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In March 2018, the foundation of Guangdong's AI-driven virtual media industry was established in Guangzhou when iFlytek (科大讯飞) and Southern Finance Media Group (南方财经全媒体集团) jointly launched a synthetic presenter described at the time as China's first AI virtual host and the nation's first audio-category news virtual anchor. The character, given the name "Zu Jiangtao" (俎江涛) after the real Southern Finance broadcaster whose voice it replicated, went live on the group's Guangzhou stock market radio frequency, delivering stock quotes, hourly news, and financial information through iFlytek's voice synthesis technology. The collaboration placed Guangdong at the origin point of a technology category that would redefine media production and public communication across China over the following decade.
In February 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic created urgent demand for contactless public information delivery in Guangzhou, and Guangzhou Daily (广州日报) responded by deploying an AI virtual anchor named "Xiao Qing" (小晴) to deliver its "Daily Safety Bulletin" (每日安民告示) program to city residents. The anchor was built on iFlytek's multi-language virtual anchor technology, adapted from its national debut during the 2019 Two Sessions to serve localized COVID-19 reporting and public safety messaging during the height of Guangdong's pandemic response. Xiao Qing's deployment illustrated the readiness of Guangdong's media institutions to put embodied synthetic presenters into service in high-stakes public-facing contexts.
In October 2021, Yangcheng Evening News (羊城晚报), one of Guangdong's most prominent newspapers, partnered with NetEase Interactive Entertainment AI Lab (网易互娱人工智能实验室) and iFlytek to launch a pair of synthetic anchors described as Guangdong's first video-type real-person AI synthetic news anchors. Named "Yang Xiaowan" (羊小晚) and "Yang Xiaopai" (羊小派), the pair were created from the likenesses of actual Yangcheng Evening News journalists through facial motion capture, three-dimensional face model reconstruction, and delayed neural rendering, and were designed for around-the-clock deployment across the newspaper's digital platforms to deliver news, weather, and COVID-19 updates in Mandarin, English, Japanese, and Korean. Their debut, timed to coincide with the newspaper's founding anniversary period, marked a significant step forward from Guangdong's earlier audio-only virtual hosts toward fully embodied, video-capable, multilingual synthetic presenters.
In March 2022, Zhuhai Media Group (珠海传媒集团) held a launch ceremony in its 1,200-square-meter studio for an AI sign language broadcasting system deployed on Zhuhai News (珠海新闻), attended by city officials including Zhuhai's standing committee member and propaganda chief. Developed by Hunan-based Changguang Qianbo Technology (长广千博科技), the system used a virtual AI anchor to translate television news content into standardized national sign language through synchronized hand gestures, facial expressions, and lip reading, directly serving Zhuhai's hearing-impaired population. The deployment aligned with national disability welfare directives and national sign language promotion policy, and it represented one of the earliest implementations of an embodied signing virtual presenter by a Guangdong city broadcaster.
In April 2022, Guangzhou Huangpu District and Guangzhou Development District jointly released the "Measures for Promoting Metaverse Innovation Development," colloquially referred to as the "Metaverse 10 Measures" and described at the time as the first metaverse-specific support policy in the Greater Bay Area. The document explicitly named digital humans, VR/AR, and related technologies as supported areas and established a framework for incubating metaverse startups and attracting digital human technology companies to the district. The announcement reflected a period of intensifying policy competition among Guangdong's municipalities as local governments sought to establish competitive positions in emerging virtual industries.
In May 2022, Guangdong Network Broadcasting and Television (广东网络广播电视台) launched "Yue Xiaoman" (悦小满), billed as the world's first Cantonese virtual idol, on the Xiaoman solar term day. Designed as a 2.5D virtual character with a complete public persona, she debuted with an original single titled "Yuan Qi Xiao Man" (元气小满) and a holographic performance, while accounts were simultaneously opened across Weibo, Bilibili, Douyin, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter and a digital collectible was released to coincide with the launch. Conceived to promote Cantonese culture, Greater Bay Area tourism, and youth cultural engagement, Yue Xiaoman was intended from the outset as a culturally specific virtual personality rather than a generic synthetic avatar, and she later served as a virtual host at a national audiovisual event using real-time motion capture technology.
In July 2022, Guangzhou Nansha New Area publicly announced its "Nine Measures for Promoting Metaverse Ecosystem Development" at the unveiling ceremony for the Nansha Metaverse Industry Cluster Zone, with the formal policy document following in October 2022. The measures included provisions for up to 200 million RMB per platform for major metaverse and digital human research platforms, alongside innovation subsidies, talent grants, and dedicated physical space. Nansha's package was among the most ambitious district-level metaverse funding commitments in China at that time, and the announcement confirmed that digital human technology was being embedded into Guangdong's highest-priority economic development frameworks.
