Xu Ye is a thoroughly modern metropolitan millennial. She reads science and cultural articles on the way into work, takes and dispatches orders from her boss, lunches on organic produce in an NGO-run community garden and picks up artisanal bread on the way home.

By Chinese standards, she says, her life in Shanghai is “peculiar”. But in one key respect it is utterly typical: like hundreds of millions of her compatriots, she carries out much of her daily life over Weixin, a wildly popular messaging app, on her smartphone.

Her connected lifestyle is largely thanks to Tencent, a $225bn internet company whose social platforms have become a part of the very fabric of Chinese lives. For people like Ms Xu, Tencent’s myriad apps and services offer a way to work, play and pay.