Finally got my Preferred card today... took three weeks from application to arrival.

First, the good: no trouble activating as others had reported, or setting up the online banking, and they gave me a generous limit.

Next, the bad: the big question I (and I suspect many others) had was whether this would work with Alipay/WeChat Wallet/other online payments. It does not. WeChat recognizes it as a valid ICBC card, but fails at trying to verify the phone number and ID (likely at least in part because ICBC US doesn't have my passport number, nor the Chinese mobile linked to my WeChat). Alipay refuses to recognize it as a valid card number at all. "Direct" online payments through ICBC are initially promising—it even lets me to log in!—but then fail with an "overseas cards not supported" error in Chinese.

Other observations: the online banking lists this as a "dual currency card"—would be nice if that was true and they'd let me pay RMB balances in RMB, but it appears not to be. ICBC (China) says they will link it with my Chinese accounts "within 72 hours," but we shall see. All the customer service appears to be based in China. I strongly suspect that I'm the ~2000th person to get one of these, given the number.

I've reached out to friends at Alipay and Tencent to see if they have any tricks to make online payments for foreign UnionPay cards work, but I suspect this is hopeless in the near term.

Will need to wait until my next China trip to see how useful this really is, but with no annual fee, it probably doesn't hurt to hold on to it.