In September 2022, at the 9th China Museum and Related Products and Technology Exposition held in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, Guangzhou-based Frontop Digital Creative Technology Co., Ltd. (广州凡拓数字创意科技股份有限公司) — a Guangdong company deploying its capabilities at a non-Guangdong venue — debuted its ultra-realistic cultural digital human "Ban Zhao" (班昭). Serving as a digital guide on the opening day of the exposition, Ban Zhao co-hosted a live studio format called the "Wenbo Digital Human Live Studio" (文博数字人直播间) alongside the Wenbo Circle online community, interviewing museum digitalization experts about heritage sector applications. Frontop, publicly listed on ChiNext that year and specializing in digital creative technology and virtual digital humans, was among the Guangzhou companies extending virtual human capabilities into heritage and cultural sectors well beyond the province's borders.
In November 2022, Tuoyuan Zhihui (拓元智慧), a Guangzhou-registered virtual digital human technology company incubated from Pengcheng Laboratory, made its first major public showcase when its Yuan Fenshen (元分身) product line debuted at the 14th China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition at the Zhuhai International Aviation Exhibition Center. Appearing at the booth of aerospace partner Aerospace Ruike Laser (航天锐科激光), the company presented Yuan Fenshen as a virtual digital human technology and application service built on proprietary original technology. The Zhuhai Airshow was an atypical venue for a virtual human product debut, reflecting the early-stage practice of Guangdong digital human companies seeking prominent exhibition opportunities wherever high-profile audiences were accessible.
In March 2023, iiMedia Research (艾媒咨询), headquartered in Guangzhou, hosted the 2nd China Virtual Human Industry Conference and AIGC Innovation Forum in Guangzhou. Chief executive Zhang Yi delivered the opening address, and the conference released two major industry reports — on virtual human development trends and AIGC industry development respectively — alongside the "2023 China Virtual Human Top 100" ranking. The event served as a key convergence point for Guangdong's virtual human ecosystem stakeholders and reinforced Guangzhou's role as a hub for sector-level intelligence gathering and industry convening.
In August 2023, Zhongshan Daily (中山日报) launched its first AI anchor, named "Qiwei" (骐玮), at the Zhongshan City Online News Release Hall and Overseas Communication Center on the newspaper's 67th founding anniversary. Qiwei was a trilingual digital broadcaster capable of delivering news in Mandarin, Cantonese, and English, developed through real-person image and voiceprint collection, AI synthesis, and integration with a 4K virtual studio system, combining voice synthesis, natural language understanding, three-dimensional artistry, optical capture, and video-driven AI algorithms. Designated as the signature host of the Zhongshan Overseas Communication Center — identified as Guangdong's first prefecture-level international communication center — Qiwei extended the pattern of Guangdong regional media institutions adopting synthetic anchors with distinctive multilingual and intercultural mandates.
In October 2023, Zhuhai Media Group launched "i Xiao Pang" (i小胖), an AI commentator built as a near-replica of real commentator Li Yongzhi from the group's Mei De Shuo (媒的说) column, on the occasion of the media group's fourth anniversary and the column's third anniversary. Powered by an AI system, i Xiao Pang was designed to handle news commentary tasks on demand, delivering viewpoints on Zhuhai-area events in a natural conversational style. The debut extended Zhuhai Media Group's commitment to embodied AI presenters — following its 2022 sign language system — into opinion-format programming as well as straight news delivery.
In November 2023, Southern Finance Media Group unveiled "Nanxi" (南希), its first ultra-realistic three-dimensional virtual host, on the occasion of the group's seventh anniversary. The character was designed for deployment across the group's financial news broadcasting platforms and represented a substantial upgrade from the audio-only AI anchor the group had launched in collaboration with iFlytek in 2018. Southern Finance Media Group's continued investment in synthetic presenter technology over a span of five years reflected the deep institutional commitment of Guangzhou's major media conglomerates to virtual human deployment as a long-term strategic capability.
In December 2023, the "Happy Together — 2024 Greater Bay Area New Year's Eve Gala" produced by Guangdong Satellite TV (广东卫视) featured extensive virtual production technology in a dual-venue broadcast from Guangzhou Chimelong Happy World and Zhuhai Chimelong Ocean Kingdom. World Excellence Technology (世优科技) provided real-time virtual visual effects rendering and compositing via virtual studio technology, and also contributed an innovative drone-based virtual tracking aerial photography system with digital AR effects. Cgangs (强氧科技) provided virtual reality on-site production solutions using its V3D Unlimited Edition systems for AR insertion effects, creating giant virtual dancer elements synchronized with live performances via pre-recorded motion capture data, with an additional segment featuring digital animal performances through AR virtual technology. The coordinated deployment of multiple virtual production vendors across two cities illustrated the growing maturity and geographic reach of Guangdong's virtual production supply chain in service of large-scale live entertainment.
