The Speakeasy Economy of WeChat (opens in new tab)

Cool story and glad the author found some community but man, I can’t help but see this through an Orwellian lens.

A single app for everything, that stores my social graph and medical info, tracks my location, pays my bills, books my vacation, orders my food. All flowing through the CCP. What could go wrong.

Some years ago, never mind how long precisely, we were using Skype for group chat and meeting. Then Skype became unstable in China, other messengers, such as Line Telegram, Whatsapp, were also unstable or unavailable. That's why we switched to wechat.