and Chinese internet technologies. For decades, the online infrastructure — from design to programming languages to wireless protocols — came from the West. These sorts of innovations, often given away free or not immediately profitable, nevertheless bestow upon their makers a sort of soft power. They transcend cultural differences and help bridge them. For the first time, a Chinese concept is taking on that role. With WeChat miniprograms, we’re seeing a technology copied not to China, but from China.
The ramifications of such a shift are subtle and pervasive, and many of them are most likely still to be realized. My conversation with Genaitay eventually turned to ByteDance, the creator of Jinri Toutiao and the short-form video platform TikTok, which has become the first Chinese-made product to cross over into Western internet consciousness. ByteDance is perhaps the hottest start-up in the world today, with a $78 billion valuation, and is increasing its efforts to move into productivity and search. It is a part of a younger generation of Chinese companies now reaching maturity, helmed by millennial founders and hungry for recognition in the outside world. It, too, is testing miniprograms. “If I was ByteDance — because they already have TikTok overseas, they can have an edge,” Genaitay said. “If they can successfully create a miniprogram ecosystem on Douyin” — the Chinese version of TikTok — “they could easily replicate it to TikTok.” They could, in other words, challenge WeChat by becoming a full-service app.
Genaitay emphasized that, if you set aside its technology, ByteDance’s small-app efforts are still at an early stage, and it remains to be seen whether the company can open up what is currently a closed ecosystem accessible only to official brands. Indeed, miniprograms of the style we’ve come to expect on WeChat seem an odd fit with the world of TikTok, which is quirky and surreal rather than commercial. But if ByteDance can pull that off, it might be a revelation. Whatever it is that takes place when Chinese-style superapp-dom meets the American teenager, it sounds like the future of the internet.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/13/magazine/internet-china-wechat.html
The New York Times
Nov. 13, 2019
The HeyTea shop in the Chaoyang district of Beijing is an expression of svelte minimalism, its LED lettering and black tiles giving off a vaguely retro vibe. On a recent weekend, one of the last truly warm days of early fall, the location was full of upmarket customers — families with strollers, Gen Z-ers in knockoff Supreme streetwear — enjoying the popular cheese tea. On the front facade, right by the door, an illustration of a hand holding a phone displayed a two-dimensional bar code, or QR code. “Scan the code to avoid lines,” a sign read.
The scene was far removed from the days 18 months earlier, when HeyTea, one of the hottest brands in China, was infamous for its long lines. Stories on WeChat, the ubiquitous Chinese social media and messaging app, of customers waiting two, three, four hours for a cup of tea only served to stoke greater demand. “I think that curiosity, the desire to wait in line because everyone else is doing it, it speaks to something fundamental in human nature,” says Peilin Chan, HeyTea’s chief technology officer. Yet as much as the shop had benefited from the viral marketing, Chan knew it was also unsustainable if HeyTea wanted to become anything more than a pop-culture gimmick. Customers were hiring people to stand in line for them (a practice known as daigou, or ‘“substitute buying”). Long delivery times were spoiling the quality of its teas. Complaints were starting to flood in online.
To solve the problem, Chan turned to the same platform that made it too big to live with. In early 2017, WeChat announced a new feature called miniprograms. Such apps are part of WeChat and don’t need to be downloaded, allowing anyone to set up a digital storefront within WeChat. Chan could have created a regular mobile app, but the integration with WeChat Pay, the platform’s mobile payment service, made billing easy, and most important, customers were already there. “At the time, we just thought that the miniprogram provided a pretty good user experience,” Chan says. The resulting miniprogram, called HeyTea Go, is opened by scanning a QR code and lets customers place orders without having to stand in line. Simultaneously, it created technological opportunities for the company, like online marketing and the collection of data about its patrons. Chan describes the adoption of the platform as — in what has been the case for hundreds of thousands of other businesses in China — “the starting point of our digital transformation.”
Slim and energetic, with the pompadour of a Korean boy-bander, Chan was born in Guangdong, part of a post-’90s generation of Chinese kids who grew up as China was transitioning from pre- to post-internet society. In 2008, the year Chan went off to college, if you ordered something online, he says, the courier would hand over your purchase, and you would hand over a wad of cash. Download speeds were slow across the country, and few people in smaller, remote cities had access to the internet. Over the next decade, Chan watched as his country went through a digital transformation as impressive as the construction boom that filled its urban skylines. E-commerce exploded. Mobile payment apps made cash obsolete.
