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In September 2017, NetDragon Websoft (网龙网络控股有限公司, HKEX: 0777), the Fuzhou-headquartered gaming and education technology company, took an unusual organizational step by officially designating Tang Yu (唐钰) as its artificial intelligence vice president. Tang Yu was not a human hire but a named digital human — a virtual executive built to handle document approvals, project tracking, employee performance evaluations, and training across NetDragon's workforce of more than six thousand employees. The appointment represented one of the earliest deployments of a named digital human in a formal corporate management role anywhere in China, and it established NetDragon as the defining actor in Fujian's nascent digital human ecosystem.
In April 2018, Fuzhou hosted the inaugural Digital China Summit, a national-level exhibition that would anchor the province's digital human development for the following eight years. NetDragon participated as a partner from the first edition, though this inaugural summit concentrated on digital infrastructure, fifth-generation wireless networks, and electronic government services rather than virtual character technology. Sometime in 2018, NetDragon formalized its broader "AI Executive" project by creating two additional virtual team members to work alongside Tang Yu: Tang Sheng (唐胜), designated AI project manager, and Tang Xiaoqing (唐小晴), serving as AI assistant. Together the three virtual employees automated internal approval workflows, performance evaluations, staff rewards and disciplinary actions, and employee training programs, representing a deliberate organizational experiment in delegating management functions to digital agents.
In May 2019, Fuzhou staged the second Digital China Summit, drawing 493 exhibiting companies and deploying full fifth-generation wireless coverage across the venue. NetDragon participated but no specific digital human exhibitions were documented at this edition. By the end of 2019, however, Tang Yu's AI team had demonstrably scaled its activity: the system had processed over 150,000 automated approval forms and carried out 125 automated reward-and-punishment actions within the company. NetDragon received the "Best Organization Innovation Award" at the 2019 China Organization Development Value Awards for the project, marking the first external recognition of a Fujian company's digital human management experiment.
In April 2020, Tang Yu made her first public appearance outside Fujian when NetDragon hosted a virtual recruitment event at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The company billed her as "China's first AI executive," and she appeared alongside NetDragon chairman Liu Dejian to attract AI talent, with the company simultaneously designating 2020 its official "AI Year." The more consequential appearance came in October 2020, when a physical AI robot embodiment of Tang Yu appeared at the third Digital China Summit in Fuzhou — the summit having been delayed from its originally scheduled spring dates because of the COVID-19 pandemic — demonstrating NetDragon's AI capabilities in both corporate management and education to visitors at the provincial capital's summit venue. In November 2020, Tang Yu appeared at the eighth Chinese Ceremony and Music Conference in Hengdian, Zhejiang, where she was designated "Shanggong Liyue Envoy," representing the integration of artificial intelligence and digital human technology with traditional Chinese cultural forms.
In April 2021, the fourth Digital China Summit returned to Fuzhou and brought NetDragon's most elaborate digital human showcase to date. The company stationed a physical humanoid robot dressed in Song Dynasty costume in Hall 6 of the summit venue: AI Li Qingzhao (AI李清照), a robot capable of interacting with visitors, answering questions, expressing emotions, speaking the local Fuzhou dialect, and performing facial recognition and classroom management functions, holding forty or more national patents. A separate physical AI robot version of Tang Yu was exhibited at the same summit. Sometime in 2021, NetDragon received the Greater China HR Management Excellence Award for its AI management innovations led by Tang Yu, adding international recognition to the domestic awards already collected for the program.
In April 2022, the Fujian Provincial Development and Reform Commission issued the "Fujian Province Action Plan for Growing the Digital Economy (2022–2025)," which explicitly called on enterprises to develop metaverse spaces for entertainment, office work, exhibitions, tourism, consumption, and social networking, and to accelerate digital twin and digital-native application development. This was the province's first major policy document to reference metaverse and virtual human technologies by name. Also sometime in 2022, the Xiamen municipal government issued its own "Xiamen Metaverse Industry Development Three-Year Action Plan (2022–2024)," setting targets for cultivating enterprises with key virtual human and metaverse technologies.
In July 2022, the fifth Digital China Summit was held in Fuzhou, and NetDragon used the occasion to create a dedicated "Metaverse Zone" in Hall 5. The centerpiece was a hyper-realistic digital twin of the company's chief executive Xiong Li (熊立), described at the summit as its first high-fidelity digital intelligence human; visitors were able to interact with face-swap motion capture technology to generate virtual avatars of themselves and experience a virtual reality "Meta Interview" installation. NetDragon participated for the fifth consecutive year as Special Contribution Brand Partner. At the same July 2022 summit, Meitu (美图, HKEX: 1357), the Xiamen-headquartered imaging and beauty technology company, exhibited its Beauty SaaS products including AI skin analysis and MeituMirror, signaling a pivot from consumer applications toward AI-powered industry solutions adjacent to digital human technology. Also in July 2022, the Xiamen municipal government announced a partnership with China Mobile's Migu to designate Gulangyu Island as a "Metaverse First Island," with plans to digitize 1.88 square kilometers of the UNESCO World Heritage Site into a metaverse virtual space populated by AI non-player character digital islanders, with augmented reality navigation and high-precision three-dimensional replicas of seventy-seven key buildings.
