China Digital Digest Weekly: Exploring the Chinese Digital Landscape
- ClickInsights
- 8 hours ago
- 4 min read
Hi folks, we are back with our weekly edition of China’s Digital Digest, wherein we bring you weekly updates on China’s digital space. The report takes a quick glance at China’s complex and rapidly evolving social media landscape by providing updates on the latest happenings across the social media industry. Here are the major highlights of the report.
1. Alibaba’s Qwen App Commits ￥30B to Chinese New Year AI Giveaway Campaign
Alibaba’s Qwen app announced a 30 billion yuan ($4.2 billion) initiative dubbed the “Chinese New Year Treat Plan.
During the holiday period, Qwen will partner with multiple businesses across Alibaba’s ecosystem, including Taobao Flash Shopping, Fliggy, Damai, Freshippo, Tmall Supermarket, and Alipay, to offer users free meals, travel, entertainment, and shopping through a “zero-cost order” mechanism. Alibaba said the campaign represents the largest Chinese New Year promotional investment in the company’s history.
2. Ant Group Launches “AI Credit” Incentive Program
Han Xin, CEO of Ant Group, has announced the launch of a special incentive program called “AI Credit” in an internal company-wide email.
The initiative is designed to provide additional rewards to teams and individuals who make pioneering contributions in artificial intelligence, signaling a further shift in Ant Group’s organizational mechanisms toward its AI-first strategy. Under the AI Credit program, contributors whose AI-related work gains market validation will receive incentives on top of existing performance-based rewards.
3. Ant Group Open-Sources Its First Embodied Intelligence Foundation Model, LingBot-VLA
Ant Group’s embodied intelligence subsidiary Lingbo Technology announced today the full open-sourcing of LingBot-VLA, its embodied AI foundation model.
This marks Ant Group’s first open-source base model for embodied intelligence, aimed at enabling cross-embodiment and cross-task generalization while significantly reducing post-training costs. The open-sourcing of LingBot-VLA represents a key step in Ant Group’s broader technology strategy and ecosystem development in embodied AI.
4. ByteDance and Alibaba May Launch New AI Models in Mid-February
Both ByteDance and Alibaba are preparing to release their next-generation flagship artificial intelligence models around mid-February, shortly before or after the Lunar New Year holiday, according to people familiar with the matter.
ByteDance intends to unveil three Flagship AI Models. Doubao 2.0 targets text generation, Seeddream 5.0 handles images, and Seeddance 2.0 tackles video synthesis. Alibaba counters with Qwen 3.5, a reasoning-oriented large language model. Consequently, developers anticipate API documentation landing during holiday downtime.
5. ByteDance’s “Doubao Phone” Targets Mid-2026 Launch
ByteDance’s Doubao smartphone initiative has entered a reset phase following setbacks faced by its first-generation product in December 2025, when several major mobile apps restricted access to key AI-related functions.
The new model is expected to debut in the second half of Q2 2026, with hardware development continuing in partnership with ZTE Nubia. ByteDance is also pursuing a dual-track partnership strategy with smartphone manufacturers. For major vendors such as OPPO, vivo, and Honor, cooperation is limited to modular offerings, including model API access or standalone products like the Doubao AI Keyboard.
6. Douyin Becomes Exclusive Vertical-Video Streaming Partner for 2026 Spring Festival Gala
Douyin has been named the exclusive vertical-video live-streaming partner for the 2026 CCTV Spring Festival Gala under a new partnership with China Media Group (CMG).
As part of the collaboration, Douyin will roll out a dedicated vertical-screen viewing mode, alongside standard horizontal streams, accessibility-friendly feeds, and behind-the-scenes content. The platform will also deploy multi-camera parallel streaming, enabling viewers to switch between or view multiple live feeds within a single stream for a more flexible viewing experience.
7. Tencent’s Giveaway Campaign for AI Chatbot Yuanbao Blocked by WeChat
Tencent Holdings’ aggressive red-packet blitz to promote its artificial intelligence chatbot Yuanbao has run into a roadblock from the company’s own super app WeChat, dealing a blow to a US$144 million effort to acquire users for the emerging AI app.
WeChat, known as Weixin on the mainland, has announced that it would restrict Yuanbao links from opening directly within WeChat, effective immediately, in response to “user feedback and complaints”, according to a statement. Yuanbao, which aimed to give out 1 billion yuan (US$144 million) in cash in the campaign via digital red packets, encouraged users to share the packets via WeChat to boost their rewards.
8. DeepSeek Steps Up Hiring to Expand into AI Search and Intelligent Agents
DeepSeek is ramping up hiring and increasing investment in AI search and intelligent agent technologies, signaling a broader expansion of its AI product portfolio and intensifying competition with industry leaders such as OpenAI and Alphabet, according to recent job postings.
Multiple recruitment listings released this month show that DeepSeek is seeking specialists to build a multilingual AI-powered search engine. The planned system will feature multimodal capabilities, enabling it to process text, images, and audio simultaneously to meet diverse user information needs. At the same time, DeepSeek’s job postings outline extensive requirements for training data, evaluation systems, and dedicated platforms to support the development of AI agents—autonomous tools capable of operating with minimal human intervention.
9. China Slaps US$3.7 Million Fine on Kuaishou for Live-Streaming Ecommerce Breach
Chinese regulators have slapped a 26 million yuan (US$3.7 million) fine on a unit of Kuaishou Technology, operator of the country’s No 2 short video platform, over multiple violations and misconduct in its live-streaming e-commerce operations, signalling tighter oversight of this market segment.
Chengdu Kuaigou Technology, a unit of Beijing-based Kuaishou, was found to have committed seven breaches including failure to disclose information in accordance with the law, charging unreasonable fees on merchants and inadequate consumer protection. The Kuaishou unit said in a statement that it had accepted the penalty and would comply with regulations.
Wrapping Up
The vast and diverse nature of the Chinese Social Media space makes it incredibly challenging to keep a tab on the rapid developments taking place. However, China’s Digital Digest brings you all the latest updates from there to keep you abreast of all the evolving trends.
To delve deeper into the findings of our latest report, click here.