Alibaba is turning the Lunar New Year holiday into a high-stakes experiment in AI user growth, committing roughly $431 million to push its Qwen chatbot into the mainstream. The company is betting that a short, intense burst of subsidies and promotions can lock in habits that will matter long after the fireworks fade. In a China market where chatbots are multiplying and loyalty is still fluid, this is less a seasonal marketing splash than an opening salvo in a longer subsidy war.
Alibaba’s $431 million red-envelope gambit
Alibaba Group is preparing one of the most aggressive AI promotion campaigns China has seen, planning to spend 3 billion yuan, or $431 million, to drive adoption of its Qwen AI chatbot during the Lunar New Year period. The company is framing the holiday as a once-a-year chance to reach hundreds of millions of users at the same time, and it is structuring the push around familiar digital rituals such as cash gifts and coupons that have long defined Chinese New Year online. By tying Qwen AI to those traditions, Alibaba is trying to make the chatbot feel less like a futuristic tool and more like a natural extension of everyday mobile life, a strategy that aligns with analysis that platforms securing early mass adoption can anchor a broader artificial intelligence platform strategy.
The company’s plan is highly tactical. Starting in Feb, Alibaba intends to shower users with incentives inside its Qwen AI app, including direct cash rewards, vouchers and other perks that function as acquisition bounties. Reporting on the campaign notes that Alibaba will spend 3 billion yuan, described as $431 m and $431 million, specifically to promote Qwen AI during the Lunar New Year window, underscoring how central the chatbot has become to the group’s consumer-facing AI ambitions. By concentrating that budget into a short period when digital attention is already peaking, Alibaba Group is effectively turning the holiday into a live-fire test of whether Qwen can scale from early adopters to a mass audience that treats it as a default assistant rather than a novelty, a goal that is explicitly tied to the company’s broader Qwen AI strategy.
How Qwen AI is being wired into Lunar New Year habits
Alibaba is not just throwing money at downloads, it is trying to weave Qwen AI into the fabric of how people celebrate the holiday on their phones. The company’s plan, outlined in Feb, is to use the 3 billion yuan budget to fund a mix of cash incentives, coupons and digital red envelopes that reward people for using the chatbot in specific ways. Users who ask Qwen AI to generate greetings, plan family dinners or craft social posts could receive small payouts or discounts, turning each interaction into a micro-transaction that both trains the model and nudges people to return. The structure mirrors the “growth hacking” playbook that once powered China’s mobile payment boom, but this time the target is conversational AI, with Alibaba positioning Qwen as a general-purpose assistant that can handle everything from shopping queries to entertainment recommendations, a push detailed in Key Points about the incentive design.
The timing is deliberate. The campaign is set to start around February 6, just as travel, gifting and online entertainment surge, giving Alibaba a captive audience for its Qwen AI experiments. The company is effectively using the holiday as a stress test for the app’s infrastructure and user experience, betting that if Qwen can handle the crush of Lunar New Year traffic, it will be ready for more routine daily use afterward. By tying rewards to specific behaviors inside the Qwen AI app, Alibaba is also gathering granular data on what people actually want from a chatbot in real life, information that can feed back into product design long after the last red envelope is opened. The scale of the planned $431 m spend, and the focus on Qwen AI as the centerpiece of the Lunar New Year push, underline how central this app has become to Alibaba’s consumer AI roadmap, a focus that is echoed in the company’s broader Lunar New Year campaign narrative.
Tencent’s 2015 playbook and the new chatbot battleground
Alibaba’s strategy is rooted in a hard-learned lesson from a decade ago, when Tencent used digital red envelopes inside WeChat to seize control of China’s mobile payments market. In 2015, Tencent leveraged its messaging app to distribute virtual hongbao, turning the simple act of sending a cash gift into a viral mechanic that forced users to link bank accounts and, in the process, normalized paying and getting paid through WeChat. That campaign is widely seen as the moment when Tencent vaulted ahead of rivals in digital payments, and it looms large over Alibaba’s current AI push. By echoing that approach with Qwen AI, Alibaba is trying to ensure that the next platform shift, from apps to chatbots, does not leave it playing catch-up again, a parallel highlighted in accounts of how Tencent turned red envelopes into a payments weapon.
The difference this time is that the battleground is not payments but AI assistants that can sit on top of everything else people do online. Chinese tech companies are racing to build chatbots that can answer questions, generate content and plug into e-commerce, and the winner is likely to be whichever platform can secure habitual use first. Alibaba’s decision to pour $431 million into a single holiday period signals that it sees Qwen AI as a foundational layer for its future services, not just another app in its portfolio. The company is effectively trying to recreate the WeChat moment for AI, using the cultural gravity of Lunar New Year to pull users into a new behavior pattern where asking a chatbot becomes as natural as sending a message. In that sense, the Qwen campaign is less about short-term user numbers and more about ensuring Alibaba is not outflanked again as China’s digital landscape shifts, a concern that is central to analyses of how the holiday is becoming China’s new AI battleground.
A subsidy war with $432 Million at stake
The sheer size of Alibaba’s commitment is already reshaping expectations for how aggressively Chinese tech giants will subsidize AI adoption. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has pledged 3 billion yuan, described as $432 m, $432 million and $432 M, to fund what some in the industry are calling a Lunar New Year AI Subsidy War, a phrase that captures both the scale and the competitive intent of the campaign. The money will flow into a mix of user rewards and developer incentives, including offers that effectively let people access premium AI features at steep discounts or even “two for the price of one” style bundles. By framing the push as a subsidy war, Alibaba is signaling that it is prepared to sacrifice near-term margins to secure a dominant position in AI services, a stance that is spelled out in detail in reports on the Lunar New Year and the role of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
That level of spending is also a signal to rivals and regulators that AI is now central to how China’s largest platforms see their future. With Alibaba Pledges and similar initiatives, the company is effectively daring competitors to match its $432 Million commitment or risk ceding ground in a market that could define the next decade of consumer technology. The risk is that such a subsidy race could compress margins across the sector and invite scrutiny over whether deep discounts are distorting competition, but from Alibaba’s perspective, the alternative is worse: allowing another company to become the default AI layer for Chinese consumers. By locking in a $432 budget for this single seasonal push, Alibaba is making clear that it views Qwen AI not as an experiment but as a core asset that justifies large, headline-grabbing bets, a view that is reinforced in coverage of how Alibaba is raising the stakes in China’s chatbot war.
