China 101
Shared power banks
充电宝
Rentable portable batteries docked in kiosks across Chinese cities, rented by scanning a QR code and returnable at any station of the same network.
Chongdianbao means power bank, and in China it usually implies the shared kind: kiosk stations in malls, restaurants, bars, and subway stations stocked with portable batteries you rent by scanning a QR code, use while your phone charges, and drop off at any other station of the same brand.
The service fits a country where phones do everything, payments, transit, tickets, identity, so a dying battery is a genuine emergency. Companies like Energy Monster and Laidian built city-scale networks in the late 2010s, survived skepticism about the business model, and became mundane urban infrastructure with hourly rental fees of a few yuan.
Shared power banks are a neat example of the scan-and-use pattern that defines daily convenience in China: no app install beyond WeChat or Alipay, a small deposit or credit check waived for good payment scores, and physical objects flowing through a QR-coded rental network.