Beijing Digital Human Timeline

The story of Beijing's digital human industry begins in December 2016, when the Beijing Exhibition Hall Theater hosted the Beijing station of Crypton Future Media's MIKU EXPO 2016 China Tour across two consecutive evenings. Audiences in the capital experienced holographic projection performances of virtual singer Hatsune Miku (初音未来), a pioneering demonstration of live virtual character entertainment at scale, and the Beijing show represented the final MIKU EXPO event staged in mainland China before the series transitioned to a new format the following year.

The city's engagement with virtually embodied AI figures deepened substantially in mid-2018. In July of that year, Microsoft Xiaoice (微软小冰) — at that point still a Microsoft division rather than an independent company — held a major public event in Beijing to unveil its sixth-generation platform. Moving beyond text and voice interaction for the first time, Xiaoice debuted an anime-style 3D visual avatar that performed an original song with choreographed dance on a holographic stage, drawing an audience large enough to require relocation from the standard Microsoft premises to a larger venue. The platform at that time reported approximately 660 million users globally, giving the visual embodiment a reach that extended well beyond a technical demonstration. Beijing hosted further virtual character activity before 2018 closed. In October, a Hatsune Miku "With You 2018" (未来有你·初音未来2018) concert was staged in the capital using holographic projection technology, continuing the virtual singer's direct presence on Beijing stages. The following month, China's leading domestic virtual singer Luo Tianyi (洛天依) — operated by Shanghai Henian (禾念) under the Vsinger brand — appeared via augmented reality at the Beijing National Stadium during NetEase Cloud Music's (网易云音乐) Guofeng Paradise Night (国风极乐夜) event. That same month, two Beijing-headquartered institutions contributed to a landmark moment staged elsewhere: Xinhua News Agency (新华社) and Sogou (搜狗) jointly launched what was described as the world's first AI news anchor at the Fifth World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang. The figure, Xin Xiaohao (新小浩), was modeled after a real Xinhua anchor and used AI speech synthesis, facial synthesis, and lip-sync technology to generate news broadcasts from text input, with an English-language counterpart also presented.

In March 2019, Xinhua and Sogou brought their AI anchor innovation directly into Beijing when they deployed a new figure, Xin Xiaomeng (新小萌), for coverage of the annual Two Sessions parliamentary proceedings opening in the capital. Described as the world's first female AI synthetic news anchor, Xin Xiaomeng represented a visible upgrade from the seated 2018 versions, featuring a full standing posture and enhanced body movement, and she appeared as part of the substantive news operation rather than in a demonstration context.

The pace of development accelerated markedly in 2020. In May of that year, Xinhua and Sogou jointly launched Xin Xiaowei (新小微) in Beijing for coverage of the 2020 Two Sessions, presenting what the organizations described as the world's first 3D AI synthetic news anchor. Modeled after a named Xinhua reporter, the figure featured full 3D rendering with the capacity to walk, could be filmed at 360-degree camera angles, and synthesized voice, expression, and gesture from text input alone — a substantial leap beyond the earlier anchors. Two months later, in July 2020, Microsoft announced that the Xiaoice platform was spinning off as a fully independent company. The new entity, formally registered in Beijing in May of that year and named Beijing Hongmian Xiaoice Technology Co., Ltd. (北京红棉小冰科技有限公司), was chaired by former Microsoft executive vice president Shen Xiangyang, with Li Di serving as CEO, while Microsoft retained an investment stake. In August 2020, Xiaoice held a press event in Beijing to launch its eighth-generation platform, introducing the X Suite product line, which included X Studio for AI-powered virtual singer and host content creation.

September 2020 brought further high-profile activity to Beijing when Baidu (百度) staged its Baidu World 2020 conference in the capital, co-produced with CCTV News. The event debuted Du Xiaoxiao (度晓晓), Baidu's first interactive virtual idol, and also introduced digital avatar versions of CCTV anchor Kang Hui and Baidu CEO Robin Li rendered as twenty-years-younger representations of themselves, described by the company as the first terminal virtual humans with cognitive ability, drawing on Baidu Brain's 550 billion knowledge graph entries. That November, ByteDance (字节跳动), headquartered in Beijing, demonstrated that corporate investment in virtual character entertainment had moved well beyond the news domain when it collaborated with Yuehua Entertainment (乐华娱乐) to debut A-SOUL, a five-member virtual idol group, on the Bilibili platform. ByteDance provided 3D LIVE motion capture technology from its Beijing headquarters, though the group's IP was held through a ByteDance subsidiary based in Hangzhou; A-SOUL nonetheless became Bilibili's top virtual idol group by follower count by 2021.

