It doesn’t look like I am going to China in 2026, so I am unable to fully update my popular article series on Surviving in Cashless China. But I do want to offer one note of warning, which is that WeChat (Weixin) is becoming increasingly different for foreigners to use.

I just tried to move my apps onto a new iPhone, only to discover that WeChat now has a ridiculously intricate system of verification and validation, that makes it nigh-on impossible to retrieve a forgotten password, and just as hard to set up a new account. I’ll leave it to this article at China Talk to explain the ins and outs of it, but the bottom line for me is that even though I managed to get back into my WeChat account for a whole minute, when I tried to change my Settings, it decided that, too, was “suspicious” and locked me out again, brightly advising me to rustle up three more friends with WeChat of their own, who didn’t mind being unpaid admin supports, to vouch for me.

One of them duly sent me the passcode they were asked to, only to receive a reply from WeChat that my account was no longer in use, even though I had wasted a busy hour trying to use it!

Another commented: “Once you have fully set WeChat up (again), make sure that you use it semi-regularly when not in China, i.e. – post the occasional photo on moments, chat with friends, or use related apps. WeChat accounts that are left inactive for long periods often suffer what is known as ‘digital death’ where the account is deactivated and the user can no longer login, but their friends still see that user in their contacts list, thereby causing much confusion. This has happened to many contacts of mine who left China during the pandemic and ceased using WeChat, then found they could no longer access their accounts months later when wanting to catch-up with friends.”

I will, at some future point, attempt once more to get back into the account that WeChat is telling my friends I am not using. In the meantime, I need to deal with the prospect that travel in south China, in particular, is going to be significantly harder for me when I can’t use the most popular payment app there. AliPay still works just fine, but not everybody takes AliPay.

I hope very much to update this article sometime with news that WeChat has stopped being an impossible torment. For those of you planning to go to China in 2026, be advised, as per the China Talk article, that setting up WeChat, with all its whistles and bells and grace periods, can take days, and requires access to a bunch of people who already have WeChat and don’t mind behaving “suspiciously” by vouching for you. So if you want to set it up on your phone, do so a good month before you travel.

‘There was an attack on Jin Yong’s writing in the Party newspaper, Zhongguo Qingnian Bao, by someone called Wang Shuo, which was a real hatchet job against his popularity with the young. Wang specifically called out Demi-gods and Semi-Devils for criticism, and said that it was unconscionably awful.

‘He only read the first volume, which is to say, the events that we see in this Battle Wizard movie, and said that he had to finish it “while holding his nose” accusing Jin Yong of “making every single error that someone can make in writing fiction” including shunting his characters around through predictable obstacles like “pigs driven through a narrow alley.”

‘So as you can perhaps already tell, it was a significant hatchet job, and went on and on about how Jin Yong’s books were so terrible, and so popular, that as far as Wang could see there was only one possible explanation, which was that people needed escapism from their modern lives, and that wuxia fiction served as, what he called, a “head massage.”

‘Unfortunately, Wang Shuo seemed to have forgotten the golden rule of literary criticism, which is not to pick a fight with someone who writes for a living, because only a few weeks later, Jin Yong published an absolutely rip-roaring response of his own in the Wenhui Bao newspaper in Shanghai.

‘He said that he was always pleased to read criticism of his work, and that he basically agreed that his fiction was over-rated, and he was sorry for all the awards it had won, and all the copies that it sold, and the millions of people who loved reading it. And, you know, it was probably a sign of terrible times that these books that Wang Shuo hated so much were the subject of a graduate course at Beijing University, and it was surely of great embarassment that American academics had staged a whole conference on his fiction in Colorado.

‘And he went on to say that it was kind of weird that Wang Shuo said he could barely finish the first of seven volumes, because the story actually only had five volumes, so it sounded to him that he was reading an illegal pirate edition, or maybe even a completely different book. But whatever, he was very grateful for millions of enthusiastic readers, and one troll whining about it didn’t bother him much.’

From my commentary track to Battle Wizard, to be found in Arrow Films’ new Shawscope #4 box set.