The app you pick on the sending side quietly chooses that channel for you. Once you have picked, moving the money across afterwards costs your family a second charge and a second conversion. So the practical first step is to work out which channel your family actually needs the money in this week, and let the app follow from there.
The four channels, plainly
A Chinese bank account is the right channel when the money is going toward something with a paper trail on the other side: a school fee, a rent, a hospital bill, a loan payment. Almost every mainland bank works: 
ICBC, Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, and the rest. Arrival is next day for most fintech routes, and same day is possible on some. Your recipient gives you their bank card number, the name on the account, and the bank's name. It is the closest thing to how a UK sender thinks money should move.
An Alipay wallet is the right channel when the money is going to be spent in the week rather than saved. Think groceries, phone top-ups, everyday shopping, and small payments to shops and family. Your recipient needs Alipay installed, a Chinese resident ID card on file with Alipay, and an Alipay ID or their mobile phone number to give you. Arrival is usually within minutes.
The catch is that the money arrives as an Alipay balance. To move it into a bank account after the fact, your recipient pays a small percentage fee that Alipay quietly takes. If she was going to spend it in the wallet anyway, no problem. If she was going to move it into her bank card, the channel was the wrong one and she pays for the mismatch.
A WeChat wallet works the same way as Alipay, and for most Chinese families it is the channel they already live in: WeChat is where money moves between friends and family inside China. Arrival is near-instant, and the same catch applies at the other end if the money needs to be moved out of the wallet to a bank card.
A cash pickup at a Western Union or MoneyGram counter is the right channel for a specific case: an older relative without a smartphone, a family member without a bank account they can put a UK-sourced transfer into, or a small town where the counter is the answer and the app is not. The cost is higher than the other three. The upside is that the money arrives in cash, in a hand, and nobody needs to open an app or log into a website. For the family sender helping an elderly parent who does not want to learn a new phone screen, cash pickup is the right channel.
What actually arrives on £300
Numbers dated 2026-10-12, pulled at a UK-morning window and refreshed at fact-check.
The real exchange rate between the pound and the yuan sits in a narrow window just under 9.00 CNY per pound in the week to 2026-10-12, with the live Wise rate at around 8.87 on the day the numbers below were pulled. Pull a current rate from Google or Wise before you send - the number moves a few fen either way through the week - and compare every provider's quote against that live number rather than against a fixed benchmark. A quote within about 1% of today's live rate is close to the real one; anything meaningfully further is a chunk of the money taken quietly in a worse rate.
- Wise: sends at the real rate the market is using, and charges a fee on the screen. On £300 to a Chinese bank card, the fee is small and the amount that arrives is close to £300 times the Google rate. To an Alipay or WeChat wallet the same thing is true, and the money is usually in the wallet within minutes.
- Remitly: the rate quoted in the app is a little below the real one, and the fee shown on the screen is often zero. That "no fee" is where the cost has been moved. On £300 the difference between Remitly's rate and the Google rate is where your family loses the small amount they would keep with Wise.
- Xoom (owned by PayPal): a bank-card route into China, with a rate below the real one and a fee on the screen. The total cost works out close to Remitly's on a UK-to-China send.
- Western Union: the cash-pickup answer. Higher total cost than the fintech apps on £300, but that is the price of a cash channel that does not need a phone on the receiving side.
The precise fee and rate on the day you send will move. What does not move is the shape of the answer: Wise stays close to the real rate on the small-family send, the fintech apps sit just under it, the traditional bank sits well below it.
The bank number
Sending £300 to a Chinese bank account through a UK bank is where money quietly disappears. The rate on the screen is meaningfully worse than the Google rate. There is a fee on top, small at an online-first UK bank (around £5) and larger on the traditional side. Either way, the fee is the small number - the rate is where the money goes. The transfer arrives in three to five working days.
Add those together and a UK bank's total cost on a £300 send is often around £30 to £40 of the money, once the worse rate is priced in. That is the difference between £300 arriving as roughly 2,650 yuan through Wise and £300 arriving as roughly 2,400 yuan through a bank, and the bank screen does not break the gap down for you that way.
For a family-sized transfer to China, a fintech app delivers more of the money than a UK bank does, and the same is true for most other countries a UK family sends to.
The receiver-name rule that will bounce your transfer
There is a rule on the Chinese receiving side that is not on any of the apps' front pages, and that trips a lot of first-time senders. The name you put on the transfer has to match what the receiver's bank or wallet has on file. If it does not match, the transfer bounces after a day or two, and the fee stays kept.
The rules per channel:
- To an Alipay wallet through Wise: the recipient's name goes in Pinyin (Latin letters, not Chinese characters), with a space between the first name and the family name, and it has to match the name on their Chinese resident ID exactly. The nickname the family uses does not work. The English spelling from a passport does not work if it is not the Pinyin their ID uses.
- To a bank card through Wise (routed via UnionPay): the same shape of rule. The recipient's name has to match what the bank has on file. Some banks throw an error if you leave a space between the first and family names. China Construction Bank in particular is fussy this way. If the app rejects the name, try again with no space.
