Alibaba, Tencent spark battle for virtual red envelopes during ‘China’s Super Bowl’

Hundreds of millions of Chinese, especially the younger generation, were all busy with just one thing on Lunar New Year’s eve: trying to grab as many virtual “red envelopes” online as they could, which totalled an estimated billions of yuan.

Smartphones became the battlefield and the major arenas were the online systems backed by internet giants Alibaba and Tencent. Alibaba, China’s top e-commerce firm, runs Alipay, known as the “PayPal of China”, while Tencent, the country’s top portal, operates WeChat, a real-time messaging app like the US’s WhatsApp.

But the fast-growing practice of grabbing virtual red envelopes – it is Chinese tradition to give red or gold packets of money, especially to children, around the Lunar New Year holidays – has become a threat to the influence and reach of the CCTV New Year’s Gala, a festive, glittering annual live broadcast run by the state broadcaster since 1984.

It is such a mainstay over the Lunar New Year that the show has been dubbed “China’s Super Bowl”, after the most-watched event in America. Last year, the Gala attracted about 750 million viewers, about seven times that of the Super Bowl, which probably makes it the world’s biggest TV spectacle.

However this year, many people turned away from their TV sets and focused more on their smartphone screens, paying less attention to the CCTV show as they joined the battle for virtual “lai see”.

Ironically, the red-envelope game was part of the programme. Every hour, starting from 8pm until midnight, there were opportunities for TV viewers to use their smartphones to grab red envelopes once the game was announced during the live broadcast.