China's Internet Is Flowering. and It Might Be Our Future. - The New York Times

Chinaʼs Internet Is Flowering. And It Might Be Our Future.
- The New York Times 15/11/19 12'29
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China’s Internet
Is Flowering.
And It Might Be
Our Future.
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Our Future.
Chinaʼs Internet Is Flowering. And It Might Be Our Future. - The New York Times 15/11/19 12'29
By Yiren Lu
Photo illustration by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

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.”
This article is part of a special issue

of The New York Times Magazine
about the future of the internet.
[Read about paying for a “luxury internet.”]
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
Illustration by Mrzyk & Moriceau
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?
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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.
China’s
Interlocking
Internet
By Yiren Lu
Read More
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
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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.
Illustration by Mrzyk & Moriceau
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.
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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.
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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
Illustration by Mrzyk & Moriceau 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.
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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.
Yiren Lu is a writer and software engineer based in New York. She last wrote for the magazine about hacking
into self-driving cars. Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian artist whose work has been the subject of numerous solo
exhibitions, including at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
Pierpaolo Ferrari is an Italian photographer and, along with Cattelan, is a founder of the magazine Toiletpaper,
known for its surreal and humorous imagery.
Additional design and development by Jacky Myint.
Read more from this special issue

about the future of the internet.
READ 4 COMMENTS

China's Internet Is Flowering. and It Might Be Our Future. - The New York Times

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Chinaʼs Internet Is Flowering. And It Might Be Our Future.

- The New York Times 15/11/19 12'29

PLAY THE CROSSWORD Account

Photo illustration by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

The HeyTea shop in the

strollers, Gen Z-ers in knockoﬀ

The scene was far removed from the days 18 months

Chan, HeyTea’s chief technology oﬃcer. Yet as much as

To solve the problem, Chan turned to the same

adoption of the platform as — in what has been the

This article is part of a special issue

[Read about paying for a “luxury internet.”]

Slim and energetic, with the pompadour of a Korean

One app in particular

In the two years since then, businesses have created

Oﬀline businesses looking to move online have long

situation — I’m at a HeyTea and drinking this particular

Miniprograms aren’t do-everything miracles, of course

Western one, in which each business has its own

The longstanding consensus about the Chinese internet

The so-called WeChat model may be the first time

earlier this year to integrate Facebook, WhatsApp and

If you’re a 30-year-old oﬃce worker living in a smaller

check out Jinri Toutiao, an A.I.-driven news-

Finally, you get to work. The job is in sales for a midsize

restaurant in the neighborhood, where you order using

To spend any amount of time in China today is to

WeChat grew slowly at first, and then explosively. Its

access became available to hundreds of millions of

Illustration by Mrzyk & Moriceau

The final ingredient would come during the Chinese

the holiday to become a full-fledged mobile payment

Having secured the two foundational needs of any

In WeChat’s early years, the government allowed it to

harnessed. “In the U.S., as a politician, you answer to

In February, I met with Sergi de Pablo Quesada, a

HeyTea, most small- and medium-size businesses don’t

As Apple does with its iOS operating system, WeChat

application will look like to the end user. The S.D.K.

Aside from some diﬀerences in coding languages and

Baidu and Tencent — you can just publish to WeChat. If

It does not provide promotion. “Not every business

Last April, in Shanghai, I met Wang Guanchun, the 35-

assistant would be able to expand beyond just random

one of these “skills” has an existing incumbent (Uber,

I can ask Xiaolai, on the other hand, to book plane

The WeChat marketplace is not without its drawbacks.

acknowledge that the platform is feudalistic, binding

Even in the West, the trend in recent years has been

While WeChat hasn’t thus far shown the tendency to

The connected WeChat internet also brings a unique

could probably go to a corner shop that sells noodles

Given various oﬃcial data-privacy crackdowns

The dark side of the WeChat internet is that all the

easily traceable financial

In Shanghai this fall, I met with Thibault Genaitay, the

the miniprogram era, Le Wagon began investing in the

In many ways, it’s an inopportune time for an

happened to Huawei, strategic and political currents

Yet in other ways, the time is finally right. In 2013,

Now American technology is following China’s lead.

The gradual convergence toward the connected