Heilongjiang Digital Human Timeline

In May 2022, Baidu and the Heilongjiang Provincial Government signed a strategic cooperation framework to build a digital economy industrial base described as "one base, three centers, N platforms." The agreement explicitly designated the construction of what was positioned as Northern China's first Digital Human Industry Innovation Center as one of its core projects, to be developed alongside an AI supercomputing center, a data annotation center, and a talent training center, with operations planned for Daqing and other locations within the province. This agreement set in motion an industrial trajectory that would define Heilongjiang's digital human landscape for the following three years.

In July 2022, the Heilongjiang Provincial Culture and Tourism Department, in partnership with Tencent (腾讯), launched a three-dimensional digital virtual anchor named ShuangShuang Tiger (爽爽虎) at the Northeast Tiger Forest Park in Harbin, marking China's first upgrade of a provincial-level tourism mascot into a digital virtual host. The character's original two-dimensional form had been introduced in 2015, and the three-dimensional digital rendering was completed in 2022 in time for Global Tiger Day. The debut featured the first episode of a series titled "Visit Tigers in Longjiang — ShuangShuang Tiger's Longjiang Tourism Open Class," and by October 2022 the first three episodes had accumulated more than forty million cumulative online views across platforms including Xinhua, Tencent, Sina, Sohu, and NetEase, demonstrating an early proof of concept for government-endorsed digital character deployment in Heilongjiang's tourism sector.

In October 2022, the Heilongjiang Provincial Government issued its "Implementation Opinions on Strengthening Digital Government Construction," which explicitly instructed the province to build a digital government laboratory and to use the provincial government website to launch innovative applications including digital humans for government service scenarios. This was the first provincial-level policy directive in Heilongjiang to name digital humans as an instrument of public administration, providing formal institutional backing for the deployments that would follow across the province's government bodies over the succeeding years.

In January 2023, at a Heilongjiang Province Digital Industry Cooperation Exchange Conference held in Harbin, a Digital Economy Industry Alliance was formally established under the joint leadership of the Heilongjiang Provincial Commerce Department and the Provincial Industry and Information Technology Department. The alliance brought together Harbin Institute of Technology's AI Research Institute, Baidu Intelligent Cloud (百度智能云), and key Heilongjiang enterprises, with the stated aim of providing comprehensive solutions for the broader Digital Heilongjiang development agenda. At the same gathering, it was announced that the Baidu AI Industry Base exhibition hall was scheduled to complete construction after the 2023 Spring Festival, signaling that the physical infrastructure first committed to in the May 2022 strategic agreement was moving toward realization in Daqing.

In June 2023, the Baidu Intelligent Cloud Heilongjiang Digital Economy Industrial Base was officially unveiled in Daqing's High-tech Zone in a ceremony presided over by Daqing Party Secretary Li Shifeng and Baidu Vice President Yang Zhaoming. Among its four key projects, the base explicitly included Northern China's first Digital Human Industry Innovation Center alongside an AI computing center, a training center, and a digital oil services platform. The Daqing unveiling represented a formal institutional commitment of substantial scale, establishing the city as the province's primary node for digital human industrial production, even though full operational confirmation at the base would not be reported publicly until the following year.

In January 2024, Heilongjiang Daily published a profile of Heilongjiang Qishi Technology Development Co., Ltd. (黑龙江起时科技发展有限公司), a company founded in 2021 in Harbin that had developed digital human products for virtual person livestreaming capable of uninterrupted twenty-four-hour operation. The profile reported that the company had already trialed the technology with more than one hundred cooperating enterprises across Heilongjiang and had empowered over one thousand Heilongjiang enterprises overall through its two Harbin-based facilities, a Postal Livestream E-commerce Sharing Base and a Beidahuang Harbin Livestream E-commerce Sharing Base. The report confirmed that commercially deployed digital human livestreaming in Heilongjiang was already operating at meaningful scale before the Baidu base in Daqing reached full operational status.

