"As I mentioned upthread, a Chinese bank account is very useful for both Alipay and Tencent Pay (Wechat), but not essential because other people can juice you."
As pointed out a number of times here in other threads, you cannot enable QR-code payments without identifying yourself using a Chinese bank account. That is, you do need a Chinese bank account to use wechat and alipay for those payments. (There may be some recent exceptions for HK people, I'm not sure.)