Usernames and passwords are effectively obsolete in China.
It's a combo of:
* All accounts need to be tied to an identity, generally in the form of a Mainland Chinese phone number which is linked in the backend to a Government ID/Foreign Passport
* Mobile first development where mobile is assumed to be the primary or only way to interact with most services.
* Overwhelming dominance of two 3rd party identity providers (WeChat and Alipay)
* WeChat mini-apps taking over most of the small use cases where authentication is baked in.
The usual flow is that you sign up with a phone number as your username and authenticate with SMS 2FA. Because it's a mobile app, it doesn't have to deal with web bullshit and actually remembers you across sessions spanning months. To reauthenticate on a different device, you just enter your phone number and use the same SMS 2FA to login.
The web flow for a lot of sites is that they require you to open the logged in mobile app and scan a QR code to login on the web.
A few legacy sites like Taobao still support password login but they're by far not the majority.
It's a combo of:
* All accounts need to be tied to an identity, generally in the form of a Mainland Chinese phone number which is linked in the backend to a Government ID/Foreign Passport
* Mobile first development where mobile is assumed to be the primary or only way to interact with most services.
* Overwhelming dominance of two 3rd party identity providers (WeChat and Alipay)
* WeChat mini-apps taking over most of the small use cases where authentication is baked in.
The usual flow is that you sign up with a phone number as your username and authenticate with SMS 2FA. Because it's a mobile app, it doesn't have to deal with web bullshit and actually remembers you across sessions spanning months. To reauthenticate on a different device, you just enter your phone number and use the same SMS 2FA to login.
The web flow for a lot of sites is that they require you to open the logged in mobile app and scan a QR code to login on the web.
A few legacy sites like Taobao still support password login but they're by far not the majority.