The Chinese Lunar New Year, or Spring Festival, is just around the corner. Sending red envelopes, or lucky money gifts, has long been a tradition during the festival. With the fast expansion of mobile payments, digital red pockets are now trending across the country. And the competition between Chinese internet giants is heating up this year. Jiang Shaoyi has more.

Shake, shake, shake.Trying to grab as many red envelopes as they can. That's what hundreds of millions of Chinese people did on Lunar New Year's Eve three years ago. As part of the Spring Festival Gala show, internet giants like Tencent and Alibaba got in on the tradition that year, sending cell phone users money gifts, which can be obtained by shaking their cellphones. Data shows WeChat users shook their phones 11 billion times that night. At one peak, 13.5 million people were shaking their phones at the same time.

Red envelopes, or hongbao, usually filled with cash, are given during the Spring Festival as a way to send new year's wishes. And this year, Chinese internet giants are back with even bigger prizes.

Taobao.com, the e-commerce arm of the Alibaba Group, is to partner with China Central Television again during the Festival to send out digital hongbaos worth 1 billion yuan. The move aims to promote the site as well as the Group's payment platform Alipay, where users can also grab red packets by attending the tree-planting charity campaign on the app, or scanning the Chinese character Fu, meaning good luck.

Meanwhile, Tencent's social messaging platform QQ will also send out hongbaos worth 200 million yuan. Users can receive a red envelope on "QQ Sports" on New Year's Eve, and they can draw these envelopes based on their daily walking steps during the first three days of the Lunar New Year, a much healthier way to grab good luck than staying at home. Jiang Shaoyi CGTN.