How does Stripe deal with the currency conversion? Is this tracked by Alipay on an individual level (i.e. so consumers can't spend more then the legal conversion amount of 50k USD)?
How is that annual 50k USD monitored/enforced now? If I have multiple bank accounts, will I be prevented from withdrawing a combined 50k from overseas ATMs?
So, the bank will report these currency exchanges (including overseas ATM withdrawals from an RMB account) to some central authority like PBOC, who will then combine it with info from other banks, and thereby know if I've breached the annual limit?
There is an real-time system shared by all banks. I can see my remaining quota immediately updated whenever I made an exchange.
In your example, if you have RMB in your China bank account and withdraw RMB overseas, these are no currency exchanges at all. It's not relevant to the $50k exchange cap.
In theory that's how it works - but it over-looks a price optimization that everyone uses. Essentially, when I walk into a restaurant/business to buy something, I'm in one of two situations:
a) I have some relationship with my employer whereby I need fapiaos to essentially reduce my income tax (i.e. count my personal expenditures as business expenses). Thus, I will ask for a fapiao.
b) I don't need a fapiao to write off income tax. Now, we play a simple numbers game:
Say there is a 10% chance of me winning some small percent of money by receiving the fapiao. But there is a 100% chance that if I ask for the fapiao the business will need to pay tax. So, we strike a win-win deal. The business gives me a discount, that is, say, 50% of what the tax is. I pay less. They make more. Everyone but the government wins.
Other notes:
a) The lottery on fapiao has been around for a while. Its not new.
b) The above deal is less and less common in big cities as more people use UnionPay (debit cards) and businesses essentially assume that people will ask for fapiao.
c) There are a few factual errors in the article. Some restaurants, yes, provide a "stack" of pre-printed fapiaos. Most have a printer that is essentially connected to the tax collection offices computer and can print at the bill's value.
As for (c), it depends on the city and even restaurant. Many places can't afford fapiao printing machines, and so the government is more lax and lets them use preprinted anonymous fapiaos. These are being phased out, but if you leave the big cities you'll still see a lot of that, and even in Beijing we get fapiao tickets at some lower end places.
While at its inception Weibo was a "twitter clone with Chinese characteristics"; it most certainly is not. IMHO, and in the opinion of everyone I talk to who has access to both, Weibo has created a "Microblog experience" that is fundamentally different (and for many more engaging) than twitter.
For example, Weibo has included inline images and videos from the get go - making your weibo stream a cross between twitter and pinterest. They have "badges", "real time chat" and other features found in other SNS applications but adapted to the microblog format. Their iPad app is beautiful - flipboard for the "microblog" format. And so on.
If you look at how people use the services, I think you'll find that Weibo users spend more time engaging with the platform than Twitter users. Its an all engrossing source of digital information, content and entertainment.
For anyone looking to put a "stream" into their app (which we are working on) its very interesting to explore the experiences and choices of both. They are not the same.
Having said that, Twitter has a far more open and accessible API and yes, it goes without saying, its not censored.
They've definitely piled on the features for weibo to suit the Chinese audience; most of this innovation is local. The nice thing about Twitter was its simplicity, that you don't have to load pics in the tweets you receive, that the visual design is simple, and you don't have any pointless reputation side games to distract you. Weibo goes and adds those features, I don't think it makes it better than twitter in anyway, although it is definitely different.
Couple that with the fact that 140 ideographic Chinese characters is much more information than a 140 phoentic letters (say 1.5, 2 times as much) along with threaded discussions, and weibo begins to look more like full on social networking than just microblogging. The way weibo has bitten into Kaixin and Renren is evidence of that.
However, I wouldn't call "Weibo" more than a Twitter clone until they are allowed to compete head-to-head with Twitter by the Chinese government. Weibo is simply Twitter in China because Twitter isn't allowed to exist.
