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In August 2019, the province registered its first confirmed digital human deployment when China Jilin Net (中国吉林网), Jilin Province's principal online news portal, unveiled a virtual anchor named Ji Xiaoxin (吉小新) at the 12th China–Northeast Asia Expo in Changchun. The character was developed in partnership with iFlytek (科大讯飞), integrating speech synthesis, speech recognition, semantic understanding, image processing, and machine translation technologies into a unified presentational system. Ji Xiaoxin debuted inside Hall 9 of the Expo's China Jilin Net exhibition area, and the portal distributed the deployment across its full network, describing the initiative as an important experiment combining artificial intelligence with media convergence. The framing positioned the anchor not merely as a novelty but as evidence that Jilin media could absorb AI tooling into editorial infrastructure. This launch would stand for several years as the province's sole publicly confirmed contribution to the national digital human ecosystem.
Throughout 2020 and 2021, no independently verified digital human deployments or company formations in Jilin appeared in public sources. The province's startup ecosystem in this area remained thin compared with Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong, which were accumulating virtual influencer agencies, AI media ventures, and foundational model capabilities at a significantly faster pace. The conditions for eventual catch-up were nevertheless beginning to form through competition and incubation activity. A company that would later incorporate as Jilin Huaqi Yuanyu AI Digital Technology Co., Ltd. (吉林省华企元宇人工智能数字科技有限公司) originated during 2022 as an outgrowth of Jilin Huaqi Zhongke Digital Technology Co., which won the 2022 China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition for its metaverse digital-twin platform project. That competition result gave the team a validated commercial foundation from which to build its subsequent virtual livestreaming operations in Changchun New District.
In August 2023, the most consequential digital human development of that year arrived when Jilin Bank (吉林银行), a provincial commercial bank headquartered in Changchun, officially launched its first digital employee, a named avatar called Yuanji (元吉). The avatar was constructed on a stack combining artificial intelligence, enterprise data, robotic process automation, and large-model techniques, and was positioned explicitly as a new-type personified worker — a digital employee integrated into business operations rather than a static spokesperson. The bank's stated intent was to shift customer interaction from text and voice channels into visible audio-video presentation, making the avatar a functional instrument of service delivery. The following month, in September 2023, a second private-sector company received public profile coverage when Jilin Zhixin Network Technology Service Co., Ltd. (吉林省智信网络科技服务有限公司) was featured by Jilin Daily as having independently developed a digital human livestreaming system oriented toward e-commerce applications. The profile represented a signal that Jilin's private sector was beginning to organically develop this class of product outside of institutional sponsorship, even if the precise founding and first deployment dates for the company could not be confirmed from available sources.
The year 2024 opened with a landmark intervention from the provincial government in the domain of tourism place branding. In February 2024, Jilin's Department of Culture and Tourism (吉林省文化和旅游厅) released a promotional short film called "Changbai Under the Snow, Snowy Region's Adventure," featuring two newly created ice-and-snow culture virtual digital humans named Chuyi (初一) and Xuanlong (玄龙). The pair were officially described as China's first ice-and-snow culture virtual digital humans, with their creation combining three-dimensional hyper-realistic rendering techniques with real-world location photography of Changbai Mountain's winter landscapes. Motion capture was achieved using livelinkface, facegood, and faceware technologies, giving the characters naturalistic movement and expressive range. The department positioned Chuyi and Xuanlong as long-lived tourism IP carriers for the Changbai Under the Snow brand rather than campaign-specific spokespersons — a deliberate strategic choice to invest in enduring virtual identities capable of representing Jilin's ice-and-snow tourism offer across multiple seasons and platforms.
In late February 2024, Jilin Huaqi Yuanyu came to broader public attention through a profile published in Jilin Daily that month. The company, founded by Han Yu (韩瑜), a Changchun native who returned from studies in Canada with a team of overseas returnees, was described as operating a production pipeline for simulated digital humans and virtual anchors out of its Changchun New District base. By the time of the profile, the firm had established partnerships with more than ten e-commerce platforms and was operating over one hundred virtual livestream rooms simultaneously, with commercial collaborations extending to Tencent, BMW, and other multinational brands. The profile illustrated that Jilin's private digital human sector, while less extensively documented than comparable companies in Guangdong or Beijing, had reached operational maturity in the e-commerce livestreaming vertical.
By late April 2024, Jilin Bank had accumulated enough operational data on Yuanji to report specific performance metrics across its expanded deployment. The digital employee was by then functioning in multiple concurrent roles — as a digital wealth advisor, a benefits dispatcher, and a financial product explainer — distributed across mobile banking, WeChat Video Channel, and Douyin. The bank reported that the mobile banking avatar had served more than 1.05 million customers, with cumulative visits across all channels exceeding 1.69 million. Attaching Yuanji's financial product explanation capability to customer interactions produced a 6.7 percent uplift in product conversion rates. The deployment also delivered operational savings estimated at approximately 238,500 yuan in video production costs and approximately 47,700 yuan in labor costs, alongside a 70 percent improvement in overall video production efficiency. These figures established Yuanji as one of the more thoroughly documented bank digital employee deployments in China outside the major commercial banking centers.