In February 2024, the Guangdong Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology (广东省工业和信息化厅) and five other provincial agencies jointly issued an action plan formally titled the "Guangdong Province Cultivating and Developing Future Electronic Information Industry Cluster Action Plan," which targeted virtual reality, digital humans, and metaverse technologies as key development areas with a stated goal of establishing Guangdong as a global future electronic information industry innovation hub by 2035. The plan represented the province's most comprehensive government directive on digital human development to that point, encoding the sector into Guangdong's long-term industrial strategy at the highest levels of provincial policy.
In March 2024, Guangzhou Baiyun District held a major project commencement ceremony at Baiyun Lake Digital Science Town in which twelve companies — including Huawei, Baidu Smart Cloud Guangzhou, and ChinaSoft International (中国软件国际) — signed metaverse industrial cooperation agreements with the Guangzhou Baiyun High-Tech Zone Investment Group. Ten projects covering AI, VR, and digital human technologies moved simultaneously into the Metaverse Future World Industrial Park (元宇宙未来世界产业园), with total park investment reported at approximately 1.265 billion RMB and a target annual revenue exceeding 3.52 billion RMB at full capacity. The event was embedded within a broader forty-six-project commencement ceremony with total investment of nearly 25 billion RMB, situating digital human infrastructure within one of Guangdong's most significant quarterly investment announcements.
In June 2024, two distinct deployments of interactive digital humans at Guangzhou cultural institutions were reported within days of each other, together marking a moment of acceleration in the sector's penetration of heritage and public education contexts. At Guangdong Provincial Museum, the Early Lingnan Exploration Project held a public presentation releasing a documentary that used digital human technology to reconstruct the appearance and movements of ancient "Modaoshan Man" based on archaeological findings from the Modaoshan site in Yunfu city, described as the Greater Bay Area's first digital primitive human and produced with research support from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University, and the Guangdong Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology. At the Guangdong Intangible Cultural Heritage Museum (广东省非物质文化遗产馆), also in Guangzhou, an AI digital guide branded as an "AI Storyteller" (AI讲古人) was deployed, using large language model real-time dialogue technology to interact with visitors about intangible cultural heritage items and traditions.
In July 2024, at the China Unicom Partner Conference, the director of Guangdong's Provincial Agricultural and Rural Short Video Production and Promotion Center presented a province-wide matrix of agricultural AI digital human characters developed for deployment across multiple agricultural industries. Featured characters included a virtual orchid-industry presenter for Sihe's orchid sector, a pineapple industry character for Xuwen, a lychee industry figure for Gaozhou, and a green plum character for Puning, with the Gaozhou lychee digital human having already facilitated transactions exceeding three million jin of lychee worth over thirty million RMB. A nationally first agriculture insurance AI digital human named "Explorer" (探险家) was also presented at the same conference, reflecting the breadth of agribusiness applications being developed within the province.
In September 2024, at the 6th Precision Medicine Development Forum held as part of the Lingnan Science Forum series in Guangzhou, the Guangdong Precision Medicine Application Society (广东省精准医学应用学会) and China Unicom's digital medical technology subsidiary jointly launched the "Thousand Doctors Plan" (千医计划). The initiative unveiled a full-fidelity digital human modeled after Professor Yuan Jin (袁进), a National Health Science Expert, identified as Guangdong's first such digital human for medical science popularization. The plan set a three-year target of creating personalized digital human avatars for one thousand science popularization doctors from 2024 to 2027, with an anticipated output of ten thousand health science videos for public education.
In October 2024, the Guangzhou Market Supervision Bureau formally published what was identified as Guangdong Province's first live-streaming e-commerce compliance guideline, covering four types of business entities across three chapters with 132 provisions. Most notable among its provisions was that the guideline was the first regulatory framework of its kind in the province to explicitly include AI digital human live-streaming compliance requirements, establishing standards for disclosure, consumer protection, and content authenticity when AI-generated hosts are used in commercial livestreams. The bureau held a public press briefing on the guideline in November 2024, signaling official recognition of AI-hosted commercial streaming as a category requiring dedicated regulatory treatment.
In December 2024, three developments in rapid succession underscored the simultaneous maturation of Guangdong's digital human research infrastructure, popular virtual idol ecosystem, and investment environment. The Guangdong Computer Society organized the "GBA Digital Human Production and Driving Technology Forum" (粤港澳数字人的生产与驱动技术论坛) in Dongguan as part of the Lingnan Science Forum series, establishing at the event the Guangdong Province AI General Knowledge Virtual Teaching and Research Office (广东省人工智能通识虚拟教研室) and bringing together researchers from South China University of Technology, Sun Yat-sen University, and peer institutions to discuss digital human production standards, motion capture, and AI-driven animation techniques. Also in December 2024, iiMedia Research published its annual ranking of China's top ten virtual live-streamers, in which Yue Xiaoman — the Cantonese virtual idol originally launched in May 2022 — placed tenth, reflecting the character's sustained growth through cross-platform engagements encompassing live event hosting, music releases, and cultural promotion across the Greater Bay Area. Additionally in December 2024, Tuoyuan Zhihui announced completion of a Pre-A financing round of nearly 100 million RMB, with investors including Yueke Financial Group (粤科金融集团), Pengcheng Vision Fund (鹏城愿景基金), and Red Bird Qihang Fund (红鸟启航基金), providing the Guangzhou-registered company with capital to advance its Yuan Fenshen product line into the next phase of development.
