On the first day of Alibaba’s Qianwen “30 billion yuan Spring Festival free orders” promotion, an apparently simple gimmick — “Qianwen, order me a milk tea for 0.01 yuan” — exposed fault lines in China’s AI marketing sprint. Users flocked to the app, reported system crashes, long waits, wrong deliveries and overwhelmed stores and couriers, while social feeds filled with screenshots of chaotic orders and brands queuing to advertise under Qianwen’s posts. Within nine hours the campaign reportedly generated more than 10 million orders and propelled Qianwen to the top of the App Store free download list, briefly eclipsing Tencent’s Yuanbao and other headline-grabbing promotions.
The promotional arms race is broad and expensive. Baidu’s Wenxin kicked off with a 500 million yuan red envelope program, Tencent’s Yuanbao splashed 10 billion on red packets and aggressive social fission mechanics, and Alibaba’s Qianwen countered with a 30 billion coupon-and-subsidy package. AppGrowing estimates that Yuanbao alone spent roughly 150 billion yuan on marketing in 2025 — a scale that dwarfs the entire year’s visible outlay of many competitors and highlights divergent strategies among the big players.
Those divergent strategies matter because the user prize has changed. Early 2024–25 brought rapid adoption of consumer AI apps; by 2026 the market has shifted from expansion to fierce retention and conversion. High-value cash giveaways and viral referral mechanics still generate downloads and headlines, but they have limited power to turn one-off bargain-hunters into habitual users. Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu are now competing to convert festival-driven spikes into daily engagement that justifies their ad and product investments.
WeChat, the critical battleground for social distribution, has pushed back. The platform moved quickly to curb what it calls “inducement risk,” banning both Yuanbao-style group-fission links and Qianwen’s share-and-redeem mechanics inside its ecosystem after viral “group bombing” incidents. That intervention bluntly illustrates a structural constraint: a dominant social platform can limit how effectively rivals can weaponize peer-to-peer sharing to scale growth.
The campaigns also revealed product-level weaknesses. In Qianwen’s case, the assistant still behaves largely as an on-platform shopping guide rather than a tightly integrated commerce agent: it can suggest purchases but can’t reliably orchestrate cross-app payment, inventory checks or rapid logistics without deeper ecosystem hooks. Users noted cumbersome flows and instances where manual ordering outperformed the AI-guided path, undercutting the promised convenience of “one-sentence” ordering.
Not all winners are those who burn the most cash. Doubao, a lower-key entrant backed by ByteDance, has pursued a markedly different path: low-cost, UGC-driven growth on short-video platforms, repeated lightweight product iterations and a focus on emotional, humanlike interactions. Doubao’s playbook — build a social content loop, encourage creators and iterate rapidly — has driven materially higher monthly actives and stronger retention at a far lower marketing cost than some rivals.
The operational consequences of the subsidies tournament are tangible. Local merchants and delivery couriers were overwhelmed and customers received incorrect or delayed orders, raising questions about whether platform subsidies are sustainable without commensurate investment in logistics and local partner capacity. That mismatch between marketing spend and on-the-ground fulfilment risks reputational damage that discounting alone cannot repair.
For international observers, the episode is a case study in the limits of stimulus-driven growth for consumer AI. China’s tech giants are demonstrating that massive subsidies can buy attention and headlines, but they cannot immediately buy the sticky user habits that determine long-term value. The coming months will test whether funds funnelled into vouchers and red packets can be parlayed into deeper product integration, cross-service payment flows and daily utility.
The broader industry implication is structural. China’s AI app market has shifted from an expansion phase to a zero-sum contest for active users; success will accrue to services that embed AI into everyday behaviors — personal finance, commuting, shopping and social interactions — and to those that resolve the messy engineering needed to glue models to inventories, payments and real-time logistics. Whoever does that well will own not just a headline, but a platform-level gateway to millions of habitual users.
Meanwhile, regulators and platform gatekeepers remain pivotal. WeChat’s clampdown on viral mechanics shows that distribution channels can neutralize even well-funded marketing designs. Firms that depend on social fission for growth may need new, compliance-friendly routes to scale, or face the prospect of spending large sums for fleeting gains.
The Spring Festival skirmish therefore marks a transition: from spectacle to substance. The giveaway era gets companies instant visibility, but the ultimate test is whether these AI assistants can evolve into indispensable, integrated services that improve daily life and command users’ time without relying on endless subsidies.