Pick China Directory: An English Guide to the Apps and Websites China Actually Uses

Pick China Directory (pcdir.com) is an English-language guide to the websites and apps that most people in China actually use. Every entry pairs a Chinese platform with the American product it most closely resembles — WeChat with WhatsApp, Douyin with TikTok, Pinduoduo with Amazon — so a reader who has never used a Chinese service can instantly understand what it does. China\'s internet runs on different rules. The largest US social platforms do not operate in mainland China, and the homegrown services that filled that gap grew up under a separate regulatory framework. The result is a parallel ecosystem: when someone asks what China\'s YouTube or China\'s Amazon is, the answer is never a simple one-to-one mapping. Short video, live streaming, social commerce, mobile payments, super-apps — these categories blur together in ways that Western platforms have only begun to experiment with. Early Chinese platforms copied US models closely. The split came later, and mobile accelerated it. With smartphones everywhere, companies built apps first and treated websites as an afterthought. WeChat\'s mini-programs and Official Accounts let businesses operate inside the chat app instead of on separate sites. Alipay grew from a payment tool into a lifestyle platform handling everything from bill payments to insurance. Pinduoduo turned group buying into a social game, reaching hundreds of millions of users in lower-tier cities that Alibaba and JD.com had underserved. That is what makes a directory useful. PCDir covers more than twenty categories — social media, short video, live streaming, film and TV, music and podcasts, gaming, web novels and anime, AI models and apps, software and digital tools, e-commerce and fintech, news, search, travel and local life, and more. Entries are written from publicly available information and checked against the platforms\' own sites. Where a fact moves quickly — user numbers, app-store availability, ownership changes — it is dated or left out rather than stated without verification. The directory is designed for English-speaking readers who want to understand China\'s digital landscape without reading Chinese. Whether you are a researcher comparing technology ecosystems, a business evaluating market entry, or simply curious about how the other half of the internet works, PCDir gives you a structured way to explore it. Pick China Directory is an independent project run by Webbase, based in China, publishing in English since 2026. Visit pcdir.com to browse the full directory.