The year 2021 opened with Beijing hosting a historic moment for domestic virtual character culture. In February, Luo Tianyi became the first virtual singer to appear on the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, performing alongside human hosts using 4K augmented reality technology broadcast from CCTV's Beijing studios. In June 2021, Tsinghua University, the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (北京智源人工智能研究院), Zhipu AI (智谱华章), and Xiaoice jointly launched Hua Zhibing (华智冰) at the 2021 Beijing Zhiyuan Conference in the capital, presenting her as China's first original AI virtual student. Powered by the 1.75-trillion-parameter Wudao 2.0 (悟道2.0) model, Hua Zhibing was formally enrolled in Tsinghua University's Computer Science Department under Professor Tang Jie and demonstrated capabilities spanning poetry, painting, music composition, and scriptwriting. The following month, in July 2021, Xiaoice completed a Series A funding round led by Hillhouse Capital, with additional participation from IDG Capital, GGV Capital, Northern Light Venture Capital, and NetEase, reaching a unicorn valuation for its Beijing-headquartered operation.

October 2021 saw a significant cultural heritage project take shape in Beijing when the Central Academy of Drama (中央戏剧学院) and Beijing Institute of Technology (北京理工大学) jointly launched the Digital Mei Lanfang (数字梅兰芳) master reconstruction project at Mei Lanfang Grand Theatre in the capital, with technical support from Tencent (腾讯). The project set out to create a high-fidelity digital twin of Peking Opera master Mei Lanfang at age twenty-six, representing China's first high-precision Peking Opera digital human. A month later, in November 2021, CCTV News and Baidu Intelligent Cloud (百度智能云) debuted China's first AI sign language news anchor in Beijing, featuring 3D ultra-realistic rendering and a reported 98.5 percent lip-sync accuracy rate; the system was developed specifically to provide around-the-clock sign language interpretation for hearing-impaired viewers during the upcoming Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics.

The year 2022 opened with a market assessment when, in January, Beijing Review published a feature article examining trends in human and virtual coexistence, reporting industry projections that China's virtual human market would reach 270 billion yuan by 2030. February 2022 placed the Winter Olympics at the center of Beijing's digital human story. Luo Tianyi performed at the "Welcome to Beijing" (相约北京) Olympic Culture Festival opening ceremony on February 2, becoming the first Chinese virtual singer to appear on an Olympic stage. Around the same time, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach appeared as a life-sized hologram via Alibaba Cloud's (阿里云) Cloud ME technology during the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, conducting a cross-city virtual torch handoff in a holographic relay demonstration held in the capital. Separately, Xiaoice operated its AI Observer and Coach System, Guan Jun (观君), throughout the duration of the Winter Olympics, providing AI-powered scoring analysis and coaching feedback for China's freestyle skiing aerial team under a National Sports Administration contract dating to 2019; the team won two gold medals and one silver during the Games. In April 2022, Xiaoice produced the promotional song "Reading to the Future" (阅向未来) for the First National Reading Conference opening in Beijing that month, with all creative outputs — lyrics, composition, and vocal performances by AI virtual humans operating within the Xiaoice framework — generated entirely by the AI system.

The most consequential development in Beijing's digital human industry during 2022 was a regulatory and policy one. In August of that year, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology (北京市经济和信息化局) released the "Beijing Action Plan for Promoting Digital Human Industry Innovation and Development (2022–2025)" (《北京市促进数字人产业创新发展行动计划(2022-2025年)》), establishing China's first municipal-level policy framework dedicated to the digital human sector. The plan set an industry scale target of 50 billion yuan by 2025 and committed nearly 900 million US dollars toward building a virtual human technology, business, and governance ecosystem across the city. That September, the 2022 China International Fair for Trade in Services (服贸会) gave the industry a major showcase in Beijing: across its Haidian exhibition area, themed "Play the Metaverse, Feel Internet 3.0," digital humans appeared across six zones covering culture, tourism, education, and urban services, with roles ranging from customer service and tourism guidance to sign language interpretation, demonstrating applications extending well beyond virtual news anchoring. Around the same period, Economic Reference Daily (经济参考报) reported that digital human employees had been deployed at multiple Beijing banking outlets, including the industrial and Commercial Bank of China's (工商银行) figure Xiao Tian (小天) at its Qingfeng Road branch, which had been in operation since August 2021, with additional digital human staff deployed at ICBC's Financial Street Smart Branch. In October 2022, Beijing-based motion capture company Noitom (诺亦腾) reached a strategic cooperation agreement with 3D Power (3D动力), organizer of the National 3D Innovation Design Competition (全国三维数字化创新设计大赛), to jointly host a "Metaverse Digital Human" special track within the competition's Elite League. The year closed with a regulatory landmark: in December 2022, the Cyberspace Administration of China (国家互联网信息办公室), together with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Ministry of Public Security, published China's first regulatory framework governing AI-generated synthetic content, including virtual human faces and voices. The "Provisions on the Administration of Deep Synthesis Internet Information Services" (《互联网信息服务深度合成管理规定》) took effect in January 2023.

