As the countdown to Lunar New Year's Eve had yet to commence, the digital battlefield's smoke had already permeated every household's living room screen. On the eve of the 2026 Lunar New Year, a costly conflict quietly escalated. The familiar "red envelope war" persisted, but the central protagonists had subtly shifted from mobile payment applications to ambitious AI assistants.
Alibaba's "Qianwen" initiated a "Spring Festival Treat Plan" with a 3-billion-yuan investment, while Tencent's "Yuanbao" lavishly distributed 1 billion yuan in cash red envelopes, and Baidu's "Wenxin" also entered the fray with a 500-million-yuan allocation. ByteDance, however, joined the competition in a more subtle yet profound manner—by becoming the exclusive AI cloud partner for the China Central Television Spring Festival Gala. Rough calculations indicate that the combined marketing resources prepared by these tech giants for the holiday season exceeded 4.5 billion yuan.
This seemingly familiar cash-splashing competition concealed a fundamental transformation at its core. The giants were no longer competing for a mere payment channel in users' digital wallets, nor even for application download statistics. Their true wager was on the right to define the "super gateway" for how people will converse with machines and interact with the world in the next era.
The central narrative of China's internet industry has thus officially transitioned from the traffic involution of the mobile internet era to the strategic positioning and construction of an AI-native ecosystem. The tipping point had arrived for a battle that was both unavoidable and had to be launched precisely at this moment.
Why 2026? Why this particular Spring Festival? Behind the apparent coincidence lay an inevitable convergence of technological curves, market readiness, and competitive dynamics. The primary reason was that the reservoir of user awareness had reached a critical point requiring release. Data showed that China's generative AI user base surpassed 500 million by mid-2025.
This milestone signified AI's transition from a geek's novelty to mainstream conversation, now poised on the threshold of widespread adoption. The Spring Festival, as China's national-level scenario featuring concentrated public attention, extensive intergenerational communication, and strong willingness to experiment with new things, naturally became the optimal "pre-installation" opportunity for market education and habit formation.
Each major company harbored memories of WeChat's 2015 red envelope campaign during the Spring Festival Gala, which famously enabled it to challenge Alipay's dominance, and they aspired to replicate that "mythical" overnight transformation of billions of people's habits.
At a deeper level, the tolerance window for technological competition was rapidly narrowing. Observers noted that the pace of technological revolution accelerates with each generation. During the personal computer era, leaders could enjoy over a decade of advantages; the mobile internet era compressed this window to about four years from the iPhone's launch to market stabilization; and in the AI era, this timeframe might be even shorter.
ByteDance's leader Liang Rubo's designation of Doubao as a "strategic high ground" that must be captured quickly, along with his warning that the "time window" waits for no one, was not an exaggeration. As foundational model capabilities across companies surpassed the "usable" threshold, pure technical parameter comparisons gave way to competition over ecosystem development and real-world implementation speed. In this context, a high-intensity campaign serving both as a "stress test" and "mindshare capture" operation covering hundreds of millions of users became the decisive factor for establishing market leadership.
Although the battlefield was shrouded in smoke, the competitive landscape remained far from solidified. Leading AI applications might show user base disparities, but they hadn't established insurmountable moats comparable to WeChat or Taobao. The market remained in a chaotic adolescent phase where any player could potentially alter the competitive dynamics through precise and powerful flanking attacks.
Tencent's key figure Ma Huateng publicly acknowledged being "slow to act" in the AI domain while identifying it as "the only direction worth investing in," reflecting this sense of imminent crisis and urgency to seize the window of opportunity. Therefore, the high-stakes gamble of the 2026 Spring Festival represented a strategic决战 launched at the right time and place, with the top ten industry rankings for the next decade hanging in the balance.
Interestingly, despite sharing common objectives, the four heavyweight contenders chose markedly different attack strategies, effectively staging a public exhibition of corporate DNA. Alibaba's approach reflected the substantial weight of its "commercial empire." The record-breaking 3-billion-yuan "Treat Plan" focused not merely on cash distribution but on intricately weaving red envelope activities into its vast commercial ecosystem.
The campaign connected virtually all core businesses including Taobao, Fliggy, Freshippo, and Amap, with the slogan directly targeting "endless free dining, entertainment, and shopping." The underlying logic was clear and assertive: they aimed to demonstrate that Qianwen was no longer just a chat companion but a genuine intelligent hub capable of handling tasks. From "ordering takeout with a single command" to "directly booking flights and hotels," Alibaba sought to extend AI's value from information generation to transaction fulfillment, completing the commercial loop from "conversation" to "action."
This represented a classic "industry penetration" strategy, leveraging its substantial B2B infrastructure and commercial ecosystem to build a moat centered on transactions and data in the consumer market. If successful, Alibaba would transform AI into a natural extension of its commercial operating system.
Tencent's choice bore deep imprints of its "social networking supremacy" muscle memory. Yuanbao's 1-billion-yuan red envelope campaign deliberately echoed that decisive night eleven years earlier: red envelopes could be directly transferred to WeChat Change, with dissemination relying entirely on relationship chain virality through WeChat and QQ. The intention was unmistakable—they sought to recreate that "Normandy moment" of overnight disruption through social networks.
