Can Chinese social media generate a WeChat rival?

China is overflowing with big-ticket websites that compete for the eyeballs and wallets of the country's 800 million internet users.

There are platforms specialising in each sector Weibo, China's answer to Twitter, focuses on information delivery video streaming apps like Kuaishou and Douyin bring entertainment Taobao and JD.com are the places to shop.

Transcending them all, however, is Tencent’s WeChat, with its one billion monthly active users. The app can easily direct its enormous internet traffic to any of the above-mentioned platforms, and sucks users in to a vast social network ecosystem, with everything from messaging to payments.

Perhaps the best chance...