China is moving rapidly away from relying on foreign communications technologies toward developing its own innovative formats, and new homegrown applications are flourishing. One of the most successful is the cutting-edge mobile application for smart phones, WeChat. Between the beginning of 2013 and the middle of 2015, the number of WeChat users in China more than tripled, while the number of microblog users shrunk by one-third. By March 2018, WeChat had passed the 1 billion active monthly user mark. WeChat’s popular features will continue to attract Chinese users, but at the expense of isolating them within small virtual communities and keeping them detached from global communications media.