ChinaPay Guide
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Diagnosis result

VPN is causing the failure

What's happening

Alipay and WeChat both route through Chinese servers. A VPN adds a foreign hop that trips risk control, fails location checks, and causes banks to flag the transaction as fraud. This is the single most common avoidable failure for tourists.

Steps to fix it

  1. 1Turn your VPN completely off — not just paused, fully disconnected.
  2. 2Close the payment app completely (force-quit on iOS/Android).
  3. 3Reopen the app with the VPN off and retry.
  4. 4Turn the VPN back on after the payment completes if you need it for other apps.
  5. 5If you have an always-on corporate VPN: contact IT to whitelist alipay.com and weixin.qq.com, or disconnect entirely during payments.

Backup options

  • •The apps work perfectly on Chinese networks without a VPN. The Great Firewall doesn't block payment apps.
  • •If the app crashes on open, VPN is almost certainly the cause.

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