In May 2024, Economic Daily published a feature confirming that the Baidu Intelligent Cloud Heilongjiang Digital Human Industrial Base in Daqing was fully operational, describing dozens of computer screens displaying lifelike digital humans conducting e-commerce livestreaming. Base operations director Ma Liang explained that the system could replicate a real person's appearance from just a few minutes of video material, enabling AI-powered livestreaming around the clock, and the base declared its ambition to form a new-type e-commerce headquarters base for Northeast China. Also in May 2024, Suihua City Deputy Mayor Lü Yingbin travelled to Mingshui County to inspect its digital economy incubator facilities, including an AI digital human exhibition hall, two AI digital human livestream halls, a "Meet Mingshui" policy livestream room, and an "Impression Mingshui" brand livestream room, in preparation for a citywide event formally named the E-commerce and AI Digital Human and Real Economy Integration on-site meeting, indicating that municipal government at the prefecture level had taken an active interest in scaling Mingshui's model. Later that same month, a detailed ecosystem report documented the full inventory of Mingshui County's digital economy incubator: seventeen enterprises, ten real-person livestream rooms, one AI digital human exhibition hall, two AI digital human livestream halls, one AI cloning room, and more than 270 employees, with the incubator having generated cumulative e-commerce revenue of 150 million yuan and 15 million yuan in employment income. Within that ecosystem, Heilongjiang Longshu Technology Co. (黑龙江龙数科技) was reported to operate more than twenty AI digital human operators and to have signed over 300 AI digital human livestream merchants, establishing it as one of the county's primary commercial operators of digital human services.

In August 2024, Sina Finance reported on rapid merchant expansion in Mingshui driven by Shanghai Kunzhiyi AI Technology Co. (上海鲲之益人工智能科技), a Shanghai-based firm operating within the county's ecosystem, which had signed more than five hundred merchants for AI-powered e-commerce in under three months. The "Impression Mingshui" direct-livestream platform achieved approximately thirty million yuan in combined AI digital human and real-person livestreaming sales, and the county publicly declared its aspiration to build what it described as China's largest AI livestream base. The ambition signaled a pivot from local service delivery toward a nationally competitive model of AI-driven agricultural and commercial promotion, with Mingshui positioning itself as a replicable archetype for rural AI-commerce in Northeast China.

In October 2024, Mingshui County's AI livestream base competed in the national "Data Elements ×" competition, with the finals held from October 19 to 24 at a venue outside Heilongjiang, and won second prize in the commercial circulation category. The recognition at the national level gave Mingshui's approach formal external validation, reinforcing its position within China's broader conversation about AI-augmented rural commerce and underscoring how far the county had travelled in two years from a nascent local experiment to a nationally acknowledged model.

In December 2024, Harbin Ice and Snow World launched two new IP characters named Bingbing (冰冰) and Xuexue (雪雪), which the Heilongjiang Provincial Culture and Tourism Department officially designated as Heilongjiang Province Ice and Snow Tourism Ambassadors. Alongside the character launch, the park debuted an immersive AI digital culture art museum titled "One Ice Snow One World," spanning 2,300 square meters across three zones and seven exhibits, deploying technologies including AIGC creative generation, immersive projection, naked-eye three-dimensional display, ultra-high-definition holographic theater, and human-machine interactive installations. The project was co-created by Inspur Intelligent Terminal (浪潮智能终端), JinDong Digital Creative (金东数字创意), and Heilongjiang Fenggu JinDeng Agriculture Company, representing a form of AI-interactive and AIGC-enabled deployment in Harbin's tourism and entertainment domain rather than a standalone conversational digital human application.

In February 2025, the Asian Winter Games mascots Binbin (滨滨) and Nini (妮妮) were developed as AI digital avatars and embedded via "Asian Winter Games AI Cards" in a collectible series associated with the Ninth Asian Winter Games hosted in Harbin. Scanning a card's QR code activated the mascots' AI digital persona, which was capable of real-time event tracking, voice-activated queries about competing athletes, personalized viewing calendars, and venue navigation. The project was developed by Heilongjiang Bozhang Licensed Operations Management Co., Hangzhou Qianyi Technology (钱意科技), and Heilongjiang Zhonglang Culture Group, with Qianyi Technology's involvement representing the contribution of an out-of-province technology partner in delivering a games-specific Heilongjiang deployment at a moment of international public attention.

