WeChat at the centre of China’s business universe

Source: The Edge Singapore

Update: Jun 8th, 2026

The ultimate key that unlocks the door is inclusion in a WeChat group / Photo: Bloomberg

In recent weeks, I have been work­ing with some South African cli­ents who are inter­ested in the Chinese mar­ket, either as export­ers or as domestic busi­ness part­ners. It has been a use­ful reminder of how China is myth­o­lo­gised: “It is a vast single mar­ket”; mis­un­der­stood: “Everything is state-con­trolled”; and mis­in­formed: “Doing busi­ness in China is much the same as doing busi­ness in the West”.

This lack of know­ledge is not unique. It dis­torts and hinders many busi­ness engage­ments with China, so it is dif­fi­cult to know where to start to get people up to speed on the basics of enga­ging with China.

Com­mu­nic­a­tion is always the start­ing point and WeChat plays an essen­tial role. If you do not have WeChat on your phone, it is almost point­less to go to China for busi­ness. You can get by without it if you are doing busi­ness with China from your home coun­try. Still, even so, you miss so many oppor­tun­it­ies to develop and deepen the busi­ness rela­tion­ship.

WeChat is the busi­ness card of China, but it is also the always-on, informal chan­nel that mir­rors how Chinese busi­ness rela­tion­ships actu­ally func­tion.

First-time vis­it­ors often take a fresh pile of busi­ness cards to China and, in so doing, reveal just how out of touch they are with mod­ern China. Genu­ine busi­ness does not exchange busi­ness cards. They exchange WeChat QR codes.

An exchange of busi­ness cards is a subtle and polite sig­nal that dis­cus­sions will prob­ably not go much fur­ther.

On the con­trary, a scan of the WeChat QR code sig­nals genu­ine interest in fol­low-up and, if handled cor­rectly, leads to busi­ness devel­op­ment. The ulti­mate key that unlocks the door is inclu­sion in a WeChat group. A request for a WeChat QR code from a Chinese con­tact, which is fol­lowed by an exchange of busi­ness cards, is a polite rejec­tion of your busi­ness approach.

West­ern col­leagues are some­times con­fused and ask why WeChat is so import­ant. “We have What­s­App and Face­book, so why do we need WeChat?”

Your Chinese coun­ter­part does not have What­s­App or Face­book because they are blocked in China and access to LinkedIn is lim­ited.

But it is more than access. WeChat is a fast, dir­ect-access plat­form that mixes pro­fes­sional and per­sonal factors. It is a cyber equi­val­ent of a busi­ness meal in the way it per­son­al­ises a busi­ness rela­tion­ship.

WeChat is part of the busi­ness envir­on­ment. A mes­sage late at night is nor­mal, as is using a voice note instead of typ­ing. The WeChat trans­la­tion fea­tures handle any lan­guage bar­ri­ers. It takes a while for West­ern­ers to become accus­tomed to this some­what intrus­ive engage­ment, although they are happy to accept per­sonal intru­sions from Face­book.

If you are work­ing with a Chinese-led organ­isa­tion, then join the WeChat group and make sure to par­ti­cip­ate

rather than lurk. Respond quickly every time because the group is where the real work­ing rela­tion­ship is being built. Silence in the group or con­sist­ently slow responses sig­nal dis­en­gage­ment.

WeChat opens the door, and if used cor­rectly, it keeps the door open. Without it, you are mostly lim­ited to look­ing through the key­hole at a field of unat­tain­able oppor­tun­it­ies.

As a fol­low-up to last week’s notes on de-dol­lar­isa­tion, Richard Tur­rin, author of Cash­less: China’s digital cur­rency revolu­tion, reports that PayPal’s 213 mil­lion Amer­ican users will soon be able to scan a WeChat Pay QR code in China and pay like a local. This is true wal­let-to-wal­let integ­ra­tion.

Tech­nical out­look of the Shang­hai mar­ket

The Shang­hai Index stopped mov­ing side­ways and has developed a new down­trend. Where the index will find sup­port below 4,100 is the key ques­tion.

The good news is that sup­port is near 4,015. The bad news is that this is a weak sup­port level. The next strongest sup­port level is near 3,900 and that is a long way down.

The most import­ant change since last week is in the Guppy Mul­tiple Mov­ing Aver­age (GMMA) rela­tion­ships. The long-term aver­age group cap­tures investors’ beha­viour. Wide sep­ar­a­tion shows investor sup­port for the trend and a will­ing­ness to enter the mar­ket when it retreats.

The degree of sep­ar­a­tion in this group has nar­rowed and begun to decline. This indic­ates an erosion of investor con­fid­ence. Fur­ther down­side com­pres­sion will con­firm that investors have become sellers, accel­er­at­ing the down­trend.

The short-term GMMA group aver­age indic­ates how traders are think­ing. They are always more excit­able than investors, con­stantly test­ing for weak­ness and tak­ing shortterm profits.

The short-term GMMA has dipped below the lower edge of the longterm GMMA for the first time since March. Con­firm­a­tion of a full change in trend dir­ec­tion occurs when the short-term GMMA falls below the long-term GMMA.

Often, these major changes in the Shang­hai Index are accom­pan­ied by an RSI diver­gence pat­tern. This has not occurred with this trend change. This sug­gests that the change may be short-lived, more in line with a fast retreat-and-rebound envir­on­ment, with 4,025 as the floor of the fall. Traders will closely mon­itor the index’s beha­viour as it approaches 4,025.

Daryl Guppy is an inter­na­tional fin­an­cial tech­nical ana­lysis expert. He has provided weekly Shang­hai Index ana­lysis for main­land Chinese media for two dec­ades. Guppy appears reg­u­larly on CNBC Asia and is known as “The Chart Man”. He is a former national board mem­ber of the Aus­tralia China Busi­ness Coun­cil.