New data from Alipay show 82% of the transactions on its platform in 2017 were made through mobile devices, mostly smart phones.

There were 520 million Alipay users in China, or around 37 percent of the country's population, in 2017. Alibaba's payment unit provides services which allow payments both through computers and through mobile devices.

Across the country, Alipay users in northern province of Shanxi and southwestern province of Guizhou appear to be the most dependent on mobile devices, with mobile payments accounting for 92% of their transactions over the past year.

Over 90% of the transactions made by users in more than 10 different provincial regions were conducted through mobile devices.

Mobile payments, which usually begin by scanning a quick response code, have rapidly become popular in China through the past few years.

The rise of mobile payments has been partly backed by easier access to quick response, or QR codes. More than 40 million small retailers across China, according to Alipay, established their own quick response codes in 2017.

Most of the codes used in the country, however, are not domestically developed. It's estimated Japanese codes accounted for 65% of the market share in China.