But Weibo is still a good place to check out the hottest topics and trends. That’s where I found people to talk to for a column I wrote about the generation that grew up without Google, Facebook or Twitter.

How do people in China use tech differently, compared with people in the United States?

The first thing many visitors to China notice is how mobile the Chinese are. Many Chinese never owned a laptop or a PC, and their first computer was their smartphone. Email never really took off in China. Some big corporations do use it. But people usually resort to WeChat for a quick response.

Because of WeChat’s prevalence, few Chinese carry business cards any more. At many meetings in China, there’s a time when everybody takes out his or her phone and scans the WeChat QR codes of others to become “friends.” I personally like having contacts on WeChat rather than on business cards. Because it’s a social media platform, you learn about your contacts as individuals beyond their business titles.

Many businesspeople I know have two or more WeChat accounts because WeChat allows only 5,000 contacts for one account. A young venture capitalist told me that it had taken him only two years to reach the limit. I don’t know how they manage so many contacts.

Generally, Chinese are more receptive to new things and more tolerant of imperfect products, including mobile apps. Some commentators here say Facebook is almost a Chinese company because of its “move fast and break things” mantra. Many people in China’s internet industry work super-long hours to make sure they beat competitors to roll out new features first.

Why are mobile wallets so popular in China?

When I moved from New York to Beijing in 2008, China was still a cash-based nation. Not many people had credit cards, and it wasn’t easy for small businesses to get approval to install the machines. I used to have to go to the A.T.M.s all the time. Going to the banks, mostly giant state-owned enterprises, was torturously time-consuming.