Increasing payment connectivity across Southeast Asia has become a focus for China, and a new initiative is set to tighten those links further by connecting Indonesia’s Quick Response Code Indonesian Standard (QRIS) with major Chinese payment ecosystems, including Alipay and UnionPay.
The result is a more seamless payment bridge between two of the region’s largest digital economies, where consumers on both sides can scan QR codes and pay in their own apps and local currencies.
One of the main goals of this initiative is to streamline the travel experience for visitors to China. The country’s transaction landscape is now heavily dominated by domestic mobile payments systems embedded in super apps like WeChat Pay and Alipay, which can create friction for foreign visitors to spend locally.
Solving Cross-Border Payment Frictions
Even without this specific barrier, cross-border payments have long faced challenges such as high transaction fees, settlement delays, and currency conversion costs. Interlinking domestic real-time payment systems is seen as a way to address these issues, enabling near-instant payments at a lower cost.
The China and Indonesia integration could also open new opportunities for small and medium-sized businesses that previously faced difficulties expanding across borders due to operational and infrastructure constraints.
For example, a small merchant in Indonesia would not need to adopt additional software or payment infrastructure to accept payments from Chinese tourists—existing QRIS codes would be sufficient.
Expanding the Yuan’s International Role
Beyond these benefits, one of China’s strategic goals is to increase the international use of the yuan. As part of this effort, China launched the Cross-Border Interbank Payments System (CIPS) as an alternative to the SWIFT network and has worked to expand its reach with countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia.
China has also prioritized development of its central bank digital currency (CBDC), the digital yuan, which has been widely piloted and is reported to have processed trillions of yuan in transactions over the past two years.
These efforts reflect a longer-term ambition to expand the yuan’s global role. While replacing the U.S. dollar as the dominant reserve currency remains a highly difficult task, some economists, including Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff, have noted that the yuan could continue to grow in importance as a global reserve currency over time, particularly alongside broader shifts in global payments and digital finance.
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