One app in particular would come to dominate Chan’s life: WeChat. Developed by Tencent, a social media giant, WeChat got its start as a chat app before evolving into a superapp. Today it has more than a billion monthly active users and — according to a 2018 report by WalktheChat, a WeChat marketing company — hosts roughly 34 percent of all Chinese data traffic. It is a social network, a payments system, a communication medium and, perhaps most ambitious, the infrastructure for businesses like HeyTea. WeChat’s first foray into this marketplace came in 2012, with the introduction of “official accounts,” which resemble Facebook Pages. In early 2017, it introduced miniprograms.
In the two years since then, businesses have created more than a million of them, equal to half the number of iOS apps available in Apple’s App Store. They come from global conglomerates like McDonald’s and Tesla and from local businesses like restaurants, hair salons and gyms. All of them are drawn in by the gravitational pull of WeChat’s enormous number of users and its standardized software infrastructure. It resembles the European Union in the way it has evolved into a market ecosystem: Miniprogram developers benefit from a common currency (WeChat’s mobile payment system), an identification system (WeChat’s login and password) and greatly lowered barriers to trade and movement (easy integration with any number of other services on WeChat). Because miniprograms run inside WeChat, businesses’ customers don’t have to sign up, log in or add their credit card numbers.
Offline businesses looking to move online have long faced a list of challenges like payment processing and analytics. Small- and medium-size businesses in particular have struggled against ambitious tech behemoths like Amazon. But with miniprograms, some of the biggest beneficiaries are local businesses that depend on foot traffic. By scanning a QR code, customers beam details about their physical situation — I’m at a HeyTea and drinking this particular cheese tea — back to the miniprogram. Such data, which connect users’ offline behavior with their online profiles, can then help drive product decisions. In HeyTea’s case, the miniprogram gave the company access to information about the popularity of tea flavors and customer churn. By targeting new teas appropriately and cutting down on lines, HeyTea was able to “level up” in a way that a similar-size business in the United States would have had a tough time doing: Within six months of the debut of HeyTea Go, it tripled the rate at which repeat customers bought drinks.
Miniprograms aren’t do-everything miracles, of course — they languish without good marketing, can be slow and still require development resources. They also tie the businesses tightly to WeChat, which may eventually work against their financial and strategic interests. But their success in China provides a fascinating look into an alternative vision of the mobile internet, one that is integrated across multiple dimensions and that is in essence a single large market. What sorts of innovations does that engender? What sorts of tensions does that create? Is it a better architecture than our Western one, in which each business has its own mobile app, existing in isolation, downloaded but idle for large chunks of the day?
The longstanding consensus about the Chinese internet is that it “decoupled” from the rest of the world 10 years ago, and that for every American tech company there is an equivalent in China. While this is largely true for applications used by consumers — the ride-sharing apps and search engines and social media sites — in reality, the two internets have yet to fully disengage from each other. Android, made by Google, and iOS, made by Apple, are still the two dominant mobile operating systems in China. Programming frameworks like React (made by Facebook) and languages like Java and Python have been adopted enthusiastically by Chinese developers. Until now, this kind of infrastructural innovation has flowed mostly from the West to China.
The so-called WeChat model may be the first time things are going in reverse. Even as the tensions between China and the United States remain strained, with much of the antagonism focused on intellectual property in technology, American tech companies have found in the WeChat internet a lot to admire — and emulate. In 2017, Google introduced “Instant Apps,” and last year Instagram unveiled shopping and payments initiatives. Mark Zuckerberg’s directive earlier this year to integrate Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram suggests superapplike ambitions. Given the political environment in the West, with big tech facing regulatory and antitrust scrutiny, the WeChat model is unlikely to be imported wholesale. But elements of its design are sure to show up in the West. Whether because of the appeal of mobile payments, or its use of QR codes, or the sheer convenience of not having to keep track of your 100th password, the WeChat model offers some undeniable improvements. The age of the mobile internet dawned in 2008 with the opening of the Apple App Store and has lasted more than a decade; the WeChat internet is almost certainly a glimpse of what comes next.