January 2023 brought investment and organizational activity to Beijing's digital human sector. Huawei (华为) announced, through its Hubble Technology Venture Capital (哈勃科技创业投资有限公司) subsidiary, an investment in Beijing Juli Dimension Technology (北京聚力维度科技有限公司), a company specializing in computer vision and AI technology for virtual human production, with the business registration change dated December 28, 2022 and the public announcement following in early January 2023. That same month, Entrepreneurial Dark Horse (创业黑马), a Shenzhen-listed company, announced the establishment of subsidiary Beijing Shuzhi Yunke Information Technology (北京数智云科信息科技有限公司) with 2.75 million yuan in registered capital, deepening cooperation with Chaoyang District government on digital economy services through a "Chaoyang Heima Digital Human Accelerator" that had originally been launched in July 2022.

The capital's growing commercial ecosystem for AI-driven digital humans became more visible in April 2023, when Shiyou Technology (世优科技) — a Beijing company founded in 2015 — held a press conference in the city to launch its Shiyou BOTA AI digital human product system. CEO Ji Zhihui (纪智辉) demonstrated the AI-powered digital employee A Yang (阿央) with real-time interaction capabilities, and the company's client roster, which included CCTV, Hunan TV, Beijing TV, Tencent, Bilibili, and JD.com, underscored how widely virtual human services had penetrated major media and platform operators by that point.

July 2023 brought two complementary developments in Beijing. The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology officially launched the Beijing Digital Human Base certification platform (北京市数字人基地存证平台) at the 2023 Global Digital Economy Conference Internet 3.0 Summit in the capital, building the system on Chang'an Chain blockchain technology to provide IP protection, evidence collection, and legal services for digital human enterprises. Separately, the Internet Society of China (中国互联网协会) launched the Digital Human Development Initiative and the China Digital Human Navigation Plan (中国数字人领航计划) at the 22nd China Internet Conference in Beijing around the same time, with nine co-founding organizations including China Search, Xinhua Net, China Unicom Online, and the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, and the first batch of thirty partner organizations formally certified. Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology Director Jiang Guangzhi (姜广智) also appeared as a generative AI-based digital avatar at the closing of the 2023 Global Digital Economy Conference in Beijing in July, a form of institutional self-presentation he would deploy again at the UNCTAD eCommerce Week in December 2023.

By October 2023, Zhipu AI — the Beijing-based company co-founded by Tsinghua University researchers that had participated in the Hua Zhibing launch in 2021 — had accumulated over 2.5 billion yuan in total funding for its GLM series of AI large language models, cementing its position as one of China's leading foundation-model developers. That same month, China Communication Culture and Tourism (Beijing) (中传文旅(北京)文化发展有限公司) unveiled the Nvwa Plan (女娲计划) in Beijing, a multi-year initiative spanning 2023 to 2025 to create one hundred digital human IPs representing Chinese cultural heritage for tourism applications, with identities allocated across top tourism properties, invited digital human creators, and co-creation partnerships with local cultural tourism agencies. In November 2023, MoFa Technology (魔珐科技) CEO Mao Haifeng showcased the company's 3D virtual human technology at the 36Kr WISE 2023 Future Consumption Conference in Beijing. The year ended with Director Jiang's second AI avatar appearance: in December 2023, he delivered a speech through a generative AI-based digital avatar at the UNCTAD eCommerce Week, becoming a notable example of a municipal government official using virtual embodiment for international institutional communication.

The Beijing Digital Human Base — whose certification platform had been established months earlier — became a physical reality in early 2024. In January of that year, the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (北京通用人工智能研究院, BIGAI), founded by Professor Zhu Songchun (朱松纯), publicly exhibited Tong Tong (通通) at Zhongguancun Exhibition Center as part of a scientific achievements exhibition, presenting her as the world's first general artificial intelligence agent with cognitive capabilities equivalent to a three-to-four-year-old child, developed through a value-driven and causal reasoning approach distinct from data-driven model architectures. The following month, in February 2024, the Beijing Digital Human Base was officially inaugurated in Chaoyang District's Donghu Huanlefangsong area. Spanning fifteen thousand square meters, it became China's first dedicated digital human industry base, initially housing forty-nine companies across four shared technology platforms. Data disclosed at the ceremony showed that as of December 2023, Beijing had 2,805 companies engaged in digital human-related business, of which 217 had digital humans as core business, with sector revenue estimated at approximately 5.1 billion yuan.

