Nice list :)

A few things to add about some of the items:

- Baidu Wangpan's sharing model is more like the file locker sites of the early 00s: when you share a file or folder, the recipient gets a 'copy'. It's not like Dropbox where you collaborate and sync changes with each other.

- Baidu wangpan can download torrents server-side.

- Toutiao is by Bytedance, which readers here will know for their popular Tiktok product.

- Readers here may know Tengxun by its international name Tencent

- Zhifubao's English name is Alipay.

- Taobao is more than a peer-to-peer marketplace. I'd guess that over 50% of e-commerce goods purchases in China (by volume, not value) are via Taobao/Tmall. There are many 'mom and pop' stores, but also many with 10s of employees.

- Tingting FM is another good one for audio content. e.g. it has Peppa Pig episodes in Mandarin, and each episode has some commentary at the end explaining the key lessons from the story. (You can watch Peppa Pig in Mandarin on YouTube for free, but there's no commentary at the end.)

Let me add a few more:

Bilibili Manhua (哔哩哔哩漫画): webcomic site adjacent to the Bilibili video platform https://manga.bilibili.com/

Qidian (起点): webnovels https://qidian.com/

Zhanse Nileyuan (战色逆乐园): discussion forum attached to another webnovel site with female-skewing readership, maybe slightly similar to r/twoXchromosomes https://bbs.jjwxc.net/board.php?board=20&page=1

SegmentFault: StackOverflow-like https://segmentfault.com/questions

V2EX: the closest thing to HN, except more like a traditional forum https://v2ex.com/

how does the p2p payment app work? No middle man?

Ah I meant P2P in the "from user to user with no transaction fees charged, doesn't go through Visa/Mastercard/Unionpay" sense (similar to Venmo, except that in China businesses accept it everywhere), not in the "fully decentralized and doesn't need a server" sense. For Zhifubao the servers are run by Ant Financial (it's a spin-off company of Alibaba), for WeChat the servers are run by Tencent. You can deposit/withdraw money to your bank account.

I'm assuming you're probably more interested in the new digital RMB wallet technology which supposedly works even if your phone doesn't have internet access, but I'm not familiar with how that is implemented (I'm guessing it uses blockchain and broadcasts the transactions later when you connect to the internet). There's some info about it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi#Digital_Renminbi

Zhifubao is better known as Alipay outside of China.

Tiktok, the app, is made by the same Chinese firm that makes Douyin, but it is maintained separately and not available in China. The content is entirely separate.

It is not uncommon that Chinese firms have separate, parallel versions of their applications within / outside China.

So it is accurate to say that Douyin is a Chinese (meaning, available in China; not meaning made by a Chinese company) version of Tiktok.

Thanks for clarifying