If you’re a 30-year-old office worker living in a smaller city in China today, your day might go something like this: You wake up in the morning and check your mobile phone, possibly an iPhone but more likely a late-model Xiaomi or Huawei Android that nevertheless has all the latest camera filters. You scroll through the Facebook News Feed-like Moments feature on WeChat and post a couple messages to the WeChat group chats you belong to. For breakfast, you get a jianbing, or crepe, from the vendor downstairs, and you pay with WeChat Pay. On your commute to work you check out Jinri Toutiao, an A.I.-driven news-aggregation app that recommends several articles on how to combat your acid reflux. That reminds you that you should probably see the doctor, a process that used to involve a full day of running around the hospital and waiting in lines (a familiar routine known as guahao) and then paying for prescriptions. Luckily, you can now get through all that virtually on WeChat, and even pay your medical bill there.
Finally, you get to work. The job is in sales for a midsize manufacturer, and because there’s no real separation between work life and personal life in China, and because no one uses email, all your communication with clients takes place over WeChat. On your break you swipe through Kuaishou, a short-video app, and check Weibo, the Chinese Twitter. You pay your utilities bill on WeChat and book train tickets through the China Railway miniprogram so you can go home to visit your parents for the new year. You see that a neighbor has sent your apartment complex’s WeChat group the link to a special deal on imported soy sauce — 70 percent off! — available on Pinduoduo, a social e-commerce app that offers deep discounts on bulk purchases that you split with your friends. (You go in on the deal.) After work, you go to dinner at a restaurant in the neighborhood, where you order using the restaurant’s miniprogram. When you get home, you read some new posts from your favorite “key opinion leaders” on WeChat, then are suckered into buying a zit-zapping machine on Taobao. You check the number of steps you walked today using the WeRun app before getting in bed. (Fewer than 10,000, alas.)
To spend any amount of time in China today is to understand why it’s said that people “live on WeChat” — but when it was first founded in 2011, in Guangzhou, WeChat was just a messaging app. “The country was really lacking one standard communication platform, which in the U.S., I think, is still email,” says Connie Chan, a general partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. “WeChat was something that was built for mobile specifically,” she says. “It wasn’t just taking a P.C. platform and moving it to mobile — and as a result you saw a number of mobile-friendly features from very early days: the QR code, the voice message.”
WeChat grew slowly at first, and then explosively. Its early days coincided with a major demographic shift in Chinese internet users: As the price of a smartphone in China dropped significantly this decade, internet access became available to hundreds of millions of laobaixing, or ordinary folks, in China’s interior. For many of these users, the mobile phone was their introduction to the internet. Unused to downloading other apps, they spent almost all their online time on WeChat, posting photos to Moments and chatting with their friends. Then, in 2012, the introduction of gongzhong hao, or official accounts, brought businesses and media personalities into the mix. For Chinese consumers, official accounts meant that spending time on WeChat was no longer simply a leisure diversion; the platform was also a place for commerce. Official accounts allowed Chines business to leapfrog, technologically speaking, the traditional website, putting customers within reach of a direct message.
The final ingredient would come during the Chinese New Year in 2014, when WeChat introduced a virtual “red envelope” that could be sent to friends. This internet-age update on the Chinese tradition of gifting hongbao full of cash to family and friends transcended the holiday to become a full-fledged mobile payment service, WeChat Pay. The subsequent competition between WeChat Pay and Alibaba’s Alipay precipitated China’s transformation into a cashless society. By scanning a QR code either displayed on a phone or printed on a piece of paper, customers could now pay merchants without cash or a credit card.
Having secured the two foundational needs of any digital society — identity and payments — the WeChat ecosystem flourished throughout the mid-2010s. Businesses like Air China expanded their official accounts into de facto websites. Fashion bloggers and writers made money from whatever they posted on their official accounts through donation buttons, which were plugged into WeChat Pay. While it was long-accepted wisdom in Silicon Valley that internet consumers would not pay for content, it turns out that when you make it easy for readers to make payments in small sums, they will.
