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 difficult 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.

Singapore once grew riches from gambier, nutmeg and rubber – yet today, not a trace remains. Lost Plantations reveals a Singapore few remember – when gambier, nutmeg and rubber covered the land, and fortunes rose on the backs of bold planters and backbreaking labour.

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I make a couple of sneaky audio cameos in this new documentary from Sitting In Pictures, my former employers on Route Awakening.

Mr Yuan is the baffled taxi driver I have commissioned to take me to the Shaolin Temple, who cannot believe his luck. Today he will make a whole £30 for driving me there and back from my hotel in Luoyang, although it’s a nail-biting journey for 90 minutes through awful smog, with only twenty feet of visibility. Giant coal trucks, overloaded to double their capacity, loom out of the gloom, along with buses, vans and tuk-tuks little better than tractors. All the vehicles have their hazard lights blinking, and it soon becomes clear that every time we overtake someone, we are on a winding mountain path with little between us and the plummet back into town. It doesn’t feel like we are heading up a mountain, although before long there are patches of snow on the ground.

The Shaolin Temple itself is a little above the smog, living in a time warp where it is still the Ming dynasty and where the sky is still blue. Founded in the late 5th century AD by an Indian monk, it has been burned to the ground several times, but always risen from the ashes. Its location was chosen because it is circled by other mountains, which appear to the credulous eye to form a silhouette of a reclining Buddha. Thanks to the fame of Shaolin kung fu, and also of Zen Buddhism, which began here with the monk Bodhidharma, it has a lot of money to spend, and is a massive hilltop complex, attended by kung fu high schools, as well as halls of residence for the 200 remaining monks, and temples and pagodas in memory of great Shaolin achievements.

It is here that Bodhidharma meditated so long in a cave that his shadow literally burned into the wall, and here that his would-be pupil Huike stood stoically outside the cave, waiting to be invited to study.

Bodhidharma had no interest in teaching him, even when he found Huike standing up to his knees in snow.

 “I will teach you when it snows red,” he scoffed, only for Huike to pull out a knife and slash his own arm*, spraying the snow with his blood. It is here that the Buddhist phrase, “Standing in snow, the heart is revealed” comes from, which I think ought to be the motto of the Finnish Shorinji Kempo Association. (*English-language documentation says slashes his own arm OFF, one of many places where Shaolin myths get a bit weird).

My guide is Lisa Lau (although her business card says Lili Liu), and in keeping with the colour theme of the Shaolin temple, her puffa jacket is a holy orange. Her services are a hefty £30, for which she confesses she usually waits around all week for a single commission. The rest of the time, she works in marketing for the temple.

She talks about of the early life of Tang Taizong, first husband of Empress Wu, who was rescued from captivity as a young man by thirteen Shaolin monks, leading to the long-term association of the monastery with the Tang dynasty’s ruling family. We see a pagoda dedicated to Empress Wu’s mum, and many steles carved with details of Tang history and/or famous donations to the monastery. One is carved with the words So Doshin.

 “Oh yes,” says Lisa, “that one’s from Japan.”

We walk on the lucky carved lotuses to the central hall, and see the training ground where the monks have stamped 48 bowl-shaped depressions in the cobbles from constant training, and the “Bachelor Tree” where monks practicing the Two Fingers of Death have poked holes into its bark. I drop in at the Forest of Pagodas, where the remains of dead monks are enshrined in multi-stepped columns, and then head off for the show.

Yes, there’s a show. Monks punching holes in things and each other, slapping around sticks and swords, and bending their legs around their head. Although the monks were very good at what they did, a lot of what they did was conjuring and sleight of hand, and didn’t have a whole lot to do with Shaolin. Nor, to be honest, did five minutes of time-wasting comedy business when audience members were brought up on stage and asked to go through several punchy kicking movements for the entertainment of everyone else.

On the way back, the smog has lifted a little. We rumble slowly through squalid hamlets of shacks and barns, piles of coal and stacks of rags. People in the street are selling mud-caked leeks and oranges. A sleek limousine coming down the mountain ploughs into a three-wheeled pick-up truck and sprays sparks across the road.

“Ooh-hoo!” breathes Mr Yuan, as he swerves around the accident. It is all he says for the whole trip.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of the Martial Arts, and the narrator of the commentary track on Arrow Films’ Martial Arts of Shaolin. Photographs by Kati Clements.

Over at Iain Dale’s podcast of ghastly people, I am interviewed about Chairman Mao, who remains, of course, the Sun in Our Hearts.