I got a friend who is an engineer at Alipay to link it to my account last year because he was curious if it would work, and it's still working now. I don't think this is replicable at scale, unfortunately; my understanding from him was that it wasn't the type of thing that could be done by a customer service person since it required low-level access that essentially would skip all the verification.

The important caveat that makes it less useful than it sounds is that many things you might want to pay for don't take credit cards at all (domestic or otherwise)—you can't charge your wallet with a UnionPay credit card, only a debit card, for instance; bike deposits are the same deal.