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Although WeChat’s primary user base is in China, an estimated 100 to 200 million people outside the country use the messaging service. Among them are millions of members of the Chinese diaspora in countries like Canada, Australia and the United States, but there is also broader expansion in much of Asia. Malaysia is reportedly home to 20 million WeChat users, out of a population of 31 million. In Thailand, an estimated 17 percent of the population has a WeChat account. In Mongolia, WeChat was the second most downloaded application in 2017. Merchants in Myanmar’s Shan state along the border with China have taken up the app and the number of retailers in Japan that accept WePay (mostly when serving Chinese tourists) increased 35-fold last year. Tencent recently purchased a $150 million stake in the news aggregator Reddit and is eyeing an entrance into the online video market in Taiwan, according to Taiwanese officials.Edit : Also, remarkably, there's this : ...once an account is registered with a Chinese phone number, it remains subject to Chinese controls even outside the country.
And the article gives some examples about it and how the control is not limited to within China itself.