In WeChat’s early years, the government allowed it to grow essentially unfettered; unlike in the United States, which is coming to see big tech as a colossus that needs to be knocked down, the Chinese government saw tech companies as economic engines to be harnessed. “In the U.S., as a politician, you answer to citizens, so you want to work on issues that get you the most number of votes,” says Yuechen Zhao, a partner at GSR Ventures. “In China, you answer to the level above you, and because there’s this huge push for tech, there’s a lot more incentive for officials to look at how they can integrate tech into their city or how they can integrate tech into public services.” As WeChat grew, it made more and more sense for various public health care, education and transportation services to piggyback on the platform, either as official accounts or miniprograms. And in the Chinese political system, where a state directive can cut through the protests of any particular corporation or individual, implementation was more straightforward. The result — a deeply integrated and extremely useful WeChat internet — is one that is difficult to imagine in a democratic West.
In February, I met with Sergi de Pablo Quesada, a Barcelona-born expat who runs a miniprogram-development venture called Out1N, in Shanghai. Unlike HeyTea, most small- and medium-size businesses don’t have the engineering resources to build their own miniprograms. Instead, they contract the making of a miniprogram to a third party, which typically charges around $2,000 or $3,000. De Pablo Quesada, 30, isn’t an engineer by background, but he coded several of his own mobile apps before starting Out1N. What he discovered was that miniprograms are at once analogous to and yet fundamentally different from native mobile apps. Native applications, like most of the apps used in the United States, are built directly on the mobile operating system (iOS or Android), which is the layer of software that interfaces with the hardware. WeChat miniprograms, on the other hand, are built on top of WeChat, an application itself built on top of the operating system.
As Apple does with its iOS operating system, WeChat provides a bundle of coding tools known as a software developer’s kit, or S.D.K., which helps programmers develop applications for specific platforms. These tools will typically include a code editor, which is sort of like Microsoft Word for programmers (it’s where the code itself is written); a compiler, which translates the human-readable code to machine-readable assembly language; and an emulator, which shows what the application will look like to the end user. The S.D.K. also provides a set of hooks, called an application programming interface (A.P.I.), that connect a miniprogram to WeChat’s payments and login infrastructure. So if you’re a third-party developer — say, HeyTea — you can download the WeChat S.D.K. onto your computer, launch the editor, have your software engineers write the code to run your miniprogram, compile it, visualize it, rinse and repeat. When the miniprogram has been completed, the developer sends the entire miniprogram to WeChat for approval.
Aside from some differences in coding languages and procedures, the process resembles that of making a regular app. But being a level removed from the operating system yields some benefits: Miniprogram developers do not have to make something for both iOS and Android, or decide between the two; they can just work with WeChat. Instead of having to figure out which of the top 10 Android stores to publish to — Google’s exit from China in 2010 created an enormous vacuum that was filled by hundreds of different app stores, set up by phone manufacturers like Huawei and Xiaomi, carriers like China Mobile and tech giants like Baidu and Tencent — you can just publish to WeChat. If you imagine the miniprogram as a painting, then WeChat provides canvas, brushes and wall space.
It does not provide promotion. “Not every business that wants to sell through miniprograms succeeds,” de Pablo Quesada says. The ones that do typically rely on marketing by influencers or brick-and-mortar stores, like HeyTea, that can publicize their online services. Because there isn’t an official miniprogram store, getting exposure for one is a challenge. Nevertheless, de Pablo Quesada says that his business is booming. He has built miniprograms for, among others, clients who need to automatically generate price quotes as well as for retailers like popular bakeries.
Last April, in Shanghai, I met Wang Guanchun, the 35-year-old chief executive of Laiye, the maker of A.I.-powered virtual assistants, including Xiaolai, which is available as both an official account and a miniprogram on WeChat. He started the company in 2015 when he noticed that traditional services like financial management and real estate, and not just ride-sharing and food delivery, were increasingly moving online within WeChat. “In this kind of environment, a virtual assistant would be able to expand beyond just random conversation, or a simple search,” he told me. It would be able to complete actual tasks for users.
Miniprograms enable you ‘to sell to any Chinese person that has WeChat, which is basically everyone.’
While Xiaolai shares similarities with Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant, its work is easier, in some ways. Alexa and Assistant struggle to take action in the physical world — book a taxi, order food, make a restaurant reservation or doctor’s appointment. Every one of these “skills” has an existing incumbent (Uber, Zocdoc) with which a virtual assistant needs to be integrated.