- Through an old-school direct bank transfer on the SWIFT network (this is what a UK bank does): some Chinese banks will require the receiver's name in Chinese characters, exactly as it sits in the bank's records. This is the harder version of the rule, and it is one more reason to send through Wise or Remitly instead.
Ask your relative to send you the exact spelling their bank has on file, in Pinyin, before you make the transfer. It is the boring five-minute step that saves the two-day wait and the kept fee.
The receive-side limit most senders never hear about
Every Chinese citizen has an annual foreign-currency conversion limit for personal use, set at the equivalent of about 50,000 US dollars a year. That is the total amount they can receive from abroad in foreign currency and convert to yuan through their bank in one calendar year.
At £300 a month this rule does not touch you. At the size of a family transfer for a school year in advance, or a deposit on a flat, it can. If your one send crosses a lot of the limit at once, the receiving bank in China may either refuse to accept the yuan conversion or ask your relative to file paperwork with the State Administration of Foreign Exchange to authorise it. The rule was tightened at the start of 2026 for transfers going out of China; the rule for money coming in is older but still enforced.
The practical version, for a family sender: if what you are about to send is meaningfully bigger than a normal month, split it across the calendar year, or check with the receiving bank first whether a single large yuan conversion will clear. This is not tax advice. If the send is unusual (a large sum, a business payment, or one that crosses two tax years) talk to a proper adviser at both ends before you tap send.
What WeChat cannot do
WeChat is one of the four channels for money going into China, but it is only that. If you are a UK sender and you thought about opening WeChat Pay yourself to send from your own wallet, know two things.
A foreign user of WeChat can add a UK card and pay for things while visiting China, but only at merchant checkouts. What a foreign user with only a UK card linked cannot do is send peer-to-peer payments to Chinese friends, receive personal transfers into their WeChat wallet from a Chinese account, top up the wallet with a balance, or move money out of the wallet back to a foreign bank card.
Peer-to-peer inside WeChat needs a verified Chinese bank account linked to the wallet, and a UK visitor does not have one. The wallet works one way for a UK visitor, and only at a merchant checkout. It is not a two-way channel for sending money back and forth.
For the sender staying in the UK, the right shape is still a fintech app that pushes CNY into the recipient's WeChat wallet from your side, without needing you to hold your own wallet. Wise does this now for individuals.
Where the money should go, if you are picking
For most UK-to-China family sends of a few hundred pounds a month, opening Wise is the right answer. It gives you the real exchange rate, shows the fee on the screen, and works into all three of the useful receiving channels (bank card, Alipay, WeChat). Pick the channel your family actually spends the money in and you have avoided the double-conversion trap.
For the older relative without a smartphone, Western Union at a counter is the right channel and the higher cost is what you are paying for the counter, not for the app.
Wise's own transaction limits into China are worth knowing before your first send. The per-transfer cap is 33,000 yuan to a UnionPay bank card, or 50,000 yuan to Alipay or WeChat, with an annual receive limit per recipient that runs into the hundreds of thousands of yuan through either wallet. Those limits do not touch a monthly £300 family send, but they are worth checking if you are sending a deposit-sized sum in one go.
The mistake most first-time senders make on the UK-to-China send is the wrong-channel one: sending to a bank card when the receiver wanted the money in Alipay to pay for the week's groceries. The bank card works, the money arrives, and then your relative pays a small fee to move it into Alipay because that is where she needed it. Ask before you send.
Corrections
- 2026-10-12: An earlier version of this page said the real GBP-CNY exchange rate sat between 9.00 and 9.20 yuan per pound in the week to 2026-10-12, used "anything above 9.00 is close to the real rate" as the quick benchmark, and said £300 arrived as 2,700 yuan through Wise. The live Wise rate on 2026-10-12 is 8.865 yuan per pound, with the 30-day window running 8.85 to 9.08. The rate band has been corrected to the real week-to-date window, the benchmark line has been reworded to tell the reader to compare against today's live rate rather than a fixed number, and the £300 Wise arrival has been corrected to roughly 2,650 yuan.
- 2026-07-13: An earlier version of this page said a foreign user of WeChat could add a UK card and send small payments to Chinese friends. That is wrong. A WeChat wallet with only a foreign card linked can pay merchants at the checkout, but cannot send peer-to-peer transfers, receive personal transfers, or top up. Peer-to-peer inside WeChat needs a verified Chinese bank account linked to the wallet. The same update tightened the UK-bank fee example, which had named an old-school "around £20" figure.
- 2026-07-13: An earlier version of this page named HSBC UK's international transfer fee as £4 online and closer to £9 at a branch. HSBC UK's current published tariff is £5, whether the transfer is arranged online or in a branch. The fee example has been softened to "around £5" and the paragraph steers the reader back to the exchange-rate margin, where almost all of the cost sits.
Related reading
If you also send money to India, the same shape of decision applies on the receiving side: which account (NRE, NRO, resident) the money arrives in decides what is really available to spend. See the India guide. For an account-arrival-rules parallel closer to home, the Nigeria guide and the Ghana guide cover receive-side rules that shape whether the money actually reaches the person.