Chinese artificial-intelligence titans are gearing up for an intense marketing blitz in the run-up to the Lunar New Year, dishing out digital “red envelopes” filled with cash and releasing cutting-edge model updates in an effort to capture hearts and minds during the most important holiday on the Chinese calendar.
It’s a Chinese tradition to give each other red envelopes containing small sums of cash to celebrate the New Year. The practice has thrived in the digital world through social media and payment apps.
This year, the red envelopes come from chatbots. AlibabaAlibabaAlibaba, founded in 1999 by Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma, is one of the most prominent global e-commerce companies that operates platforms like AliExpress, Taobao, and Tmall.READ MORE is committed to spending 3 billion yuan ($431 million) through its chatbot app, Qwen, which recently added agentic features that allow users to order food delivery and book train tickets by telling the chatbot what they need.
TencentTencentBest known for its super-app WeChat, Tencent is a Chinese technology conglomerate and a major player in the video gaming industry.READ MORE’s chatbot, Yuanbao, pledged 1 billion yuan ($140 million) and kicked off a social marketing campaign often used in e-commerce: Users can win red envelopes by sharing links to Yuanbao with their personal contacts.
The strategy seems to be working: Yuanbao ascended to the top of Apple’s App Store in China after the campaign started on Sunday, from 9th place a month ago. On social media, users have shared screenshots, showing they have won sums ranging from 0.01 yuan (less than 1 cent) to about 55 yuan ($8).
ByteDanceByteDanceByteDance is a Chinese internet technology company that owns TikTok and Douyin, a Chinese version of TikTok with a successful e-commerce arm.READ MORE’s Doubao is currently the most popular chatbot in China. It is set to make a sponsored appearance at the state broadcaster’s New Year’s Eve Gala, China’s most-watched TV program, which has several times more viewers than the Super Bowl.
“The Lunar New Year is China’s most important holiday with the opportunity for peak digital engagement,” Shenghao Bai, an analyst at Counterpoint Research, told Rest of World. Consumers are more receptive to marketing efforts as work and study are paused, Bai said, and family gatherings also accelerate the spread of new trends, making culturally rooted promotions especially effective.
This year’s holiday begins on February 15 and runs for nine days.
Successful Lunar New Year marketing has a proven track record of virality. In 2014, Tencent’s messaging app WeChat onboarded millions of users to its payment feature by allowing them to share digitized red envelopes, turning itself into a formidable competitor to the then-mobile payment monopoly of Alipay.
Last year, DeepSeek shocked the world by launching two top-performing AI models trained with a fraction of the compute used by leading Western models. During the holiday, hundreds of millions of Chinese users flocked to DeepSeek, seen as a symbol of national pride.
ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are unavailable in China, leaving the consumer AI market to domestic players. Beyond advancing model capabilities, AI labs in China are increasingly racing to design features that can turn their chatbots from productivity tools to everyday companions.
For older people and people who work in farmland, they may have heard a lot about AI, but there just isn’t a strong enough incentive for them to try.”
As most Chinese users do not have the habit of paying for subscriptions, chatbots have resorted to first acquiring mass user numbers, with the hope of potentially generating revenue through advertising, e-commerce, and other services. (Meanwhile, in a twist, WeChat blocked its own AI chatbot’s marketing campaign on Wednesday after aggressive cash-sharing links triggered spam complaints and “ecosystem disruption.” Yuanbao said it was working to improve the sharing mechanism.)
Big Tech’s extravagant marketing campaigns can help elevate AI literacy among the non-tech population, which could benefit the entire AI ecosystem, Tiezhen Wang, head of APAC ecosystem at AI developer platform Hugging Face, told Rest of World.
“For older people and people who work in farmland, they may have heard a lot about AI, but there just isn’t a strong enough incentive for them to try,” Wang said. “As more people are embracing AI, they will not just use the one who gave them red envelopes, they will try other apps as well.”
The tech community, in the meantime, is celebrating the Lunar New Year with a series of model releases. The success of DeepSeek a year ago has inspired the Chinese AI industry to work on open-source models and vie for international recognition, despite limited access to high-end chips.
Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and StepFun have released upgraded models in recent weeks. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.5, equipped with new visual understanding and agentic capabilities, has risen to become the fourth most-used model this week on the API access platform OpenRouter.
ByteDance, Zhipu, and Minimax are also expected to release upgrades in the coming weeks.
The wave of model releases is partly prompted by anticipation that DeepSeek will launch its next flagship model, V4, around the Lunar New Year. Companies are eager to get their products out before DeepSeek again dominates the headlines. “Attention is all you need,” Hugging Face’s Wang said. “They are likely thinking that if V4 has been released, no one will be paying attention to my model.”
