In today’s day and age, it seems like every week there’s a nifty new app that will gives you the lowest price on groceries, access to better shared cars and taxis, and translates languages more quickly and accurately. But there are some true essentials that lead the pack, which are pretty indispensable for maximising life here in Beijing.

JSS
Designed with expats in mind and focusing on high-quality English customer service, JSS offers same-day grocery and food delivery from expat-friendly restaurants and grocery stores like Jenny Wang’s. JSS truly tries to connect with its customers, which is why it launched its Brand Ambassador program.

Sherpa’s
Sherpa’s provides a food and grocery delivery service but only works with top-quality restaurants, which means a less wide range of options compared to its Chinese-language counterparts but mainly consists of western-friendly selections. Sherpa’s couriers are trained to ensure a quick, courteous, and correct delivery.

Meituan
Meituan is one of several local food and grocery delivery apps that gets the job done when you’re in a pinch. They generally deliver within the hour and offer a much wider range of restaurants and grocery stores than the earlier two expat-friendly English language apps, if you can navigate its Chinese interface. Plus, you can also rent the yellow Meituan shared bikes using this app!

JingDong (JD)
In the realm of shopping, JD is great for household products and groceries, where you can find almost everything from spinach to stereos. It’s a Chinese-language app but if you can figure it out, it could save you lots of time and effort searching for a brick-and-mortar store for what you need.

Weidian
This is WeChat’s answer to TaoBao, which offers listings by small local business owners with artisanal crafts, foodstuffs, or supplies. Sustainable brands started by expat entrepreneurs such as The Bulk House, KIYANI Botanics, Greeniche, Dancing Yak Handicrafts and The Green Room are some examples of stores you can find on it.

TaoBao
TaoBao is so ubiquitous that it needs no introduction. And if you were first introduced to BaoPals – the English language expat-friendly version of the local app – you really should try TaoBao because of its easy image search function, which we explain in this article here.

Xianyu
A sister to TaoBao, Xianyu is the secondhand version of the popular shopping app and offers plenty of gently-used, practically new clothes, furniture, and other goods. This is great for kids’ stuff which they tend to outgrow quickly. This article tells you all about it!

Dazhong Dianping
Dazhong Dianping or simply Dianping, is essentially what I call the Chinese Yelp, which offers guides for lifestyle and entertainment including restaurants, hotels, cinemas, through business listings, ratings system, and comments section. You can check the app for reviews and recommended specials before you choose a restaurant, helping you and your family to avoid unpleasant surprises. Additionally, paying through the app usually grants you a discount.

Dear Translate
This is editor Mina Yan’s pick of all the free translation apps that are out there right now, and there are a lot. It has a camera translate function that quickly translates the text in front of you and also has an awesome conversation translation function. Best of all, of course, it’s free!

Pleco Chinese Dictionary is probably the best offline Chinese – English dictionary. It integrates dictionaries with an amazing amount (over 110,000) of frequently-updated entries and example sentences with Pinyin, document reader, flashcard system with fullscreen handwriting input, and a live Optical Character Reader (OCR). It also includes audio to help your pronunciation and displays stroke order diagrams showing you how to draw each character.

Tell us which apps you can’t live without here in Beijing (aside from WeChat and Alipay…) in the comments below!

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Images: Pexels, Vivienne Tseng-Rush

When it comes to waimai, my platform of choice is always Meituan. It’s not that they’ve got more options than eleme or anything like that. It’s simply a matter of habit. Nevertheless, what began as a humble food delivery app has since grown to include shared bikes, grocery delivery, hotel booking, attraction ticket sales, medicine delivery, and my latest favorite feature – ride hailing. It seems like they’re trying to gain market share from Didi by offering cheaper rates for riders and not taking commission from drivers, an obvious incentive for any potential recruit.

Here’s how to use it

Go to the car icon at the top of your Meituan homepage.

Once it’s open, you should get a pretty accurate pin for your current location. If you need to change it, simply click on the blue location pin and manually input your address.

Then in the second line, input your desired destination. For most popular places such as Solana Mall, both Chinese and English are acceptable. However, if you know the Chinese name, I would highly recommend using it to avoid any mistakes.

Once you’ve put in your destination you can now select drivers from multiple ride-hailing apps, with estimated costs listed on the right.

Then click the black button at the bottom to call your car.

Some have said that the quality of drivers is not as great as those who work for Didi, but honestly, after using Meituan for a week, I haven’t seen any difference between their drivers and a Didi Express.

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Images: Mina Yan, Pexels

China’s booming online food delivery platforms are again facing another food safety scandal amid revelations that the industry’s registration safeguards can be easily circumvented through black market intermediaries that happen to be just as readily available online as the food platforms themselves.

