PayPal to accept payments from Baidu Wallet – China’s latest business and technology news

Business & Technology

A summary of the top news in Chinese business and technology for July 27, 2017. Part of the daily The China Project newsletter, a convenient package of China’s business, political, and cultural news delivered to your inbox for free. Subscribe here.


China’s search giant Baidu has announced a partnership with U.S. online payments leader PayPal. TechCrunch says the deal will connect 100 million users of payment service Baidu Wallet with all 17 million merchants registered on PayPal. Many of these merchants sell goods that may be desirable to Chinese internet shoppers who have not previously had a convenient way to pay for such purchases.

Baidu Wallet is in a distant third place in the race to dominate digital payments in China: Alibaba’s Alipay has around 500 million users, while Tencent’s WeChat Pay has about 600 million. The PayPal deal will help Baidu catch up, but both Tencent and Alibaba are expanding aggressively and inking partnership deals with other overseas payment platforms.