Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in any of the following things. It's just my experience and what I've heard from my friends.

First, As of 2018, it makes a difference when a Chinese and US-dwelling citizen applies for the US-based ICBC card. Under such circumstance, SSN is not required. The ICBC USA will pull a credit report from the Chinese credit bureau. That's probably helpful for someone with no credit history and no SSN. They can still get a real, high CL credit card which can be used in major stores, and accumulate some credit history.

I tried QuickPass in HK (2019), Taiwan (2018), Macau (2016) with no success. I heard some major brands in HK now supports QuickPass and a friend told me the merchant needs to explicitly enable that feature.
Besides, I have a China-issued Visa-only card which features EMV and payWave. Somehow I only succeeded using its payWave in a small grocery store in Berkeley, the Target in Cupertino and nowhere else in America. Weird.

Funny story: I noticed that promo, used my CCB-issued chip debit card, whose chip is broken, and made a successful fallback transaction through UP network. Immediately in 30 seconds, even before the receipt was fully printed, I received a message from the bank saying my card has been locked and I had to make an international call to unfreeze it. UP is really worried about swiping.


I had a classmate who traveled to Cuba in 2017. His China-issued UP card barely worked there. Eventually, he ended up with some CUP with exchanging CNY cash on the black market.

A kind of universal POS terminal with a big touchscreen and orange plastic has been widely used by corp merchants. That terminal supports Wechat/Alipay/UP by default, and it seems business owners cannot deny foreign UP cards separately. You will have a good chance to use any foreign-issued UP card when the merchant uses that kind of terminal.

The problem is that if the cashier discovers you are using a foreign card, they may cancel the transaction and insists you change the payment method. Because the merchant is still charged a higher fee for foreign UP cards. Therefore some businesses may write the policy that doesn't allow customers to use them. The current highest processing rate for domestic UP is 0.6%. For foreign UP, it seems to be ~2%.

As a comparison, the fee for Alipay/WePay commercial recipients is about 0.35%. For A/W individual recipient, there's no transaction fee, but a 0.1% withdrawal fee will occur if they want to transfer the balance to their bank.

Lastly just FYI, that terminal can work with any V/M/A/D/J cards too but it's not enabled by default. I heard using Amex on that terminal will charge the merchant on a whopping 4.5% rate.

Now the official rule of foreigners opening bank account is:

• you must have any kind of visa which permits you a single stay longer than 90 days (e.g. family reunion visa, student visa). The usual 10-year touist visa issued to US citizen doesn't allow that.
• or, you must have any kind of visa/status which permits you to legally earn in China (e.g. short-term work visa, student visa with fieldwork/internship permit)

In the real world, it's quite a YMMV experience. A lot of branches don't want to open an account for you because they don't know how; not because they can't. And generally, branches in Shanghai is much more flexible than those in Shenzhen. Maybe it's because Shanghai banks deal with more foreigners from Western countries, as HK residents can just open their account in China Mainland without any visa/status requirement.