If your company is in Russia, China or the US, and the government in that country has any interest in the data you collect, you will have to give it away. In Russia and China they just do it, in the US it's a matter of "National Security". I'm not sure why this would surprise anyone - maybe because most of us are on the side of the latter.
I'm in a relocation in China for the past 2.5 years, and it was obvious this is coming since they released end to end encryption back in 2016.
China is not a democracy, surveillance is one of the most important issues in China (see link), and allowing their citizen to talk outside of their reach of surveillance is unacceptable.
Wechat - the so-called Whatsapp + Facebook all-in-one app (Wechat can be the only app on your phone) is a 1) fantastic app and extremely innovative, Many things to learn from it in the west. 2) perfectly demonstrates how the Chinese government pushes for centralization, for the sake of government supervision.
(have all the users in just one place, talking to their friends, ordering food, flights, trains, paying for everything, ordering things online etc.
IMO Kik messenger is a classic case of a company that had 5 funding rounds, never really took off, and are now jumping on the blockchain bandwagon with a 'feasible' idea for a coin use case just to please their investors. I've been following them for a while. They claim to have a lot of users but not once they released DAU or MAU, only "Users" which they claimed to be 500mm (registration with no verification). + They've had a range of different scandals (child pornography, pedophila, just google it) which they are not planning to solve.
You don't actually need to have a bank account in order to use Wechat payment. Someone can just send you money over wechat and it would still work, just a 1000rmb/month limitation. If you're a tourist it should be fine.
Living in China for the past two years -
Important thing to remember - in China and in most of South-East Asia the tech boom came at a later stage when smartphones were already prominent. Android + Chinese manufacturing made it possible to produce cheap smart phones. The result is that these countries have completely skipped the laptop phase and went straight to smartphones, most of the population doesn't even know what a laptop is.
What the west calls eCommerce (amazon, Ebay etc) is called mCommerce in Asia (Taobao app, JD.com App etc). Asian consumers find it easier and more natural to shop using smartphones rather than laptops like Western consumers.
Oh and yes, When I leave the house I don't even take my wallet, everything is paid using wechat.