Fascism has it's good points!
Seriously though, WePay isn't innovation - we could have that right now in the West. Citibank could make an app that would allow peer-to-peer money transfers with QR codes the way WePay works. It would be smooth and easy. You'd just have to have a Citibank account. After a while, everyone could get an account with Citibank and it would be great! The other banks wouldn't like it, but whatevs.
Then Citibank would realize they were the gatekeepers of the digital peer-to-peer economy and they would seek rent. Transaction fees would increase. Monthly account fees would sky-rocket. Eventually, the govt would realize this was a drain on commerce and would seek to regulate and maybe even break up Citibank, but in a rule-OF-law nation, the govt would actually have to go to court and Citibank would get to argue their case against govt intervention. It could take YEARS! Look at how long it took the govt to prosecute IBM back in the day!
Meanwhile, if Tencent gets too greedy with WePay, the govt just makes their CEO disappear. In fact, in a fascist state, having monopolies is an ADVANTAGE! It's one throat to throttle - if there's a problem, there's just one CEO you need to kill.
WePay isn't innovative - it's just something that works particularly well in a fascist state. Getting the whole banking industry to agree to communicate and cooperate on a common mobile payment system is a bit more difficult...
Update - s/rule-by-law/rule-OF-law/
The "feature" of WeChat is that it can be used for almost anything. It is a cash successor more so that a card alternative. Anyone can print, display or scan a QR code. Doesn't matter if it is a store, a friend or a random person. Doesn't matter if it is in the physical world, on a website or in a chat. And it is easy to do. And almost everyone uses it.
Contactless cards only matches WeChat in the same way something like Apple Pay does.
The more secure analogy comparable in price would be solutions like Square and PayPal Here. Smartphones are ubiquitous.
As the other reply says too, any shop can set this up easily. I challenge you to take contactless payments in your home country, it's nothing like simply getting a qr payment and involves merchant banking.
I've seen tiny remote rural village stores that would never even imagine having a visa PoS terminal with big wechat payment signs out front.
And they remix the ideas of western tech and often improve upon it. WeChat is orders of magnitude more convenient than what the US has to offer. Everything is centralized and integrated, what Google tries to do, but adopted everywhere. Book anything, pay for anything, tap phone to pay for anything. I don't expect many places to take phone payments. In China, most everywhere can take phone payments.
Their social networks also seem to do great at getting things naturally viral. I posted a random video without any boosting and it got like 1.5K views in a day.