The past two days, I’ve been worn out trying to top up Claude Code.
Claude Code refuses to accept credit cards issued by banks in mainland China—even if the card proudly bears a Visa or Master logo, even if it settles in US dollars.
Before this, I’d been using services like Wildcard to get virtual credit cards for payments. But Wildcard shut down recently for reasons unknown. There are also indirect ways to pay—like using Google Pay, or buying an Apple Gift Card and paying through iOS.
None of these work for Claude Code. It rejects my payment every time. I even recharged my App Store account with $125 (Claude Code Max is $100, and paying through iOS means an extra $24.99 “Apple tax”), only for that $125 to sit there unused. Claude Code just won’t take the money. I have money to spend, but nowhere to spend it.
So I turned to a local provider—Moonshot—to call Claude Code via their API. Their API was slow, so I prepaid 500 RMB to upgrade my account to Tier 3 for faster speed and higher concurrency.
After a single day, I was done with them. I asked their agent to build a feature, but it completely ignored the project’s basic structure, dumping all new files outside the core src/ directory.
I pointed out the problem and stressed that everything must go inside src/.
The agent politely acknowledged its mistake—then promptly deleted everything outside src/.
Damn these providers. To save tokens, they dumbed the AI down to the point of absurdity.
In that moment, I was furious and cursed at it.
Of course, I know it’s just a probability machine. It can “cleverly” finish all sorts of tasks, yet I feel no more affection for it than I would for a stray cat I’ve never met. I was just venting.
When I finished, the AI cobbled together a string of emotionless apologies. The room was stifling; sweat beaded on my forehead.
What was I really venting about?
I closed my laptop and walked to the nearby parcel station to pick up a delivery: a tiny stainless-steel adapter—“4-point to 22mm”—so my faucet could connect to my water filter. A week ago I didn’t even know such a thing existed.
And then it hit me: this feeling of isolation isn’t just about failed payments.
In traditional industry, if two parts don’t match, a few bucks for a standard piece solves it perfectly—precision to the millimeter, globally interchangeable. But in the cutting-edge world of AI, the most basic payment and network connections feel like secret maps drawn by different nations, never meant to align.
When I was a kid, it felt like the world was heading for its best future. People said the world would become a global village. We Are the World played everywhere. Google was accessible in China. Web 2.0 was booming. There were no walls. We surfed the net.
Today, we’re online all the time, yet we no longer say we surf the net. Technology has driven economic concentration, and monopolies have reinforced the walls. Cross-border services hide behind “Not available in your region.” Social networks have become walled gardens. Information fractures across languages and policies. The internet has splintered into isolated islands, no longer one continuous continent.
The world never became a global village.
And the Iron Curtain has already fallen—quietly.