Shared power banks

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 WeChatTencent's super app that combines messaging, social feeds, payments, and millions of built-in mini programs, and is effectively the default operating system of daily life in China. or AlipayAnt Group's payment and lifestyle app, originally built as the escrow layer for Taobao, which together with WeChat Pay forms China's mobile payment duopoly., a small deposit or credit check waived for good payment scores, and physical objects flowing through a QR-coded rental network.