In August 2022, NetDragon published an internal announcement appointing Tang Yu as rotating chief executive officer of Fujian NetDragon Websoft Co., Ltd., making her what the company and subsequent international media described as China's first, and arguably the world's first, AI digital human CEO. The formal international press release followed the next day, generating extensive coverage from CNBC, Euronews, the BBC, China Daily, and numerous other outlets. Chairman Liu Dejian stated that the company believed artificial intelligence was the future of corporate management, and NetDragon stock subsequently outperformed the Hang Seng Index by approximately ten percent following the announcement. By the time of the appointment, Tang Yu's AI team had collectively processed more than 300,000 approval forms, issued approximately 500,000 task reminders, and completed over 1,200 internal rewards-and-punishments decisions.
In March 2023, Tang Yu became the first AI digital human chief executive to present a company's annual financial results when she delivered NetDragon's 2022 highlights — including education revenue growth of 71.2 percent year-on-year — at the company's "Spring Mountain Can Be Seen" media briefing at Digital Education Town in Fuzhou and Changle. In April 2023, the sixth Digital China Summit opened in Fuzhou and NetDragon set up a "Digital Human One-Stop Experience Zone" featuring face-capture digital human driving, a 360-degree immersive light-and-shadow experience, and digital human solutions for education and livestreaming, which became one of the summit's most popular attractions. Also at the sixth summit, the Beijing Province pavilion featured a virtual digital human produced by Volcano Engine (火山引擎), a ByteDance subsidiary, serving as an automated guide to Smart Beijing technologies — one of the first instances of a non-Fujian company deploying a digital human guide within the Fuzhou summit venue.
In June 2023, Meitu announced seven new AI products at its second Image Festival, including DreamAvatar, an AI digital human generation tool capable of creating both realistic and stylized digital humans, and Kaipai (开拍), an AI talking-video production tool combining teleprompter, AI scripting, and AI beauty features. Meitu's chief executive announced the company's strategic shift from lifestyle scenarios to full-scale productivity scenarios. The formal standalone launch of DreamAvatar came in August 2023, when Meitu released the tool with an "AI Actor" feature that transformed real individuals into AI avatars in video clips using three-dimensional human posture estimation and driving algorithms, initially launching with eleven digital human characters across robot, beast-person, and humanoid themes, with an "AI Anchor" feature simultaneously integrated into the Kaipai application and enterprise access available through API and SDK. In October 2023, NetDragon showcased its digital human full-process solution — covering custom three-dimensional creation and motion-and-expression capture — at the twelfth Fujian Province "Top 10 Cultural Enterprises" exhibition in Fuzhou, where visitors could create personalized digital humans from scratch.
In April 2024, several significant digital human developments converged in Fujian within a single month. The Fujian Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism debuted "Xiao Fuduo" (小福多多), the province's official cultural tourism digital human, at the Global Travel Merchants (Fujian) Conference in Quanzhou. Created in partnership with China Mobile Fujian and Migu Xinkong (咪咕新空文化科技(厦门)有限公司), a Xiamen-based Migu subsidiary, Xiao Fuduo performed in a music short drama promoting Fujian's Maritime Silk Road heritage by interacting with historical figures. Also in April 2024, a book launch event in Fuzhou deployed an AI digital human avatar of French sinologist Sonia Bressler to deliver a speech in Mandarin presenting her book about Fujian ceramics — one of the earliest documented instances in the province of a digital human representing a specific named foreign individual in a cultural context. The same month, the Fujian Provincial Government Office issued its "Implementation Plan for Promoting High-Quality Development of Digital Cultural Tourism," which explicitly called for creating digital humans, AI tour guides, stereoscopic projection, and other experiential service scenarios, setting targets for fifth-generation wireless, metaverse, virtual reality, and AI applications in cultural tourism by 2025. Separately in April 2024, at the China Digital Human Industry Forum held in Guangzhou, Tang Yu was awarded "2024 China's Best Virtual Employee," while NetDragon's subsidiary Taverse (天诺) received the "2024 China Best Technology Innovation Award" and a Taverse virtual IP won the "2024 China Best Virtual Streamer Award."
