There's literally no option to do that in the WeChat app (believe me, I looked). A quick internet search shows that the only way to do this is to switch the entire language of your phone to simplified Chinese . So I guess the people who wrote the app never realized that it's possible to want to use a specific language and a specific mapping service independently.

Sorry if I sound a bit peeved, but...I am a little bit peeved. First of all, I bought a SIM card at mychinaunicom.com, which I later found out was way overpriced (imagine my surprise when my friend told me that he pays only ¥20/GB). And actually I found a SIM card from my previous visit to China (bought in China at my hotel) and looked at the pricing, and it's true. ¥30/500MB, ¥50/1GB, and ¥100/2.5GB was the pricing from 2 years ago. Even with the roughly 50% markup the guy at the hotel sold it to me for, it was still cheaper than the card I bought this time. Second, the last time I was in China (1.5 to 2 years ago), these dropouts either did not occur, did not occur as often, or I do not remember them happening. It seems like the problem has gotten worse. Now if I were paying ¥20/GB, I'd probably be willing to overlook some of these problems, but I was paying a lot more than that. When I pay US$25 for 1GB of data, I expect the service to be fairly decent, especially in the middle of two of China's biggest cities, and what I got was anything but. This also happened with the Unicom HK card I had; the data connection would drop occasionally. A few times, my phone's modem even sort of "locked up" and refused to connect to the data network until I put it in airplane mode and took it out of airplane mode. I've had this happen in the US a handful of times, maybe once every 2-3 months. In China it was happening every 1-2 days. Third, they've made it an even bigger pain to obtain a SIM than it was on my previous visit. There are rumors flying about having to cancel 4G plans before you leave China or you get blacklisted (not sure if that's true or not). But LvyCom, an authorized distributor, has something about this on their main website: http://www.lvycom.com/ It says SIM cards from other providers and obtained from other China Unicom sources like official stores "Require tedious cancellation process; fail to cancel will cause bad credit and debt." This is the first time I've seen any authorized distributor chime in on this rumor.

Now if I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd probably assume that the service is poor and:

• They did it because voice is their cash cow, and they want VoIP calls to drop so often that people actually subscribe to the voice service.
• They did it because they want to make peoples' VPNs constantly have to disconnenct and reconnect so that the VPN ends up using up a high % of all data used establishing and reestablishing the connection, which increases their revenue.

I don't really think there's any conspiracy theory here. I just think their maintenance department doesn't know what they're doing, nor does their billing department. They oversold the network and the WCDMA cells are suffering from the "cell breathing" effect especially during the peak hours. Normally this would push traffic from a more heavily loaded cell to a more lightly loaded one; if all cells are heavily loaded, the coverage area can actually shrink and traffic literally gets dropped.

So yeah, I'm a bit peeved. But I'm pretty sure I'll have calmed down before my next visit