The UnionPay terminals should be able to process Discover cards, but it appears they first need to have Discover's AID loaded to be able to run a Discover card by chip.
The McDonald's in Beijing takes my Discover EMV card fine, but I have to first insert the card, get the error message (I've seen "候选列表空", though didn't notice the English below that), and swipe the card (when it tells you to swipe or cancel). Of course, same as other places, the chip will not work, just let it go back to mag stripe. As long as you are able to fall back, you should be fine, but the steps you need to do can be PITA sometimes.

Has Shanghai McDonald's disabled fall back transactions? I have seen news about some locations no longer accept fall back, so that could be a problem.

For the BIN issue, it seems that several small acquirers have blocked Discover's BIN due to fraud concerns (back a while ago criminals used forged Discover cards to obtain large amount of cash from POS they applied for). There has also been rumors on the Chinese Internet claiming "cards beginning in 6011 are fake cards" or something, leaving impression in some merchants that the funds will not be credited to their accounts (actually it seems the funds will be credited slower than UnionPay cards, especially if transaction occurs in weekends). My Discover card has not been rejected or blocked by POS yet; once I pulled out the card and the cashier was finding the it weird and doubted if the card can be processed, though.

Another issue is that the POS has to connect to UnionPay network, not Alipay or something that directly connect to a bunch of banks.


Visa and MasterCard can be used at several high end establishments, including large hotels, department stores, famous restaurants and many other places that non-Chinese citizens may visit. Still, it is very very limited compared to UnionPay. I am waiting to see if V/MC will see much better acceptance rate beginning June 1st when non-UnionPay networks can apply to begin their processing services. Just don't expect Visa or MasterCard can be used like UnionPay once June 1st comes, as their applications may have to take quite a while to be approved, and then the networks have to be built up and merchants have to choose to accept cards issued in these networks.