In May 2024, the seventh Digital China Summit took place in Fuzhou and digital humans occupied a more prominent position in the experience area than at any previous edition. The National Data Administration highlighted digital humans in all varieties as a defining trend, and the experience area featured more than a hundred interactive projects including metaverse digital humans alongside virtual reality, augmented reality, holographic displays, and naked-eye three-dimensional screens. Xiao Fuduo performed with five young tourism ambassadors in three shows at the China Mobile exhibition area, presenting digital tourism projects for Fuzhou, Wuyishan, Zhangzhou, Sanming, and Xiamen. A digital human character named Xiaoqi (小柒) attracted visitors on the final day of the exhibition area. Meitu, participating in the summit for its sixth consecutive year, created a custom AI digital human specifically for the seventh summit to enrich on-site interactive experiences in both offline exhibition halls and on Internet of Things hardware screens. Tang Yu also appeared at the seventh summit, where she was again honored as China's Best Virtual Employee.
In June 2024, Meitu held its third Image Festival, unveiling upgraded Kaipai V2 with AI scripting, integrated AI digital human and virtual avatar capabilities absorbed from DreamAvatar, video translation, and one-tap post-production, while also launching MOKI, an AI short film creation tool, and upgrading its MiracleVision platform to version 5. Later the same month, Xiao Fuduo appeared at the "Come to Fujian, Summer Fun" provincial summer tourism promotion in Pingtan Comprehensive Experimental Zone, her third live co-stage appearance. The Fujian Culture and Tourism Department simultaneously announced plans to deploy a service version of the character, to be named Fuduo (福多多), at Fujian Provincial Library and Fujian Provincial Children's Library for interactive self-service and navigation.
In July 2024, Fujian Jianhang Network Technology (福建建航网络科技) co-hosted a launch event in Fuzhou for a "Red AI Digital Human Course" covering digital human modeling, motion capture, expression design, and cultural tourism and e-commerce applications. The event was attended by former Fujian Civil Affairs Director Huang Xuhe, former China Academy of Art Animation Dean Lin Chao, and representatives from Fujian universities and vocational schools, reflecting an emerging effort to build digital human training pipelines within the province's educational institutions.
In October 2024, Fujian Daily's Maritime Silk Road International Communication Center unveiled the "AI to Cyprus" project, in which virtual anchor Haixingxing (海星星) and a newly created Cypriot avatar named Aphrodite appeared together — representing a Fujian-based media organization's first documented deployment of AI virtual characters for international cultural communication purposes.
In November 2024, multiple digital human deployments went live across Fujian within weeks of each other. Mengchao Hepatobiliary Hospital at Fujian Medical University deployed AI digital human "Xiao Mi" (小觅) in its lobby at the Golden Mountain campus in Fuzhou, providing voice-interactive navigation, doctor appointment scheduling, medical insurance queries, and augmented reality wayfinding on both a full-size standing screen and a desk-mounted version, operating around the clock on a large language model with multimodal interaction capabilities. Also in November 2024, the cultural tourism digital human Fuduo appeared at the "Wisdom of Fujian People" community event at Fujian Science and Technology Museum in Fuzhou, engaging children in interactive question-and-answer sessions organized by the Fujian Daily Group. In the same month, NetDragon was named Industry Leader of the Year in the 2024 Metaverse Most Promising Investment Value Watchlist, jointly issued by the China Virtual Reality Technology and Industry Innovation Platform and Caijing New Media. Also in November 2024, Migu Xinkong's Gulangyu Metaverse Community Platform officially launched in Xiamen, completing the project first announced in July 2022; the platform featured high-precision digital replication of Gulangyu Island's 1.88 square kilometers, AI non-player character digital islanders, 260 digital map points, 70 audio guide points, 40 AI-and-augmented-reality guide points, and 20 interactive kiosks deployed across the island.
In December 2024, Xinhuanet launched its "Cultural Tourism Ambassador 2.0" program at a forum in Jinjiang, Quanzhou, deploying AI digital human guides at Fujian museums and heritage sites through signed cooperation agreements with Jinjiang Museum (晋江市博物馆), Wudianshi Traditional Street (五店市传统街区), Wulin Traditional Village (梧林传统村落), and four other scenic locations, enrolling fifteen Jinjiang cultural tourism ambassadors onto the Xinhua Digital Cultural Tourism Platform. In the same month, Fujian Lianzheng Information Technology Co., Ltd. (福建联政信息技术有限公司) filed a China National Intellectual Property Administration patent for a virtual human driving method and device based on multi-modal perception, with a corresponding US patent application published in October 2025. Also in December 2024, Meitu's Kaipai application surpassed one million monthly active users, becoming the largest user base in China's talking-video tools category, with the app having absorbed AI digital human capabilities from the discontinued standalone DreamAvatar product.