The autumn of 2024 brought a significant institutional development in Jilin's broadcast sector. In September 2024, the Enne (嗯呢) AI Laboratory was jointly established in Changchun by Jilin Broadcasting and Television Station (吉林广播电视台), Jishi Media (吉视传媒), Jilin University's School of Computer Science and Technology, the University of Trento in Italy — represented by European Academy of Sciences member Professor Fausto Giunchiglia — and additional partners. The laboratory subsequently deployed digital anchors for programs including the morning broadcast "Good Morning Jilin," developed the Zhenghuor (整活儿) Smart Media Platform 1.0 integrating multiple AI models including DeepSeek, and produced AI-generated short video content covering Jilin's ecology, agriculture, and local livelihood topics. The platform was trained on local Jilin media resources to enable localized content generation, and Jilin University's School of Computer Science and Technology established a talent service station at the laboratory as a practical training base for AI-generated content applications. The formation of the Enne Lab marked the first documented involvement of Jilin University in the province's digital human ecosystem and embedded broadcast infrastructure directly into the research and production process.
In February 2025, Jishi Media announced that it had completed local deployment of the DeepSeek large model, becoming the first state-owned enterprise in Jilin Province to achieve large-model local deployment. Simultaneous with this announcement, the company began training the Jilin Cultural Tourism Large Model (吉林文旅大模型), described as China's first provincial-level cultural tourism vertical large model, built on DeepSeek and incorporating Jilin's historical, cultural, natural, and folk-custom resources as training material. This positioned Jishi Media not only as a distributor of digital human products but as a developer of the underlying model infrastructure from which those products could be generated and continuously updated.
March 2025 brought two further developments in Changchun. Jishi Media formalized a joint venture with Beijing 360 Digital Intelligence Technology Co. (北京三六零数智科技有限公司), establishing Jilin Jisuan Zhiyuan Technology Co., Ltd. (吉林省吉算智元科技有限公司), with Jishi Media holding a 70 percent stake and 360 Group the remaining 30 percent on a registered capital of five million yuan. The joint venture's stated business scope covered AI fundamental software development, AI infrastructure, and AI application services, providing the institutional vehicle through which Jishi Media's digital human and AI-generated content activities could access 360 Group's technology stack and associated commercial partnerships. Also in March 2025, the Changchun Medical Insurance Bureau (长春市医疗保险管理局) launched what it described as China's first medical insurance AI digital human, a 24-hour embodied avatar service on Douyin offering real-time face-to-face policy consultation on medical insurance matters. The system was built using the DeepSeek AI large model for training and integrated natural voice synthesis, facial expression rendering, and movement generation into a unified presentational interface. The development process had taken approximately six months, during which the bureau constructed a localized knowledge base from its existing hotline and customer-service repositories. The deployment operated in a hybrid model pairing the digital human with live human streamers for complementary capability, and the bureau committed to iterative improvement based on consultation feedback.
In May 2025, the provincial culture-and-tourism system extended its digital human program beyond promotional film into physical installation. A Smart Interactive Holographic Cabin was launched at Jilin Provincial Museum (吉林省博物院) in Changchun, deploying Chuyi and Xuanlong as interactive AI guides for museum visitors. The installation integrated Baidu Ernie Bot (文心一言), ByteDance Doubao (豆包), and a self-developed cultural tourism small model trained on Jilin-specific datasets covering regional attractions, seasonal landscapes including Changbai Mountain's environmental phenomena and Jilin City's rime-ice formations, and local folk customs. The cabin enabled natural conversation, artifact narration with historical context, and personalized visitor guidance, with a youth-oriented storytelling mode layered onto standard explanation. Plans announced at launch committed to extending the holographic cabin format to Jingyuetan National Forest Park and the Museum of the Imperial Palace of Manchukuo (伪满皇宫博物院), signaling a province-wide distribution strategy for portable digital-human kiosks, alongside a mobile application extension planned for summer 2025.
The final months of 2025 within the covered period saw digital humans elevated formally into Jilin's AI industrial policy while two major product and platform events occurred in the province. In September 2025, the Jilin Provincial People's Government issued its Implementation Opinion on Accelerating AI Innovation and Development, composed on September 12 and published September 16. Under the section on AI and cultural tourism, the opinion explicitly instructed authorities to upgrade the Changbai Under the Snow virtual digital human, enhance its guide and interactive functions, and develop new digital human application scenarios. The same document linked digital human work to upstream enablers including high-quality datasets in publishing, film, broadcasting, and cultural-heritage domains as well as AI-generated content creation capabilities, embedding the digital human thread as a planned component of the provincial AI roadmap rather than treating it as a discretionary experiment.
Also in September 2025, Jishi Media co-organized the 2025 China World Heritage Tourism Promotion Alliance conference at Ji'an in Tonghua prefecture — the first time this national heritage alliance conference had convened in Northeast China. More than 200 attendees participated, including national heritage experts and government officials, and Jishi Media used the occasion to present its culture-and-tourism digital human solution and debut themed micro-short-dramas about Goguryeo heritage culture produced with associated AI tools. Later that same month, Jishi Media held a New Product Launch and Ecosystem Cooperation Conference at the Changchun New Quality Productive Forces Development Promotion Center, releasing ten digital products alongside a program called the Starlight Plan. Among the products was Ji Xiaozhi (吉小智), a cross-scenario digital human spanning cultural tourism and government service contexts, characterized by four-K ultra-high-definition imagery and described as having broken through previous limitations in digital human broadcast delivery by upgrading subtitle functionality from simple text assistance to a multidimensional information carrier. The September launch also announced plans for an AI-generated content computing center projected for 2026, positioned as a Northeast Asia AI Computing Audiovisual Industry Cluster core node. These converging events in September 2025 — provincial policy, heritage-sector deployment, and product commercialization — marked the point at which Jilin's digital human ecosystem, which had been largely institution-driven since Ji Xiaoxin's debut six years earlier, became the subject of coordinated provincial-level industrial planning.
[Mar 2026]