For those foreigner who has the Chinese ID card, may I know what Category letter appeared on your ID? I am senior engineer and I have "B".

Here is the ranking system. I'd say A is for department head level or an extremely high paid 26 year old technical consultant with a PhD. B is probably everyone else. And C for short term work, like trade show reps.

www.china-briefing.com/[...]

@Nicepal. There are also bonus points for Chinese language level, age, salary, and a few other things.

@Alex, looking at the link. Your 26yearold, highly paid constulant might get the 85 points, but would still not meet the other criteria for A.

Tiger tiger, as long as you get the 85 points you don’t need any other criteria...

Can the new ID card be used to get Alipay? Alipay won't let me register with a US passport ID.

@ Kongming. No, the new work permit cards are useless.

You need to check what you’re entering wrong on Alipay. It’s fine with my (British) passport. Are you entering your name correctly?

@kongming
Alipay expects a Chinese ID with 18 digits - dunno if this STILL works, but pad your US passport # with 9 leading zeroes to achieve an 18 digit number.

That should satisfy the 18 digit thing - but it also appears these services are increasingly verifying "real ID's" with PSB databases - and THAT may be why your registration is failing.

You'll have to contact Alipay directly - and work with a supervisor to try to get your passport properly registered - this will include sending scanned photos of your passport and current visa - to verify you're legally entitled to the services.

If you're like most expats - your visa is only 1 year - so this requires the hassle of renewing your docs with alipay, WeChat, and your chinese bank whenever your visa or passport expires - depending on which date(s) the service uses as the expiration date.

@michael2015. I’ve got Alipay & Wechat linked to my UK passport only using the actual passport number, no need for extra digits. I’ve never, from memory, linked/uploaded my resident permit when it has changed.

I agree he should contact Alipay customer services but the problems won’t be caused by what you suggested. Possibly an issue with linking bank card & passport. Sometimes bank staff add our names slightly differently to our passports. That then causes problems.

Kongming.

You have an Alipay, you just want to link it to your account am I right?

Problem won't be with Alipay but some banks won't allow a none ID card number to be linked, as was originally the case with my account.

The only get around is to open an account with one of the banks that do, I remember BOC and IBOC being ones that worked fine by linking a passport.