Was that like, enforced? Or did your landlord potentially just prefer cash? I know very little about how land-ownership works in China, except that nobody really ever owns their land.
My landlord preferred to be paid through Alipay. I had to pay in cash because Alipay wouldn't let me make payments that large. (Because my Alipay account was backed by a foreign credit card as opposed to a Chinese bank account, I assume. If you're curious, the rent was about US$700 / month, so the payment would have been about US$2100.)
I don't see that landownership is really relevant. Mostly it's done on the basis of notional 70-year leases from the government. Since the government dates to 1949, the first round of those recently expired. There was a lot of curiosity beforehand as to what would happen, but it doesn't seem to have made enough of a splash that anyone commented about it (where I could see) afterwards. So I don't know how it turned out.
I understand that rural peasants may sometimes own their land outright. In this case, I was renting one apartment in a building with 5-6 floors and I think 4 apartments per floor.
They'd like to. Vending machines will no longer sell to you unless you can pay that way.
For more significant things, you can still use cash. I'd go down to my landlord's bank every three months to pay the rent.
Was that like, enforced? Or did your landlord potentially just prefer cash? I know very little about how land-ownership works in China, except that nobody really ever owns their land.
My landlord preferred to be paid through Alipay. I had to pay in cash because Alipay wouldn't let me make payments that large. (Because my Alipay account was backed by a foreign credit card as opposed to a Chinese bank account, I assume. If you're curious, the rent was about US$700 / month, so the payment would have been about US$2100.)
I don't see that landownership is really relevant. Mostly it's done on the basis of notional 70-year leases from the government. Since the government dates to 1949, the first round of those recently expired. There was a lot of curiosity beforehand as to what would happen, but it doesn't seem to have made enough of a splash that anyone commented about it (where I could see) afterwards. So I don't know how it turned out.
I understand that rural peasants may sometimes own their land outright. In this case, I was renting one apartment in a building with 5-6 floors and I think 4 apartments per floor.