An Apple Pay launch in China would be a big step forward for NFC-based proximity payments in China. Mobile pay is popular thanks to Alipay’s remote mobile payments, but NFC has not quite caught on. It isn’t that NFC payments are locked out technologically speaking – there are over 4 million POS terminals in China that support UnionPay’s NFC-enabled Quickpass technology. That is about a quarter of all Chinese terminals (as opposed to the 2 percent or so of merchants in the U.S. that are NFC ready today).
There is a slight chance that the launch will be delayed, according to the source, but it seems clear that Apple Pay China is a thing that it is coming soon.