I can ask Xiaolai, on the other hand, to book plane tickets to Nanjing on June 3, and it will directly conduct a search on Air China’s WeChat miniprogram, confirm the timetables and make the purchase with WeChat Pay. Contrast this setup with Google’s Duplex, a conversational A.I. that was released to great fanfare last year. Duplex is an impressive feat of text-to-speech machine learning, an A.I. that can carry on real-time phone calls with a human on the other end being none the wiser. But in China, there wouldn’t be a human on the other end; there would be a WeChat miniprogram. When Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, introduced Duplex, he noted that 60 percent of small businesses in the United States still didn’t have an online booking system. Duplex, in other words, is predicated on the inevitability of phone calls. Xiaolai is predicated on their obsolescence.
The WeChat marketplace is not without its drawbacks. A perennial debate in tech has raged over the benefits and costs of consolidation. When I talk to businesses that are developing WeChat miniprograms, they acknowledge that the platform is feudalistic, binding them ever closer to Tencent, at the expense of their own independence. “But what can we do about it?” HeyTea’s Chan asks, pointing out that traditional mobile apps, too, are built on real estate owned by tech giants — the operating system.
Even in the West, the trend in recent years has been toward fewer large companies. Leveraging their size, their cash reserves, their ability to attract the best engineering talent and make innovations deeper in the computing stack, the breadth and depth of their user bases and product offerings, they’ve made incursions further and further afield. In the mobile internet in particular, the tollbooth operators are Apple and Google. The two companies have the power to accept or decline submissions to their respective app stores — and more subtly, by publishing the S.D.K.s, they control the technical specifications of the mobile apps themselves. With miniprograms, WeChat assumes a similar role: Developers are now designing miniprograms that fulfill WeChat’s requirements and that are subject to its approval. It has the power and privilege to police who gets access to a billion customers.
While WeChat hasn’t thus far shown the tendency to block or shut down miniprograms without cause, it’s easy to envision a future in which WeChat looks to squeeze money from the enormous marketplace it has built and begins taking a cut of every miniprogram transaction. That would make it like the Apple and Android app stores, which keep 30 percent of first-year revenues from paid apps. At that point, businesses that had spent years building up traffic to their miniprograms would have little recourse. The more prescient miniprogram users today, then, like HeyTea, often see miniprograms as training wheels for their own apps.
The connected WeChat internet also brings a unique set of privacy and security issues. Christopher Balding, a former professor of economics at the Peking University HSBC School of Business in Shenzhen, cites examples of businesses selling on the black market customers’ personal information gleaned from WeChat. “A lot of stores, if you scan the QR code, it just starts sucking up enormous amounts of data,” he said, “You could probably go to a corner shop that sells noodles and say, Hey, I want to buy some data.” Some of this data will end up in the hands of internet fraudsters.
Given various official data-privacy crackdowns currently going on, a lot of it will also end up captured by the government’s own surveillance efforts. As WeChat has grown, the government has developed increasingly sophisticated techniques to use it as a way to pry into citizens’ private lives while also muzzling its potential as a political town hall. New regulations issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China in September 2017, for instance, hold WeChat chat group administrators liable for politically sensitive or pornographic messages in the groups they manage — in effect creating a system of grass-roots censorship. “They can control WeChat without having to kill it,” says Bill Bishop, a well-known China analyst, adding, “That’s what’s so fascinating — the regulators are really smart.”
The dark side of the WeChat internet is that all the factors that have made it such a vibrant ecosystem — the identity and payments data, the user engagement — also make it an incredibly dangerous tool. Mobile payments provide an easily traceable financial trail; China’s incipient “social credit” scoring system may end up analyzing users’ payment records and online activity in order to determine eligibility for various social and financial services. As the Chinese internet becomes the WeChat internet, WeChat will increasingly be treated as a public utility, subject to more and more direct interference. This is the cost that Chinese companies have always paid, but the WeChat internet arguably exacerbates it: By consolidating user activity that was previously divided among different online sites, or conducted offline, onto a single platform and onto miniprograms, they’ve made users even easier pickings.