An undercover investigation by Chinese investigative media organization Serious Case #47 showed that online restaurant certification can be bought from certain QQ groups for prices ranging from RMB 800 to 1,500 (USD 136 to USD 237).

According to an intermediary named Lin Feng, anyone with an identification number and a bank card can successfully apply for the fake credentials. As Lin boasted to the Serious Case #47 undercover reporter, “We can help you get a business license and a food license which will allow you to open a shop address within 300 meters of your actual operating location.”

But it’s not just licensing; the undercover investigation also revealed that opportunistic restaurateurs can get in on the lucrative online food delivery industry even without the hassle of certification, real or otherwise.

Puhuang Restaurant on Anlelin Road, Dongcheng District

A Serious Case #47 reporter was able to track down a Beijing restaurant named Puhuang in Dongcheng District (shown above) that was willing to rent out part of its space for RMB 8,000 a month; in return, the renter would be able to operate as an online food provider underneath the Puhuang business license.

As it turned out, a total of 13 different online food providers have been sharing the same Puhuang business certification.

The undercover report comes six months after government regulations cracked down on lax registration and certification practices for Chinese O2O food platorms. Implemented by the national food and drug inspection agency, the regulations were specifically designed to outlaw “phantom” food providers that operated without business or food operator licenses.

In 2016, China’s online food delivery platform suffered a series of food safety scandals; Ele.me was caught using food providers without proper food catering certifications that ultimately resulted in a USD 19,000 fine, but the public backlash would finally hit its peak when 20 customers came down with food poisoning from ordering from Shanghai online food delivery platforms.

Besides government regulations, the industry vowed to clean up its act. Meituan Vice President Wang Puzhong claimed his company’s “Skynet system” ensured customer safety and satisfaction by automating the registration and verification of all of its food providers through network auditing and supervision. What’s more, Beijing’s O2O food delivery industry developed its own self-inspection systemlast September that would be readily available for the public to access.

Chinese online food delivery customers surged to 295 million users over the first half of 2017. Every single day, 1.8 million orders are in Beijing alone, culminating in daily sales worth about 100 million yuan.

Each of the top three Chinese O2O food providers has a massive online presence. Baidu Take-out offers 4,413 online food providers while Meituan and Ele.me offer 7,247, and 7,926 selections, respectively.

It’s hard not to imagine our lives nowadays without numerous apps and online services upon which we depend for conveniences on a daily basis. And yet, technological security features such as a facial recognition registration system failed to protect a 21-year-old stewardess who was raped and murdered by her Didi Hitch driver in what has become China’s current top trending public safety story.

Fair to say that Beijing residents fond of ordering take-out should limit their selections to brick-and-mortar locations that they know to actually exist.

More stories from this author here.

E-Mail: charlesliu1 (at) qq (dot) com
Twitter: @Sinopath

Images: Sina Finance, Kanshangjie

According to China news blog What’s On Weibo, there is a growing backlash towards Halal certification in China, which has lead to calls for further regulation of the Halal certification system and crackdowns.

With an estimated 23 million Muslims in the country, Islam has had a long history in China. So you’d imagine in a country where the word for meat, rou (肉), can by default be considered pork, that clear labeling would be necessary for those with religious dietary concerns. A robust Halal labeling industry has existed for years, certifying products ranging from chili paste to vegetarian sausages to paper towels to bottled water. However, citizens claim there has been a noticeable shift to exclusionary “Halal-only” practices that could be considered discriminatory to other beliefs and ethnic groups.

Articles in government mouthpieces like the Global Times denounce “Pan-Halal Tendencies,” which they define as Halal labeling beyond food products, like for haircuts or bathhouses. According to the Global Times article, earlier this year in Gansu’s Linxia Hui autonomous region, nearly 800 stalls and businesses selling Halal products considered “Pan-Halal” had been shut down to “safeguard the region’s ethnic unity and social stability.”

Online, furious Chinese netizens have taken to sharing photos of Halal supermarket lines, Halal-only restaurant seating in Shanghai or Meituan’s special Muslim friendly delivery boxes. Outraged netizens have taken to calling all of it the “Halal-ification” (清真泛化) of China. Their argument is, since China is a secular, atheist Communist country, why should a religion have perceived state-sanctioned special treatment?

It could be easily argued that a general anti-Islam feeling has crept over the country, connecting the religion to extremism and terrorism. That coupled with strong nationalist tendencies that tend to scapegoat the “enemy de jour” could spell further strained relations with between Han and China’s Muslim minority population.

Despite all of this, Halal labeling undoubtedly has it’s benefits for many expat families that practice these religious dietary restrictions and makes it super easy to know whether those instant noodles or corner restaurants make do without unwanted porcine products. 

Photos: chinabangla.net, youtube.com