In March 2025, China National Radio reported on a broad wave of AI digital human deployments across multiple Mingshui County government functions. The County Discipline Inspection Commission created an AI digital human named Xiao Lian (小廉) for anti-corruption education, using AI voice synthesis to narrate integrity stories to the public. The Mingshui Public Security Bureau launched an AI digital police officer accessible via a WeChat public account, providing twenty-four-hour anti-fraud publicity and traffic law education, while Mingyuan Community's Party-Building Responsibility Zone deployed an AI digital human livestream to explain healthcare, pension, and social security policies, with the first broadcast attracting more than two hundred concurrent viewers, over five hundred comments, and more than five thousand likes. Chongde Township and four other townships in the county similarly launched AI digital humans for government services, agricultural knowledge dissemination, and party-building publicity, demonstrating that by early 2025 the technology had diffused from Mingshui's commercial e-commerce ecosystem into its public administration infrastructure across multiple levels of local government.

In April 2025, China Unicom's Yichun branch, in collaboration with China Unicom Heilongjiang Industrial Internet Co., launched a suite of DeepSeek-powered smart application scenarios that included a virtual digital human application explicitly described as combining the DeepSeek large language model with virtual digital human technology. Named the Culture-Tourism Companion, the application provided holographic projection guides, augmented reality navigation, and personalized itinerary planning for Yichun's forest and eco-tourism resources in the Lesser Khingan Mountains region. This represented the first verified digital human deployment identified in Yichun, marking a geographic expansion of the province's digital human activity beyond the three previously dominant nodes of Harbin, Daqing, and Mingshui County, and introducing DeepSeek-integrated virtual character technology to a part of Heilongjiang whose economy is closely tied to ecological and forest tourism.

In May 2025, at a provincial exhibition in Daqing highlighting what official communications described as new quality productive forces, the Baidu Intelligent Cloud Heilongjiang Digital Human Industrial Base exhibited two commercial products: a digital human livestream all-in-one machine enabling one-click AI-anchored livestreaming and a digital human interactive screen supporting human-machine dialogue and intelligent interaction. The base presented itself at the exhibition as committed to building a digital human industry cluster hub for Northeast China, reaffirming the regional industrial ambition first articulated when the base was unveiled in Daqing in June 2023.

In June 2025, Sina Finance published a comprehensive milestone report documenting the China Mobile Mingshui Branch's deep partnership with the county's digital economy incubator. By that point, more than three hundred AI livestream accounts were running simultaneously through cloud servers, and a dual-mode system combining real-person livestreaming with a digital human matrix had been fully deployed across the county. Five townships were operating AI digital humans for government services, and a jointly constructed AI Livestream Training Base involving Heilongjiang Vocational College and five other universities had trained more than two hundred local e-commerce talents. The Mingshui County Disabled Persons' Federation had used the AI livestream platform for disability certification training, achieving a fifteenfold increase in online participation compared to prior formats, and the incubator had reached more than thirty enterprises with a cumulative two hundred million yuan in e-commerce revenue over two years, a significant increase from the 150 million yuan recorded just over a year earlier in May 2024.

In September 2025, Mingshui County participated in the Fourth Global Digital Trade Expo held in Hangzhou, with Heilongjiang actors operating outside the province as county-level representatives of Heilongjiang's digital economy achievements. Through thematic presentations, project signings, and technology demonstrations at the Hangzhou venue, Mingshui signed five agreements covering AI technology services and technology transfer. Heilongjiang Zhuote AI Technology Co. (黑龙江卓特人工智能科技) signed agreements worth over one million US dollars with enterprises from Hong Kong, Macau, and South America, and Shanghai Kunzhiyi AI Technology entered a formal partnership with the Mingshui Internet Service Center for AI and e-commerce integration, extending the web of commercial relationships that had been building around the county's digital human livestreaming model.

In December 2025, Heilongjiang Engineering Institute Kunlun Tourism College (黑龙江工程学院昆仑旅游学院), located in the Harbin area, partnered with China Food News to launch a program called the Super Nova Live Broadcast Talent Plan. AI digital human training was a core element of the curriculum, with students uploading their images through a dedicated system, adjusting parameters, and personally experiencing the full process of AI digital human generation from end to end. The program was designed to prepare students for livestream talent roles across sectors including beauty, travel blogging, and agricultural product promotion, embedding digital human technology within formal higher education in Heilongjiang in a publicly reported context for the first time and reflecting the degree to which virtual human production had, by the end of 2025, become a recognized vocational skill within the province.

[Mar 2026]