GUANGZHOU, China — Barriers between China’s tech rivals like AlibabaAnd TencentChinese companies are rushing to adhere to Beijing’s clampdown on alleged Monopolistic Practices.

In China’s last ten years, mobile payments have surpassed cash and credit cards to be the most popular form of consumer payment. Tencent’s WeChat Pay and Alipay — run by Alibaba affiliate Ant Group — are the most popular, covering the majority of the mainland population of 1.4 billion people.

However, fierce competition meant that Alipay was the only way to pay for products purchased on Alibaba’s Taobao mobile e-commerce platform. But that is changing.

We also believe that payment will be available in the future in every place. Users can choose their preferred method of payment. It is also an act of fairness,” Lei Moofeng, Vice-General Manager at WeChat Pay said Wednesday, during CNBC’s annual East Tech West conference in the Nansha district of Guangzhou, China. This is according to the CNBC translation of his remarks in Mandarin.

However, he didn’t give a time frame or respond to directly to the question about WeChat Pay being in negotiations with Alibaba.

Lei, however, pointed out that WeChat announcedUsers could share links to external websites, such as Taobao, Monday

Previously, users of WeChat — the ubiquitous social messaging app in mainland China — could not directly share a link to a product on Alibaba-run Taobao. Users could instead copy and paste from the Taobao product pages into WeChat a collection of keyboard symbols. The user would be able to copy and paste the exact same set of symbols into Taobao, which will take them to the product page.

A test by CNBC on Thursday found that the share function on Taobao now allowed users to send a product page link to WeChat — along with some promotional text.

WeChat will continue to explore new ways for users to interact with the app, beyond messaging and mobile payment. Lei said that the functions included automatically deducting shipping charges once the courier retrieves a shipment package. This eliminates the need to pay manually.

Many Alibaba apps have been downloaded, such as the food delivery app Ele.me, and the video platform Youku. started allowing WeChat Pay. Tmall and Taobao were still available only via Alipay as of Thursday morning local.

JD.com’sAs of Thursday morning, the ecommerce app had WeChat Pay support, which is a Chinese version of Apple Pay. Tencent has a nearly 17% stake in JD, according to S&P Capital IQ.

China’s small business owners have complained that they cannot use the same platform as an e-commerce website or food delivery service from the same company. The businesses may not be able to operate simultaneously on different platforms even if it was possible. face higher fees.

The Chinese government attempted to curb monopolistic practices of internet companies by clamping down on them since late 2013. record $2.8 billion fine on Alibaba for such behavior.