everything wrote:I’m not sure we can say China is way more online.
You mean like all is Weibo?
Looking at my case, I now telework.
I think you meant WeChat. Weibo is micro-blogging and I was talking about the economy. Vastly more of the Chinese economy is online than in the US. I suspect it's the world leader in this regard, but I cannot speak from direct experience for anywhere but China and the US.
As you probably have heard, China is already a virtually cashless society. Nobody carries a wallet, just a phone. I don't even use and ATM card to make ATM deposits. You just scan a QR code on the ATM to access your account. O2O business is off the charts. You think Amazon.com is a big deal, but in China Taobao and JD.com represent larger slices of the economy than Amazon does in the US. You pay your phone bill from inside of WeChat. Restaurants just leave a QR code on the table for you to pay your bill. There's a local supermarket here where you actually can
only buy stuff through and online app. It's honestly hard to think of any financial transaction that isn't done online by default. If you try to use cash these days, you are like the old lady at the supermarket pulling out an old fasioned checkbook. Cashier's often have no change. Self serve mini-mars are normal and while we joke about bad self-service checkout in Los Angeles, at the Wallmart near my home, it's like 80% self-checkout. You don't have to use the machines either. You can just scan stuff with your phone as you are shopping, pay for it with your phone with no special kiosk needed, and then you just slash the QR code your phone generates to prove you paid as you leave. The bike sharing is off the charts. The user volume in the US is a joke compared to in China where there are so many IoT powered shared bikes on the street, they are a traffic nuisance. It's orders of magnitude more widespread than in Los Angles, where's it's common but still a niche market. There's restaurants all over town that basically only do delivery through food apps.
It just goes on and on. As long as you are a local Chinese person who doesn't care about getting over the great firewall, average Internet speeds are much faster both at home and with your phone, and 5G coverage is significantly more widespead than in the US, and it's real 5G too, not this so called "5G+" which is basically just 4G on cocaine.
Basically the entire economy is being run on cell phones
Edit:
This probably only applies to the cities. I think rural areas bring the numbers down when I google overall cellphone penetration rates. Google gives numbers like 58% or so, but in Xi'an if you tried to tell someone you didn't have a smartphone, they look at you like you had a third arm growing out of your head or something.