On the first hours of February 1, links stamped with Tencent's new "Yuanbao" branding began to inundate WeChat group chats and private timelines. The company launched a promotional campaign that will distribute RMB 1 billion through a mix of cash red envelopes, shareable prizes and a limited batch of 10,000‑yuan reward cards, immediately prompting users to form sharing networks and dedicated "AI red‑envelope" groups to maximise their chances.
The mechanics are engineered for social friction. Users earn chances to open red envelopes by completing themed tasks inside the Yuanbao app, but the total attempts are capped. Each shared red envelope can be opened by up to ten contacts, and those who share receive additional chances, explicitly incentivising users to re‑engage their existing WeChat relationship graphs rather than onboarding strangers through traditional marketing.
The campaign has already produced visible effects. Netizens reported group chats being flooded with links and screenshots as people tried to trigger hidden tasks, coordinate reposts on Moments and trade openings to chase the rare prizes. Tencent says there are 100 of the 10,000‑yuan "Xiaomaka" cards in the prize pool; 16 had been claimed at the time of reporting. Main draws are scheduled in three rounds with cash withdrawal windows after February 4, 10 and 17.
The move is framed internally and publicly as a deliberate marketing strategy. At a late‑January employee meeting, Tencent chairman and CEO Pony Ma said the company would convert marketing budgets into user giveaways to re‑create the social momentum of the 2015 WeChat red‑envelope moment, when mass giveaways helped accelerate WeChat Pay adoption. The difference now is a layered, AI‑inflected product front, Yuanbao, that mixes creative templates, chat interactions and distribution mechanics to embed itself into everyday social behaviour.
For Tencent the goal is both defensive and offensive. The campaign leverages the single most valuable asset in China’s internet ecosystem—WeChat’s dense social graph—to boost usage of a new app and to reassert the firm’s claim on social interaction as artificial intelligence reshapes user interfaces. By turning marketing spend into peer‑to‑peer incentives, Tencent aims to accelerate product discovery and push Yuanbao into the centre of holiday social rituals.
The tactic carries risks. The viral mechanics amplify spam and user fatigue, prompting the spontaneous creation of link‑sharing groups whose only purpose is to harvest platform giveaways. Such engineered sharing could facilitate gaming, bot abuse or creative accounting by third‑party organisers seeking to extract value. In addition, Beijing’s regulators have become attentive to dominant platform behaviour, platform monetisation, and user data flows, raising the prospect of scrutiny if the campaign is seen as anti‑competitive or as undermining consumer protection rules.
Competitors and observers will watch two metrics closely: retention and conversion. A short burst of downloads and group chat noise is easy to buy; converting that activity into sustained use of Yuanbao’s AI features, and then into monetisable behaviour for Tencent, is harder. The campaign is a lesson in how billions of yuan in incentives can be redeployed not simply to buy attention but to reconfigure social habits, yet the long‑term payoff depends on whether Yuanbao can offer a frictionless, genuinely useful AI experience that keeps people inside Tencent’s ecosystem.
Ultimately, the giveaway is an explicit attempt to weaponise a culturally embedded ritual—the Spring Festival red envelope—into a strategic advantage in the emerging AI‑first social layer. It is a reminder that in China, platform battles for AI and social primacy will look as much like marketing engineering as they do like product innovation.