In February 2025, Tuoyuan Zhihui announced that its Yuan Fenshen product line had fully integrated DeepSeek-R1 and simultaneously unveiled what it described as China's first one-stop IP video creation center, enabling users to produce IP video content in four steps by drawing on a library of over one million viral video scripts. Upgraded capabilities included smart livestreaming, educational video generation, and virtual expert functions, with DeepSeek-R1 enhancing the natural quality of text generation used in synthetic presenter scripts. The announcement positioned Tuoyuan Zhihui's Guangzhou-based platform as an early commercial integrator of next-generation language model capabilities into digital human production workflows.
In March 2025, the launch ceremony for the 2025 Hongwei World Digital Display and Metaverse Ecosystem Expo was held at Guangzhou Pazhou Science Town, attended by more than five hundred government, industry, academic, and media representatives. Hongwei Group (鸿威集团) chairman Wang Zhaoyun announced a global expo tour covering eleven domestic and international cities, and a concurrent forum addressed VR large-space scenario-based operations. The substantive expo followed in May 2025, held at the Guangzhou Canton Fair Exhibition Center, drawing approximately three hundred exhibitors across more than twenty thousand square meters and attracting over fifty-five thousand professional visitors to concurrent forums addressing metaverse cross-sector fusion, VR/AR/MR/XR equipment, and digital human technologies.
In April 2025, the Guangzhou Municipal Industry and Information Technology Bureau (广州市工业和信息化局) officially launched a government-service digital human named "Sui Xiaoxin" (穗小信) at a dedicated policy digital human conference held at China Telecom's Guangdong headquarters. Sui Xiaoxin integrates AI large language model technology with two core functions — digital human policy interpretation and AI-powered intelligent government service query — and employs zero-sample digital human customization with real-time intelligent recognition, smart perception, and smart generation capabilities. Professor Hao Tianyong of South China Normal University noted the platform's advanced natural language processing capabilities at the launch, positioning Sui Xiaoxin as an early instance of a Guangdong municipality formally deploying a named, visually embodied digital human for citizen-facing government services.
In May 2025, Zhuhai Media Group launched a self-developed AI anchor on Zhuhai News, marking the first full-program AI anchor broadcast for the city's flagship television news program. Developed on the group's proprietary "Jiuzhang" (九章) AI computing platform — trained on decades of Zhuhai media data and registered with the Cyberspace Administration of China for deep synthesis services — the AI anchor achieved near-human appearance with natural voice and synchronized lip movements. The group's chief technology officer stated that the digital human product was being adapted for application across multiple industries, a direction confirmed in September 2025 when the technology was exported to Yangjiang Broadcasting Station (阳江广播电视台) for use in its Minsheng 12345 program.
In November 2025, Guangzhou Baiyun District People's Government Office issued the district's first metaverse-specific policy, formally titled the "Several Measures for Promoting High-Quality Development of the Metaverse Industry," which took effect in December 2025 and remained valid for two years. The document explicitly named digital human technology as a supported area, offering research and development subsidies of up to two million RMB, digital content production grants of up to 500,000 RMB per product, immersive experience center construction support of up to three million RMB, and one-time incentives of up to ten million RMB for key metaverse enterprises choosing to relocate to the district. Baiyun District's existing metaverse ecosystem — encompassing companies such as Tuten Vision (图腾视界) and Four Open Garden (四开花园) alongside projects including the Metaverse Future World Industrial Park and Tonghe Nanhu Metaverse Park — formed the industrial base into which the new incentives were directed. Also in November 2025, though at an event held in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, iiMedia Research released the "2025 China Digital Human City Development Index Top 20," in which Guangzhou ranked third nationally with a score of 89.28, behind Beijing and Shenzhen and ahead of Shanghai, while Foshan ranked nineteenth and Dongguan twentieth — making Guangdong the only Chinese province with three cities simultaneously in the national top twenty. The report, noting that China's digital human core market had reached 339.2 billion RMB in 2024, highlighted Guangzhou's mature live-streaming e-commerce ecosystem and Canton Fair resources as the distinctive city-level strengths underpinning its high national ranking in digital human industry development.
[Mar 2026]