On the eve of China’s 2026 Lunar New Year, WeChat will for the first time allow users to post a gold‑coloured “New Year” Moments, a visual perk Tencent is tying directly to Yuanbao, its payments‑and‑promotion app. Tencent’s head of corporate communications, Zhang Jun, publicly demonstrated the feature on Weibo and issued a short how‑to: create a “拜年朋友圈” (New Year greeting Moments) in the Yuanbao app and publish it to trigger the gold effect. Zhang stressed that both Yuanbao and WeChat must be updated to their latest versions for the interaction to work, underscoring the close technical coupling Tencent has engineered between the two products.
Yuanbao sweetened the pot on February 16 by adding 100 extra “small 10k‑yuan cards” — high‑value red‑packet prizes — available in an hourly draw from 16:00 to midnight. The new mechanic also introduces a social incentive: liking someone else’s golden Moment can trigger a chance at a red packet drop. The company’s interface alters posted text and comments so that messages are temporarily displayed as festive stickers, creating a short‑lived, platform‑guided celebratory atmosphere designed to boost contagious sharing and time spent in the app.
This push is part of a much larger Yuanbao Spring Festival campaign that launched at the start of February. Yuanbao is distributing a total of RMB 10 billion in cash red packets, with single prizes capped at RMB 10,000, and required users to update to Yuanbao app version 2.55.0 to reserve benefits. Since the activity began, Yuanbao reports that its AI image‑generation calls have risen thirtyfold, new users engage with the app in eight or more conversational rounds per day on average, and single‑day user time has jumped by over 80 percent — metrics that signal rapid, promotion‑driven engagement.
The feature sits inside a broader holiday arms race between major Chinese tech firms to capture AI and commerce attention. Alibaba’s Qianwen app staged its own campaign, promising RMB 30 billion in free orders and prompting surges that overloaded its servers; the spike revealed the limits of promotional strategies that depend on instantaneous scale. For many AI newcomers and established platforms alike, cash incentives and immersive social features have become the default tools for breaking into users’ everyday behaviour during the most valuable consumer moment of the year.
But Tencent’s manoeuvres also highlight the limits of the open internet inside China’s dominant super‑apps. WeChat has imposed restrictions on direct sharing links for third‑party red‑packet promotions that it considers to be “inducing sharing”; users cannot click a link to join an external promotion and must instead copy and paste an activation code. That policing constrains how external AI apps and commerce platforms convert viral interest into frictionless participation, reinforcing a dynamic where third‑party services remain dependent on WeChat for discovery and retention while being subject to its gatekeeping rules.
The immediate result is predictable: a burst of festive cheer and short‑term engagement gains, but also a clearer demonstration of how platform control shapes the winners in China’s AI and payments markets. Tying an eye‑catching social affordance to a payments app rewards incumbents that can orchestrate product, promotion and social graph access in concert. It also raises open questions about user experience, the sustainability of subsidy‑driven growth, and how regulatory and platform policy will continue to mediate competition among super‑apps and rising AI challengers.