In January 2025, Meitu introduced "Yuan Yiyi" (袁一一), described as China's first AI digital human designed for KTV entertainment — a three-dimensional hyper-realistic avatar capable of dancing, singing, and learning new dance moves from video inputs. Also in January 2025, NetDragon's "Development and Industrialization of a Digital Content Engine Platform" project was awarded the Third Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress by the Fujian Provincial Science and Technology Award, recognizing the underlying platform that powers the company's digital human and content creation capabilities.
In March 2025, the Fujian Provincial Government published its "Overall Plan for Accelerating Digital Empowerment of High-Quality Economic and Social Development," calling for forward-looking development of metaverse, connected vehicles, humanoid robots, and other future industry tracks, and referencing AI industry parks established in Fuzhou, Xiamen, and Quanzhou.
In April 2025, the eighth Digital China Summit opened in Fuzhou and delivered the most concentrated cluster of digital human activity the province had yet seen. Fuzhou Radio and Television Station debuted three AI digital anchors — Weng Xiaomeng (翁小猛), Zhu Xiaojun (竹小君), and Guoguo (郭郭) — on its flagship news program "News 110," marking the first verified broadcast-level AI digital anchor deployment in Fujian; each character was modeled on a real anchor and employed speech synthesis, facial modeling, and lip prediction for automated text-to-video news broadcasting. At the eighth summit, Tang Yu appeared wearing a traditional Fuzhou "three knives" headpiece in the role of AI Tourism Recommender, conducting real-time interactive question-and-answer sessions recommending Fujian tourism spots alongside the Fujian culture IP mascot Fubao (福宝), while NetDragon also debuted a Digital Cultural Tourism Demo Zone featuring a virtual reality horse-riding simulator themed around Wuyi Mountain's Nine-Bend scenic route. At the same summit, Fujian Dahuazhixian Technology (达华智显) exhibited a 1.65-meter mobile AI digital human featuring a cloud-brain-plus-edge-side dual-engine architecture, centimeter-level autonomous navigation, multimodal interaction supporting more than twelve languages, and a seventy-two-hour custom digital human training pipeline. CCTV's "News 30 Minutes" specifically highlighted digital humans, AI robots, and robot dogs as the defining experience-area features of the eighth summit. Also in April 2025, the Fuzhou Municipal Medical Insurance Bureau launched a medical insurance AI digital human integrated into the existing Xiao Mi kiosks at Mengchao Hospital, extending the system's coverage to reimbursement queries, medical insurance code usage, and cross-regional treatment. And in April 2025, Xiamen University's School of Marxism deployed an AI digital human modeled on professor Wang Qiqi for ideological and political education courses, where the system conducted question-and-answer sessions and guided student discussion. NetDragon participated in the eighth summit for the eighth consecutive year.
In May 2025, Migu Xinkong was selected as one of the 2025 National Top 30 Growing Cultural Enterprises, recognized for its portfolio of more than 160 patents — seventy-seven percent of which were invention patents — and for operating the Gulangyu Metaverse, the Three Lanes and Seven Alleys digital cultural street, and Cloud Museum projects.
In August 2025, Tang Yu made her debut in holographic form at the 2025 Global Smart Education Conference in Beijing, connected to an AI-generated content dialogue model for real-time conversation with human attendees — the latest evolution of a virtual character who had first appeared as a named vice president eight years earlier in Fuzhou. In September 2025, NetDragon became the only corporate invitee at UNESCO's Digital Learning Week at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, where the company's interactive AI digital human was among the innovations showcased; Vice Chairman Dr. Simon Leung spoke at both the opening ceremony and a ministerial roundtable.
In October 2025, the Haisi Quanzhou Digital Creative Week opened in Quanzhou and featured digital human Hehe (和和), who appeared at the opening ceremony and interacted with hosts in real time — an indication of how extensively digital human deployments had spread geographically within Fujian to reach secondary cultural event venues in the province's second city.
In November 2025, Fujian Province's first police three-dimensional digital human, Rong Xiao'an (榕小安), was deployed at two major commercial-district police stations in Fuzhou: the Dongjiekou station and the Suwanbao station. Dressed in police uniform with visible badge and identification number, Rong Xiao'an used generative large language models and speech recognition to provide police consultation and tourist information on large screens at both locations.
In February 2026, Rong Xiao'an made the transition from physical police station kiosks to citizens' mobile phones when the character officially launched on the "Fuzhou Police" WeChat public account, providing around-the-clock police consultation across more than ten categories covering hundreds of high-frequency services including identity documents, passports, and driver's licenses. A promotional video titled "Hui Jian" introduced both Rong Xiao'an and a newly revealed female counterpart digital officer, Rong Xiao'ning (榕小宁), together — closing the decade-long arc that had begun with a single virtual vice president in a Fuzhou technology company and concluded with two AI police officers serving the citizens of Fujian through their smartphones.
[Mar 2026]