As of May 2019 I am a foreigner and I can use both Ali Pay and WeChat. How? Simple get a Chinese bank account. I got in day one and at the Beijing Airport at Terminal 3 I went to China Construction Bank and got an account easy with just my passport and Visa and I didn't need to be here on a work visa.
People say you need to be working here which isn't true. Bank Of China said that at the airport but you just need to find the correct bank that doesn't require you to be working like China Construction Bank.
Be prepared to be there for a hour or 2 if you can't read or speak Chinese.
Also even if you decide you don't want to do that and get a bank account there is still a work around to getting WeChat Pay to work WITHOUT a Mainland China bank card.
What you do is do your real name verification ide tifacation with any of your credit cards.
Then have someone send you a red packet. (As of February 2019 new China regulations don't allow people to actually accept the red packet money so getting money that way won't work.) I know you won't be able to accept the red packet because it will say you need a Mainland China bank card. You just need to click it open it to activate the WeChat Pay feature. It doesn't matter about you don't get the money from the red packet.
After 24 hours the person that sent you the red packet will get that money back since you didn't recieve the money.
Then you go online and use one of those 3rd party top up website services which can load your WeChat wallet. Sure you pay fees to do that and costs mlorenajd don't get dollar for dollar but it's a way to get it working without a Mainland China bank card and you can pay merchants.
Now I don't know if the red packet step is needed or you can just use a top up service or not. One of them they require you to add them on chat and I think they send you a red packet.
Later on you may get a message saying if you don't verify who you are by this date WeChat Pay portion will be disabled. All you need to do for that is verify yourself with your passport and it will stay in there.
Also not you can do 2000 ¥ daily buy only have up to 2000 ¥ on your account at a time.
Last edited by Deathbyillusion; Jun 8, 2019 at 10:54 pm