In Shanghai this fall, I met with Thibault Genaitay, the 30-year-old head of China operations at Le Wagon, a French-founded coding boot camp with three locations in the country. Two years ago, at the very beginning of the miniprogram era, Le Wagon began investing in the miniprogram ecosystem — testing its coding framework and adding miniprogram-focused lectures to its courses. Today many of its alumni are miniprogram developers helping foreign brands expand their WeChat presence, and Le Wagon finds itself liaising between an international market eager to access WeChat’s audience and a WeChat with increasingly international ambitions. “Tencent is pushing very hard for miniprograms to have traction abroad,” Genaitay told me. “They’re hosting hackathons in Singapore and Europe. They want to have third-party providers working in conjunction with merchants to develop miniprograms, mainly for Chinese consumers abroad.” He added, “We’re talking about the diaspora of millions of WeChat users outside of China, that’s their first angle.”
In many ways, it’s an inopportune time for an international expansion by a Chinese company. United States-China relations are at their lowest point since the Cold War. Technology has become tinged by nationalism. The shaky détente between Apple and WeChat — miniprograms cut out the Apple App Store and make WeChat the only app you need on your phone — is unlikely to hold forever, and as has happened to Huawei, strategic and political currents will probably end up forcing Tencent onto its own operating system.
Yet in other ways, the time is finally right. In 2013, when it tried to expand internationally, WeChat lost out to WhatsApp, a messaging app with similar functionality but perhaps greater cultural appeal. Today, though, WeChat is no longer just a messaging app: It’s also the world’s biggest marketplace. For foreign companies that want to sell their products to Chinese consumers, miniprograms offer a shortcut through an otherwise byzantine array of middlemen, distributors and import partners. As de Pablo Quesada puts it: “It gives small businesses the opportunity to not only sell to Chinese tourists when they are in New York City, but then to be able to sustain the relationship once they go back to China. Because you have a miniprogram, you can see if your favorite painter in New York has painted anything new; you can buy it right there and have it sent back to China. That’s one of the biggest revolutions about miniprograms — that it enables you to sell to any Chinese person that has WeChat, which is basically everyone.”
Now American technology is following China’s lead. The recently introduced WhatsApp Business, a platform for local businesses to provide information and communicate with their customers, bears striking similarities to miniprograms and has been gathering momentum in Mexico and India. Mark Zuckerberg’s public references earlier this year to “the digital equivalent of the living room” and “secure payments” echo much of what already exists on WeChat. Through Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, its marquee acquisitions, Facebook is the American tech company that comes closest to WeChat: It’s a messaging app, a social network and an e-commerce platform. Like WeChat, Facebook Pages and Instagram consolidate numerous businesses under one roof. You can imagine an Instagram where each account is a storefront, sort of like a miniprogram, where users might be able to make and show off their purchases without ever leaving the app.
The gradual convergence toward the connected WeChat model speaks to a profound change in dynamic between Western and Chinese internet technologies. For decades, the online infrastructure — from design to programming languages to wireless protocols — came from the West. These sorts of innovations, often given away free or not immediately profitable, nevertheless bestow upon their makers a sort of soft power. They transcend cultural differences and help bridge them. For the first time, a Chinese concept is taking on that role. With WeChat miniprograms, we’re seeing a technology copied not to China, but from China.
The ramifications of such a shift are subtle and pervasive, and many of them are most likely still to be realized. My conversation with Genaitay eventually turned to ByteDance, the creator of Jinri Toutiao and the short-form video platform TikTok, which has become the first Chinese-made product to cross over into Western internet consciousness. ByteDance is perhaps the hottest start-up in the world today, with a $78 billion valuation, and is increasing its efforts to move into productivity and search. It is a part of a younger generation of Chinese companies now reaching maturity, helmed by millennial founders and hungry for recognition in the outside world. It, too, is testing miniprograms. “If I was ByteDance — because they already have TikTok overseas, they can have an edge,” Genaitay said. “If they can successfully create a miniprogram ecosystem on Douyin” — the Chinese version of TikTok — “they could easily replicate it to TikTok.” They could, in other words, challenge WeChat by becoming a full-service app.
Genaitay emphasized that, if you set aside its technology, ByteDance’s small-app efforts are still at an early stage, and it remains to be seen whether the company can open up what is currently a closed ecosystem accessible only to official brands. Indeed, miniprograms of the style we’ve come to expect on WeChat seem an odd fit with the world of TikTok, which is quirky and surreal rather than commercial. But if ByteDance can pull that off, it might be a revelation. Whatever it is that takes place when Chinese-style superapp-dom meets the American teenager, it sounds like the future of the internet.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/13/magazine/internet-china-wechat.html
