Chinese App Rivalries Heat Up with Cashless Raps and Bike Diplomacy

Another day, another couple million dollars virtually beamed around China’s growing cashless economy. Jing Daily reported on Tuesday about an intensifying fight for mobile pay dominance between the field’s two top spenders, Alipay and WeChat Pay:

On July 31, Alipay (under Alibaba Group) announced that it was naming the week beginning August 1 “Cashless Week”; on the same day, WeChat Pay (under Tencent Holdings) picked one day—August 8—and declared it “Cashless Day,” and also nicknamed the entire month “Cashless Month.”

Beef!

And what better way to escalate this conflict than throw a rap video into the mix?

Alipay has done just that, enlisting Miami-born rapper MC Jin (the first Asian-American rapper to get a major label deal in the US) and Guangdong spitter Tizzy T to trade bars like “我的生活没有束缚每天都是freestyle” (“My life has no boundaries, every day is freestyle“) and “讨厌被束缚出门我从来不带钱包” (“I hate to be held back, when I go out I never take my wallet”):

Well, to paraphrase Wu Tang, “Cash[lessness] Rules Everything Around Me (C.R.E.A.M.)” — certainly an area of the culture currently ripe for banger production. Looking forward to Tencent’s return salvo.

Elsewhere in the intersection between pop culture and Chinese app innovation… oh look, there’s Rihanna with an Ofo:

Billboard says:

In a new “1 KM Action” partnership announced today (August 1), the singer’s Clara Lionel Foundation will join forces with bike-share platform ofo to not only fund scholarships for girls in Malawi through the foundation’s Global Scholarship Program, but also donate bikes to those students to relieve transportation challenges in getting to class. The first batch of ofo bikes have already been put into use in Malawi, kicking off what will become a five-year partnership.

Good on them. Your move, Mobike!