Circle Misses the Mark on China

In announcing that it had raised $50 million of venture funding, Circle extolled China’s status as a font of innovation.

“China is today the center of innovation in mobile apps and digital finance,” Circle wrote in its press release.

Well, not exactly.

I returned yesterday from my second trip in as many months to China and I can assure you that China is not “the center of innovation in mobile apps and digital finance.”

Whether Circle was placating its new Chinese investor, IDG Capital Partners, with those platitudes aside, as in so many ways, there is a raft of misconceptions about China. Whether it is the size of its population (a lot more than the official 1.4 billion) or how it is living under communism (a lot less intrusive than it is made out to be in US media) or its GDP (never as high as the “official” rate), nearly everything in China rests somewhere between perception and reality.

The same is true for digital finance. Yes, the Chinese have shown an appetite for bitcoin, mainly as a means of speculation than true digital innovation. Here’s how TechCrunch put it:

[IDG] could be a key partner [for Circle] in breaking into the Chinese market, which has an entirely different set of regulations around bitcoin. Two years ago, after Chinese Bitcoin enthusiasts started piling into the market and driving up the price of the currency, the government intervened and ruled that banks couldn’t directly handle transactions. Transactions between private individuals are allowed, however.

The truth is there is a lot — a lot — that is wildly antiquated in China’s banking system. Last week, I was in Shenzhen, not exactly a backwater of China, and I needed to change the modest sum of $200 into renmenbi. I walked into an average ICBC Bank branch. The branch looked like a “Happy Days” set. It could have used a good dusting. The currency exchange took nearly an hour — an hour! Everything was manual. At one point, the teller had to swap out plugs for two machines to connect to her computer, which looked like a Dell Precision. My receipt was hand stamped.

“Innovative” was not the word that sprung to mind.

There is an NFC payment system for the Beijing subway, just as there is in Hong Kong, London, and elsewhere, but my personal experience was that digital payments in China were … nowhere to be found. There was only one retail establishment during my entire stay in China that let me pay by credit card. One. And I was in Beijing most of the time. Want to go to the Forbidden City? The Great Wall? The Palace of Heaven? The Summer Palace? You’d better have plenty of yuan in your pocket. China eased the rules on card payments last October to break some of the existing monopolies, but those changes are not going to revolutionize payments in China overnight — not by a long shot.

Again, that is not to say that there is no digital banking in China — there is. But my personal experience was that nothing in China rises to Western perceptions or stereotypes. Remember, the Chinese live in a parallel digital universe. They have their own versions of Facebook, Twitter, Google and other digital media platforms popular in the West. (Facebook, Twitter and Google are all blocked in China.) The alternatives to Apple iPhones, like Xiaomi, are well-regarded locally, even by Westerners I spoke with.

All this parallel online and mobile media means everything is a just a little different there. And I have little doubt that digital finance will continue to evolve differently in the Middle Kingdom. Through IDG, Circle is making a link to China, but the value of that link, well, let’s just say perception might not sync with reality.