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In late January 2022, roughly ten days before the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics, an AI virtual weather anchor named Feng Xiaoshu (冯小殊) went live on the Zhangjiakou Meteorological Bureau's WeChat public account, marking the earliest documented deployment of a digital human in Hebei Province. Created by Huafeng Weather Media Group (华风气象传媒集团) and XiaoIce (小冰公司) using deep neural rendering technology, Feng Xiaoshu was modeled on real-life weather host Feng Shu and provided real-time weather reports and spectator weather indices for the Zhangjiakou competition zone throughout the Games. The deployment was nationally coordinated but operated on a platform specific to Zhangjiakou, making it both the province's first documented virtual human and a direct product of the city's role as an Olympic host.
Also in February 2022, Baoding's municipal government work report included metaverse-related development directions, making it one of the first local-government documents in Hebei to signal policy interest in this emerging sector. These early moves took place against a province-wide regulatory backdrop that was still being assembled: in July 2022, the Hebei Provincial People's Congress Standing Committee enacted the Hebei Digital Economy Promotion Regulation (河北省数字经济促进条例), establishing the broadest provincial legal framework for digital economy development and creating the enabling environment within which subsequent digital human deployments would occur.
The most substantive event of 2022 arrived in November, when China's first idiom culture digital human ambassador debuted at the China International Digital Economy Expo in Zhengding. Named Han Dandan (邯丹丹) and jointly created by the Handan Municipal Bureau of Culture, Radio, Television and Tourism and Baidu (百度), the project — branded "AI Idiom Tour Handan" — produced six nationally pioneering digital achievements at once: the digital human ambassador herself, an idiom map integrated into Baidu Maps, an augmented reality idiom digital street installed on Huichexiang Historical Street, a metaverse "City of Idiom Allusions" built within Baidu's Xirang platform, a dedicated idiom database, and a set of idiom digital collectibles, four thousand editions of which sold out in three minutes during the expo. Han Dandan incorporates Baidu's AI speech recognition, voice synthesis, and UNIT dialogue technology, and her creation reflects Handan's strategy of weaving the city's extraordinary depth of idiom cultural heritage into nationally scalable digital formats.
The official launch press conference for "AI Idiom Tour Handan" was held in January 2023, and the Digital Idiom Experience Hall opened on the second floor of Handan Municipal Museum that same month. Visitor volumes during the 2023 Spring Festival were high enough that the installation attracted thousands of daily visitors, and cumulative media reach for the project surpassed 3.9 billion views, reaching more than 97 million identifiable individual users. Also in January 2023, the Hebei Provincial Government Office published the Accelerating Digital Hebei Action Plan (《加快建设数字河北行动方案（2023–2027年）》), setting a target of 330 billion yuan in digital economy core industry value-added and a goal of digital economy activity constituting more than 42 percent of provincial GDP by 2027. The plan designated Xiongan New Area as a benchmark for global digital city development and outlined six special actions encompassing twenty key projects, providing strategic framing for the municipal-level digital human deployments that would follow over the next two years.
In April 2023, Hebei Expressway Group (河北高速集团) and Baidu jointly released Jian Lulu (简璐璐), described at launch as the industry's first smart highway AI digital human. Built on Baidu's Wenxin Transportation Large Model (文心交通大模型), Jian Lulu was designed to handle road network monitoring, emergency command, maintenance management, and public travel services across the provincial expressway network. The launch was announced at the 25th China Highway Informatization Conference and positioned Baidu's transportation-specific large model as the underlying architecture for a new category of operational digital human deployed in critical infrastructure. In June 2023, Jian Lulu was publicly showcased again at the China·Langfang International Economic and Trade Fair in the Hebei Transportation Department exhibition, consolidating the character's role as a public-facing representative of provincial highway digitization.
By October 2023, a different kind of virtual figure was being documented nationally: Ji Xiaojia (冀小佳), the virtual digital host operated by Hebei Broadcasting TV (河北广播电视台), was catalogued in a CSM Media Research survey of twenty-six virtual anchors deployed across nineteen mainstream Chinese media organizations. Described in that survey as a "Station-Style Newcomer," Ji Xiaojia has a short-haired professional broadcaster appearance and had appeared on programs including Follow the Birds Through Hebei. Her exact debut date could not be established, but her inclusion in a national industry census by October 2023 confirms that Hebei's public broadcasting sector had already integrated virtual anchor technology into regular programming by that point.
In March 2024, Xinhua News Agency profiled Zhongshi Boxing (Xiongan) Technology Co., Ltd. (中视播星（雄安）科技有限公司), a company located in the Xiongan Zhongguancun Science and Technology Park. The company uses metaverse technology to develop digital humans capable of conducting e-commerce livestreams, with planned expansion into consulting and guidance services for schools, hospitals, and other institutional venues. Zhongshi Boxing represents one of the very few companies based within Hebei Province working directly in digital human technology development, and its address within the Xiongan Zhongguancun Science and Technology Park situates it within an extension of Beijing's innovation ecosystem rather than within a standalone Hebei-native technology cluster.
