the short story is that a ton of shit in china is done through wechat and the services it connects and to have a proper account you need citizenship because you get a sort of social security number that gets linked to your account

this basically means you can order stuff online, pay at restaurants, order a cab and so forth. the stuff you can do with it is amazing and what you can do without it is diminishing. so without the ability to use this you are hamstrung. you also cannot open a bank account. you cannot buy a home. there is more but thats the basics of it. you can google expats who have lived in china for a time and most of them end up marrying a chinese spouse and then all this gets done under their spouse's name. thing is, even if you marry a chinese spouse, you will still never be granted citizenship. it just becomes easier to stay in china, like get approval