Aside from the infrastructure, which Japan simply transferred to China once the in-kind payment in resources had been made, China also got a whole lot of know-how.

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It also runs online shopping sites for retail consumers in China as well as an online payment service Alipay.

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The Bank of China Group, which already has a secure online payment system for Visa cards, is developing another system for BOC's Great Wall card, as well as Visa and Mastercard.

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The Alibaba Group board discussed at numerous Board meetings over the past three years the impending imposition of new regulatory requirements on the online payment industry, including ownership structures, as they were being developed in China, and was told in a July 2009 board meeting that majority shareholding in Alipay had been transferred into Chinese ownership.

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It has struggled to find the right payment mechanisms for the App Store, and the iPhone is not available officially on the largest operator, China Mobile, which has 700m of the 1.1bn mobile users in the country and a higher proportion of the best ones.

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