Two of China’s biggest tech groups have turned the Lunar New Year into a battlefield for users and AI: Tencent announced it will distribute RMB1 billion in cash red packets through its Yuanbao app from February 1, and Baidu followed with a RMB500 million giveaway tied to its Wenxin assistant running on the Baidu app from January 26 to March 12. Both promotions cap individual wins at RMB10,000 and are explicitly framed as seasonal campaigns to drive app usage and engagement. Tencent has said the red packets can be withdrawn directly into WeChat, underscoring the company’s aim to tighten its payments-to-platform loop. Baidu also announced that its app will serve as the “chief AI partner” for the 2026 Beijing Radio and Television Spring Festival Gala, signalling a cultural as well as commercial push for its AI products.
At face value the moves are generous consumer marketing: familiar Spring Festival “red envelopes” repackaged as digital incentives. But the campaigns are also tactical product plays. Tencent’s Yuanbao distribution is a short, visible way to steer users into an app ecosystem that can feed into games, social features and payments; Baidu’s Wenxin giveaway explicitly positions its conversational AI as a mass-market utility. The timing — in the midst of the holiday and in the run-up to state media’s flagship gala — amplifies reach, turning seasonal social chatter into trial and usage metrics for nascent AI services.
The context matters. Chinese tech firms have for years used festive red packets and promotions to acquire users cheaply, and the practice has grown with super-app economics: a one-time cash incentive can produce repeated engagement if the product hooks users. Today those incentives come as China’s tech giants aggressively pivot to AI offerings after years of slowing ad growth and tighter regulation. Large-scale cash promotions buy two things at once: attention in a crowded market and the raw usage data critical to refining large-language models and recommendation systems.
There are immediate commercial and strategic benefits. For consumers the giveaways are direct financial transfers and a reason to try AI assistants; for the companies they are measurable funnels for onboarding, retention and payment conversion. Integration with WeChat as a withdraw option is significant because it preserves Tencent’s control over the user payment flow and makes the promotion sticky: money withdrawn into WeChat wallets is likely to be spent inside Tencent’s ecosystem. Baidu’s association with the Spring Gala gives its AI a cultural legitimacy that pure tech advertising cannot buy, especially as AI products seek mainstream trust.
Risks are real. Such campaigns carry a high short-term cash cost and ambiguous long-term returns if the underlying products do not deliver sustained value. Regulators in China have been attentive to promotional behaviour, payment flows and anti-money-laundering rules; aggressive, large-scale giveaways could invite scrutiny if not carefully managed. There is also the danger of diminishing returns: consumers conditioned to expect cash bonuses may be harder to monetize through subscriptions or advertising once the promotion ends.
What to watch next: user-acquisition and retention figures for Yuanbao and Baidu app sessions tied to Wenxin, the conversion of trial users into paying or repeat users, and any regulatory commentary on the scope or mechanics of the giveaways. Equally important is whether competitors respond with similar offers or double down on product differentiation — the campaigns are less an isolated marketing stunt than an opening salvo in the next phase of China’s platform competition over AI and payments.