Turns out, BOC said my residence permit was expired (it wasn’t) and had to update it in their system. They cut me off from Alipay with no warning. CCB wouldn’t let me transfer more than ¥3000 at a time. Got them to change it to ¥10k. CMB just plain made a mistake and didn’t want to fix it because admitting error makes them look bad. All fixed, all access restored. No dictionaries, no fucking Google Translate.
Yeah, some places it is clearer than others. I understood it a lot better in Hong Kong surprisingly. Probably because it is a second language to a lot of people there