In August 2024, Xiongan Xingyuan Technology (雄安兴元科技有限公司), another AI digital human and metaverse developer also located in the Xiongan Zhongguancun Science and Technology Park, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Smart Health (Xiongan) Elderly Care Services (智慧康（雄安）养老服务有限公司) to develop AI digital humans for elderly care applications. The agreement positioned Xiongan as a site of emerging deployment in a policy-sensitive domain, and was the first documented instance in Hebei of digital human technology being formally directed at elder care services.
The pace of verified deployments accelerated markedly in September 2024. In Shijiazhuang, the Municipal Public Security Bureau Traffic Management Bureau launched Yuanji (元吉), also named Shi Xiao'an (石小安), as the city's full-time online AI digital traffic officer. Built on Baidu's Intelligent Cloud Qianfan Large Model Platform and having been in testing since May 2024, the system was capable of handling more than 150 question types with a 98 percent effective response rate and 95 percent factual accuracy. Available continuously via WeChat official account and mini-program, Yuanji answered public inquiries about vehicle management, traffic policies, and travel information, and Baidu identified it as the first such service nationally on its cloud platform. Later that same month, at the 7th Handan Tourism Development Conference, Daming County — under Handan municipality's jurisdiction — unveiled a tourism digital human modeled on Guo Wei (郭玮), a host from CCTV Movie Channel who was originally from Daming. Available in both a modern and a Song dynasty costume version, the digital human serves as a digital recommendation officer providing guided commentary on Daming's cultural heritage, and was released as part of a three-product digital tourism suite that also included the Jiuwen Daming Metaverse App and a Daming AR Tour mini-program. Around the same time in September 2024, the Hebei Telecom 10000 Customer Service Center (河北电信10000号客服中心) launched digital human customer service integrated with natural language processing, accessible continuously via the Hebei Telecom WeChat public account through the platform's remote counter and online customer service functions. This deployment extended digital human technology into the province's commercial telecommunications sector, complementing the governmental and tourism-facing applications that had dominated earlier activity.
In October 2024, the China International Digital Economy Expo returned to Zhengding, and the Handan pavilion featured Daye (大业), an AI digital human representing Linzhang County. Displayed in a holographic cabinet and rendered as a classical figure in white robes, Daye engaged visitors in voice conversation about Linzhang County's attractions, including its Three Kingdoms heritage, Guiguzi culture, and associated idiom stories. The system was developed by Zhongchuang Cultural Preservation Technology Development (Beijing) Co., Ltd. (中创文保科技发展（北京）有限公司), continuing the pattern by which Handan municipality sourced digital human technology from Beijing-headquartered firms for deployment in culturally themed tourism promotion at provincial and national expos. Also in October 2024, in Xingtang County under Shijiazhuang's jurisdiction, the Kuaishou Digital Human Livestream Disability Assistance Base (快手数字人直播助残基地) was inaugurated at the Xingtang County Disabled Persons' Entrepreneurship and Innovation Park. Jointly launched by the Hebei Provincial Disabled Persons' Federation, Kuaishou (快手) Public Welfare, and Kuaishou's digital human team, the facility uses Kuaishou's Nuwa (女娲) digital human livestreaming system, which provides a 72-hour continuous broadcast capability. Under the operational model, government authorities supply computers and venues while Kuaishou donates digital human accounts and traffic support, and the first phase plans for bases across five administrative villages in Hebei Province, making this one of the most geographically distributed social enterprise applications of digital human technology documented in the province.
In June 2025, Hebei Software Vocational and Technical College (河北软件职业技术学院) in Baoding was reported by China Education Daily as operating a deeply integrated AIGC and digital virtual human teaching system. The college had created digital virtual humans modeled on its own teachers, incorporating them into a tripartite ecosystem described as Teacher-Machine-Student, with more than 90 virtual simulation scenarios, three virtual laboratories, 120 virtual equipment sets, and 265 virtual cases. Online course participation at the institution was reported to grow at 5 percent annually, with student interaction frequency increasing more than 8 percent per year. In July 2025, four Hebei provincial departments covering industry and information technology, education, culture and tourism, and broadcasting jointly issued a notice soliciting metaverse typical cases from Hebei-registered enterprises. The notice explicitly defined virtual digital humans as a qualifying case category, describing them as entities based on artificial intelligence, computer graphics, modeling simulation, and natural language processing that can simulate human appearance, expressions, and behavior while generating economic and social value. This represented the most direct and targeted provincial-level policy action addressing digital humans in Hebei to that point in the decade.
By October 2025, Hebei Daily confirmed the operational status of a province-wide public library AI digital human joint service platform (公共图书馆AI数字人联合服务平台), which provided AI-assisted book-finding, book-recommendation, and reading services with integration between physical and digital library resources across the provincial network. That same month, the Hebei provincial government published the Hebei Province AI-Plus Action Plan 2025–2027 (《河北省推动"人工智能+"行动计划（2025–2027）》), promoting artificial intelligence applications across more than twelve sectors including manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, education, culture and tourism, and commerce. The plan promoted AI involvement in marketing content generation, multimodal optimization, and internet governance — domains where digital human technology is routinely deployed — signaling that the province intended to deepen its engagement with AI-generated synthetic media as an instrument of both economic development and public service delivery through the remainder of the decade.
[Mar 2026]