Touching the Greater Bay Area: Foreign students immerse themselves in services provided by Chinese major social media

On Aug. 6, 2024, the “Touching the Greater Bay Area” cultural exchange program brought two British students, Rowan Humphreys from Cambridge University and Zhu Bowen from Imperial College London, to the headquarters of WeChat, a major Chinese social media and payment platform, in Guangzhou city, south China’s Guangdong Province. They were joined by Li Wenqi, a Chinese student from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies.

Throughout the tour, the students learned about WeChat mini programs, most notably the WeChat Mini Programs Educational Platform. They also tried to program mini programs, and made mobile payments.

With mini programs, users can access daily services without downloading applications, avoiding wasting huge amounts of data to download applications they rarely use.

According to the latest data issued by Tencent, the parent company of WeChat, the active daily users of WeChat mini programs reached 600 million in late 2022. Currently, mini programs have generated over 11 million job and income opportunities.

In addition to daily services, mini programs are widely used in the education sector. The WeChat Mini Programs Educational Platform now provides free classes for various subjects, including IT and science research. The platform has cooperated with many middle schools nationwide, and has also cooperated with the education sector in Hong Kong and Macao.

Following an increase in inbound tourists, WeChat has seen a huge year-on-year increase in international bank card transactions and transaction value. As of June 2024, the monthly total value of payments made by WeChat users using international bank cards has quadrupled and the monthly transactions made by those users has increased six fold.

According to a representative of WeChat, prior to Spring Festival, they simplified the activation process for foreigner WeChat accounts. The number of simplified account activations made in June is nearly 10 times the amount made in March.