In April 2024, the Beijing Municipal Education Commission (北京市教育委员会) introduced Zhi Xiao Jing (智小京), the commission's first digital virtual instructor, to host the kickoff of a citywide training program for basic education administrators and teachers covering AI-enhanced pedagogy, including teaching design, homework design, exam question creation, and comprehensive practice design. The digital instructor served as the public-facing interface for a municipal educational initiative of considerable scale.

July 2024 brought another high-level industry gathering to Beijing, when the Internet Society of China held the AIGC Era Digital Human Industry Development Seminar in the capital, convening thirty industry representatives from organizations including Beijing Mobile, Lenovo (联想), Ant Group (蚂蚁集团), Baidu, Baichuan Intelligence (百川智能), Xiaoice, and Zhipu AI for discussion of AIGC-era digital human applications, industry standards, and security frameworks. Two months later, in September 2024, the Internet Society of China staged the First China Digital Human Conference at the Zhongguancun National Innovation Demonstration Zone Exhibition and Trading Center in Beijing across two days, themed "Digital Human Applications and the Future." The conference included forums on AIGC technology innovation, AI application promotion, media innovation, and education technology; released technical requirements for large model-based digital human systems; awarded exemplary case certificates to twenty units; and announced that the China Digital Human Navigation Plan had grown to over one hundred partner organizations since its launch in July 2023. October 2024 saw Beijing Dance Academy (北京舞蹈学院) unveil its first digital dance students, Xiao Bei (小北) and Xiao Wu (小舞), during the academy's seventieth anniversary celebrations, in a project contracted to Blue Universe Digital Technology (蓝色宇宙数字科技有限公司) for approximately 1.639 million yuan and positioned within the academy's newly established China Dance Digital Education Center.

In January 2025, the Beijing Digital Human Base served as the venue for the Internet 3.0 domain competition of the Eighth Zhongguancun International Advanced Technology Competition (中关村国际前沿科技大赛), bringing together digital human startups and technology demonstrations at the country's first dedicated industry facility. Later that same month, the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission and Zhongguancun Management Committee (北京市科委/中关村管委会), together with four partner departments, released the "Beijing Action Plan for Technology-Enabled Cultural Innovation (2025–2027)" (《北京市科技赋能文化领域创新发展行动计划(2025-2027年)》), outlining a strategic push to integrate digital humans into cultural and entertainment experiences across the municipality.

March 2025 brought two notable developments to the capital. Changping District Government (昌平区) launched the AI Consulting Digital Human (AI咨询通数字人) in its public service hall, designating it as Beijing's first district-level political service AI digital human; the system combined DeepSeek large model technology with industry-specific and business-process models to provide automated civic consultation. Also in March 2025, BIGAI presented TongTong 2.0 at the 2025 Zhongguancun Forum Annual Meeting's General Artificial Intelligence Forum, demonstrating cognitive capabilities upgraded to the equivalent of a five-to-six-year-old child, up from the three-to-four-year-old level exhibited in January 2024; at the same event, the TongZhi Brain Alliance (通智大脑联盟) was simultaneously established with robotics partners including Leju and Unitree. Two months later, in May 2025, the Summer Palace (颐和园) introduced AI digital human Xiao Yi (小颐) at its East Gate visitor service center, designated as Beijing's first municipal park AI digital human. The 3D interactive kiosk used speech recognition, lip recognition, and voice synthesis technology for bilingual Chinese-English interaction, drew on over one hundred thousand words of professional content and two thousand precise question-and-answer pairs, generated personalized itineraries in under one second, and handled an annual consultation volume exceeding 340,000 inquiries.

The decade-long arc of Beijing's digital human industry reached a symbolic administrative milestone in January 2026, when the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area (北京经开区) granted China's first official virtual idol identity certificate to Yuri (尤栗), a virtual pop singer created by Hanqing Studio (汗青工作室) using generative AI. Yuri's brand AI.TALK had accumulated over 1.1 million followers, and her debut music video had surpassed 12 million views. Designated as Beijing E-Town's first digital resident, Yuri was assigned roles in public safety promotion and environmental advocacy as part of the area's OPC Community initiative — a moment that encapsulated how far the capital had traveled in a decade, from the holographic concert stages of 2016 to a formal administrative recognition of AI-generated virtual beings as named participants in Beijing's civic life.

[Mar 2026]