Originally Posted by
Scifience
The important caveat that makes it less useful than it sounds is that many things you might want to pay for don't take credit cards at all (domestic or otherwise)—you can't charge your wallet with a UnionPay credit card, only a debit card, for instance; bike deposits are the same deal.
Wait a second - do you mean that even if you link your ICBC to Alipay, you won't be able to use Alipay at a place that wouldn't take the ICBC card anyways? Well that changes the usefulness of linking it to Alipay in the first place...
One more drawback to the card that I thought of: on the statement (online or paper), all you will see for each transaction is "PURCHASE UNIONPAY MERCHANT SHANGHAI CHN." It doesn't list the actual merchant.