Money, Banking & Payments — 支付/汇率

The financial vocabulary of modern (mostly mobile) China

Everyday finance in mainland China is unusually mobile-first. Cash is rare. A mall transaction goes via QR code; so does the bowl of noodles from the street vendor, the metro ticket, the temple donation box, and the fifty cents you owe a friend for a bottle of water. Even small village shops accept 微信支付 or 支付宝. A foreigner who shows up with a wallet full of bills is regarded as mildly eccentric.

This article is the working phrasebook for that environment: how to pay, how to bank, how to budget, and how to talk about the digital wallet that has quietly replaced most of the physical one. For character-level depth on where 贝 (the "shell/money" radical) lives and how it spawned half of this vocabulary, pair it with the money-and-value radical tour.

// The payment surface, as an API.
interface Payment {
    payForThing(amount: CNY, method: Method): Receipt;
    goToBank(action: "deposit" | "withdraw" | "transfer"): void;
    budget(income: CNY, expense: CNY): Balance;
    exchange(from: Currency, to: Currency, amount: number): CNY;
}

type Method = "cash" | "card" | "QR" | "WeChat" | "Alipay";

1. Currency refresher

China's currency is Renminbi — "the people's currency" — abbreviated RMB or, in banking contexts, CNY. The unit you name a price in is 元 (formal) or 块 (colloquial). Every price you'll see on a menu uses 元; every price you'll hear spoken uses 块.

2. payForThing(amount, method)

The ground-level transaction: ask the price, pay, (optionally) get a receipt. The default payment method now is a QR code — you scan the merchant, or they scan you.

Asking the price

Payment methods

The scanning choreography

Mobile payment has two directions: either the customer scans a printed QR code on the counter, or the cashier scans a QR code displayed on the customer's phone. Small vendors prefer the first; larger merchants with a proper point-of-sale prefer the second. The question that negotiates which direction to use is almost a set phrase:

Receipts and change

3. goToBank(action)

Even in a mobile-first economy you will eventually walk into a bank — to open an account, to get a card, to wire money abroad, or to change foreign cash. Bring your passport and patience.

Places and cards

Account actions

4. budget(income, expense)

Income-in, expense-out. Most of this vocabulary is built on 钱 (money) or the 贝 radical.

Income and expenses

Borrowing and lending

Investing

5. Digital-era terms

Chinese acquired an entire second financial vocabulary in the 2010s, bolted onto smartphones.

6. Exchange rate and travel money

The money-changer counter — at an airport, a Bank of China branch, or a hotel — uses a recognizable set of phrases.

7. Sample dialogs

8. Edge cases

Foreigner-friction: opening a Chinese bank account

Opening a mainland bank account was, a decade ago, something you could do as a tourist with a passport. Today, most branches require a valid residence permit (居留许可, jū liú xǔ kě) and a local phone number, and some require a working visa on top. Policies vary by bank, by city, and by branch-manager mood. Bank of China (中国银行) and ICBC (工商银行) tend to be the most foreigner-friendly; try a major downtown branch rather than a neighborhood one.

Without a Chinese bank account, you can still use WeChat Pay and Alipay by linking an international card — this has worked since 2023 for most foreign Visa/Mastercards, with a small foreign-card surcharge.

零钱 — spare change, digitized

零钱 (líng qián) literally means "zero-money," i.e. small change. Physical 零钱 is increasingly rare: you'll go weeks without seeing a coin. But digital 零钱 is constant — in WeChat, your in-app wallet balance is called 零钱, and money received via red packet lands there. It's the only piggy bank most people under forty have.

Tipping vs 打赏

Tipping is not traditional in mainland China. Restaurants, taxis, hotels — none of them expect it, and leaving a tip at a local place can even be declined or cause polite confusion. The cultural equivalent is 打赏 (dǎ shǎng), but applied to content creators, streamers, and livestream performers — you "reward" them with a small direct payment through the platform. In a sense, tipping relocated from the service economy to the attention economy.

房价 — the conversation topic

房价 (fáng jià, house prices) is an eternal small-talk subject. Expect to hear it within ten minutes of meeting anyone in their thirties in a Tier 1 city. Related vocabulary: 首付 (shǒu fù, down payment), 月供 (yuè gōng, monthly mortgage payment), 学区房 (xué qū fáng, school-district apartment). The phrase you'll hear most is 买不起 (mǎi bu qǐ, "can't afford to buy") — a complement construction that is itself a whole grammar topic.

块 vs 元 — don't switch mid-sentence

Pick one register and stay in it. A price quoted as 一百块 is colloquial; 一百元 is formal. Mixing — 一百块元 — is wrong and sounds like a machine translation. If the merchant says 块, answer in 块. If the contract says 元, say 元.

9. Next steps

• Radical tour: money & value — where 贝, 钅, and 贝-family characters come from
• Next phrasebook: Shopping & Haggling — prices, sizes, bargaining at markets
• Browse money vocabulary — filtered by tag
• Module 5: The Standard Library — the core vocabulary spine

Once the payment choreography is on autopilot — scan, confirm, paid — you'll start noticing the second layer: the casual number-talk that surrounds every transaction. 打折 (dǎ zhé, discount), 包邮 (bāo yóu, free shipping), 满减 (mǎn jiǎn, threshold discount). That's the Shopping phrasebook.