China’s biggest internet companies have reopened a familiar front in their competition for user attention: the Spring Festival red envelope. This year the prize is not only short-term engagement but control of the “AI traffic super‑entrance” — the hooks that will funnel billions of daily interactions into company‑owned large language models and AI services.
Baidu and Tencent announced rival cash campaigns in late January. Baidu’s Wenxin assistant will let users on the Baidu app share a 500 million yuan pool from January 26 to March 12, with individual rewards as high as 10,000 yuan; Tencent’s Yuanbao app will start a competing promotion on February 1, distributing 1 billion yuan in various red‑envelope formats, some redeemable directly to WeChat. Other players are staking claims around the broadcast peak: ByteDance’s Volcano Engine has become the exclusive AI cloud partner for the state broadcaster’s 2026 Gala, and niche AI apps such as Doubao plan interactive Spring Festival tie‑ins.
The tactic is familiar. Large cash giveaways tied to national festivities have been used before to seed new services and habits: WeChat’s 2015 five‑billion‑yuan red‑envelope campaign turbo‑charged WeChat Pay adoption and set the template for platform growth through social virality. In subsequent years platforms from Alipay to Douyin and Kuaishou used the same calendar moment to lock in users and scale network effects with ten‑and‑twelve‑billion‑yuan promotions.
What has changed is the product at stake. Rather than payments or short videos, the competition now focuses on AI assistants, models and the ecosystems that surround them. The market already shows fragmentation: Quest Mobile’s rankings of AI‑native apps put Doubao, DeepSeek, Yuanbao, Ant’s A Fu and Alibaba’s Qianwen among the leaders. The 2025 launch of the open‑source DeepSeek R1 model has further lowered barriers to entry and intensified the race to capture users and data.
Financial analysts frame these holiday pushes as long‑term infrastructure investments rather than immediate profit drivers. Brokerage notes circulated in China recommend positioning for gains across several AI monetization pathways — from advertising and e‑commerce to music, video and education — and name both platform owners and specialist service providers as likely beneficiaries. The strategic logic is that once a platform secures a "super‑entrance" it can more easily convert floodlight attention into sustained revenue streams.
That strategy carries risks. Massive cash promotions are costly and can be blunt tools if they drive temporary spikes without lasting engagement. There are also regulatory and reputational hazards: tighter privacy rules, scrutiny of algorithmic practices, and public sensitivity about perceived collusion among dominant firms could crimp tactics that rely heavily on user data harvesting and platform bundling. Equally, the march of open models like DeepSeek invites new competitors to appropriate traffic unless incumbents can turn giveaways into sticky product advantages.
For global observers the episode matters because it signals how China’s tech ecosystem intends to build consumer AI scale: by weaponizing social rituals and mass‑market incentives to bootstrap model usage and data accumulation. Whoever wins the Spring Festival battle may not be the ultimate victor, but the promotional blitz will shape which interfaces and datasets become standards for Chinese consumer AI over the next several years.