Tencent's strength lay in its ability to activate China's largest and most dynamic social network at minimal cost. After the campaign launch, Yuanbao red envelope links spread like wildfire through countless WeChat groups, even prompting some users to joke about "group chats turning into task boards," which precisely demonstrated the strategy's effectiveness. However, Tencent's real challenge wasn't external user acquisition but internal evolution: how to complete the AI transformation of its entire ecosystem without compromising the user experience of WeChat, this "national-level application."
Its internal testing of the "Yuanbao Pai" feature, attempting to create a social subspace where AI and humans coexist within group chats, represented a crucial experiment in "atomizing" AI capabilities and injecting them into social networking genes. ByteDance's tactics demonstrated its "disruptor" radical nature. Instead of engaging in direct competition over cash amounts, it took a divergent approach by securing the more symbolic high ground as "CCTV Spring Festival Gala's Exclusive AI Cloud Partner."
By providing underlying support through Volcano Engine and enabling Doubao's deep involvement in program interactions, this amounted to a nationwide "roadshow" demonstrating technical credibility. But ByteDance's ambitions extended far beyond mere application exposure. Its strategy focused on "capturing every potential entry point," from the "Doubao Phone Assistant" attempting to become an OS-level intelligent agent to rumored AI hardware, ByteDance was building an "omnipresent Doubao" ecosystem.
This "system-level" approach proved particularly dangerous because it attempted to bypass existing app store rules to become the fundamental intermediary between users and the digital world. This inevitably created friction with super-apps like WeChat and Alipay concerning boundaries, privacy, and control. For ByteDance, the Spring Festival Gala served both as a coming-of-age ceremony for its technical capabilities and a crucial opportunity to gain public trust for its broader ecosystem vision.
Baidu's path revealed the unique considerations of an "established search giant." Instead of aggressively promoting a standalone application, it seamlessly integrated the 500-million-yuan red envelope campaign into the Baidu App, which boasts over 700 million monthly active users. Users could naturally activate the Wenxin assistant and participate in activities beside the traditional search box without additional downloads.
This "seamless migration" strategy aimed to smoothly transition the massive user base and habits accumulated during the search era into the AI age, consolidating its "search + AI" position as the primary information acquisition gateway. Simultaneously, by becoming the AI partner for Beijing Television's Spring Festival Gala and introducing numerous AI creative features, Baidu demonstrated its multimodal capabilities in entertainment scenarios to attract broader and younger user demographics.
After the Lunar New Year's Eve bell tolled and the red envelope shower subsided, the genuine competition was just beginning. The essence of this conflict had long transcended shallow traffic battles, entering the deeper waters of ecosystem positioning. The competitive focus was shifting from laboratory "technology horse races" to real-world "scene bayonet combat." The evaluation criteria were no longer cold benchmark scores but rather which platform could activate more services and solve more concrete problems.
Consequently, we witnessed Alibaba integrating its internal commercial landscape, Tencent exploring social scene reconstruction, ByteDance布局 hardware and system foundations, while Baidu connected external services through open protocols. The future battle for AI gateways would inevitably become a comprehensive contest of ecosystem richness, openness, and synergistic efficiency.
The ultimate test that followed was the ancient yet brutal challenge of "user retention." History repeatedly demonstrated that users attracted through subsidies exhibited loyalty as unstable as quicksand. After the Spring Festival狂欢, preventing users from "leaving immediately after claiming rewards" presented a cliff-face obstacle for all players. This explained why each company's activity designs千方百计 induced users to engage in genuine, repeated interactions with AI—they attempted to use the holiday's high-intensity usage period to forcibly "compile" new user behavior patterns.
However, transforming AI from a "holiday novelty" to an "everyday tool" depended on whether it could provide WeChat-level social necessity or Taobao-level consumption convenience, something far beyond what a marketing blitz could guarantee. Ultimately, all喧嚣 would return to commercial fundamentals: sustainability. Currently, mainstream AI applications remained in the "blood transfusion" stage of massive investment. Finding viable business models—whether subscription-based, enterprise services, or transaction commissions—remained the Damocles' sword hanging over the entire industry.
After completing the daring leap of user acquisition through Spring Festival cash burning, converting traffic into long-term value presented the next challenge for tech giants—more complex and profound than holiday marketing. The 2026 Spring Festival AI狂欢 represented a concentrated display of collective anxiety and strategic choices among China's internet giants on the eve of an era transition. Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and Baidu, following trajectories predetermined by their respective genetic blueprints, deployed heavy resources to charge toward the same vague yet enormous future gateway.
The final outcome of this battle wouldn't be revealed amidst the Lantern Festival lights. The true victor might not be the one with the most impressive New Year's Eve statistics, but rather the player who, during the long ordinary days following the holidays, could seamlessly integrate AI technology into the fabric of billions of users' lives like air, and on this foundation, construct a truly prosperous, stable, and vibrant new ecosystem.
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