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In November 2018, Tibet Radio and Television Station (西藏广播电视台), also known in English as China Tibet Broadcasting System, was formally established in Lhasa through the institutional merger of Tibet Television (西藏电视台) and Tibet People's Radio (西藏人民广播电台), carried out as part of the Chinese Communist Party's national institutional reform initiative. The new station was the last provincial-level broadcasting entity to be created among all thirty-one Chinese provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions, and a ceremony attended by CPC Tibet Autonomous Region Standing Committee member and Propaganda Department Director Bianba Zhaxi marked the occasion. Though the establishment itself was administrative rather than technological, Tibet Radio and Television Station would go on to become the primary institutional vehicle through which digital human technology first appeared in the region.
In October 2022, Tibet Radio and Television Station deployed two convergent media products in Lhasa as part of its coverage of the 20th National Congress of the CPC, which convened in Beijing from October 16 through October 22. The two products were named "AI Artificial Intelligence Broadcast" (《AI人工智能播报》) and "VR Immersive Congress Attendance" (《VR沉浸式参会》), and they appeared alongside a third product highlighting Congress delegate profiles as part of a broader package that generated more than one hundred original new-media pieces accumulating over thirteen million total clicks. In Chinese media industry terminology of that period, an "AI播报" designation typically denoted an AI-powered automated voice broadcast or text-to-speech system rather than a fully rendered visual digital human avatar with a face, body, and movements, and no contemporary source explicitly described the station's product as a visual virtual presenter. Nonetheless, these deployments represented Tibet Broadcasting's earliest documented entry into AI-assisted on-screen presentation, and the VR product marked its first use of immersive virtual reality for news coverage.
In March 2024, People's Net (人民网), the digital arm of People's Daily operating from its headquarters in Beijing, launched a matrix of multiethnic AI digital hosts for its coverage of the Two Sessions. The six digital hosts were created using real-person image style transfer technology applied to photographs of People's Net's own minority-language journalists, producing realistic two-dimensional digital human forms. One of the six was a Tibetan-language digital host, making this the first confirmed Tibetan-language AI digital host created by any organization. The other hosts covered Mongolian, Uyghur, Kazakh, and Korean, alongside Mandarin and foreign-language versions, all deployed under a program branded "Two Sessions AI Study." This development took place entirely in Beijing and was not a deployment within Tibet, but it represented a meaningful milestone for the Tibetan language in the digital human field. People's Net repeated the deployment for the 2025 Two Sessions, again in March 2025, using the same multiethnic format and incorporating enhanced generative AI technologies for that iteration.
In December 2024, the Tibet Meteorological Bureau (西藏气象局), specifically its Disaster Prevention Center in Lhasa, officially launched what it described as the first meteorological anchor digital human in Tibet's meteorological field. The digital human was female, dressed in traditional Tibetan ethnic clothing, and was built using advanced artificial intelligence and virtual reality technology, though the bureau's announcement did not identify the developer or any third-party vendor. The Disaster Prevention Center director Luobu Jiancan was quoted describing the launch as an important measure for Tibet's meteorological department to keep pace with technological trends, and the bureau confirmed that the digital human had already entered operational service at the Disaster Prevention Center with plans to extend its presence to social media platforms. Also in December 2024, though outside Tibet, China Mobile's Migu (中国移动咪咕), Beijing Tiancheng Jiahua Cultural Media (北京天成嘉华文化传媒), and Sandman Studios (沙核科技) opened a four-hundred-square-meter VR immersive experience in Beijing's 798 art district titled "Potala Palace: Journey of Wishes" (《布达拉宫·心愿同行》), featuring a pre-rendered virtual Tibetan girl as a guide character who leads visitors through a digital representation of the Potala Palace. Priced at one hundred to two hundred yuan per session, the experience was a Beijing commercial deployment using Tibetan cultural settings and a synthetic Tibetan guide character, not an installation within Tibet itself.
In March 2025, Tibet Radio and Television Station produced and released what it and the national press described as Tibet's first AI digital human. The work was a rap rendition of the classic revolutionary song "The Emancipated Serfs Sing" (《翻身农奴把歌唱》), released in late March 2025 through the station's Zhufengyun (珠峰云) client application to mark the sixty-sixth anniversary of the liberation of serfs in Tibet. The production employed a suite of cutting-edge generative AI content technologies including text-to-image, image-to-video, digital human singing performance, and a continuous single-take AI camera technique. The Paper, a reputable state-affiliated outlet, covered the release under the headline "Tibet's First! AI Digital Human Rap, Recreating Classic Song," affirming the characterization. The distinction from the station's 2022 "AI Artificial Intelligence Broadcast" product is meaningful: the 2025 work featured a fully rendered visual digital human with a body, face, and animated singing movements produced through generative AI, placing it in a recognized separate category from the AI-assisted voice broadcasting of 2022. This release, made in Lhasa, constituted the first comprehensive visual AI digital human avatar produced and deployed within Tibet.
In July 2025, Lhasa hosted the 2025 Global Digital Economy Conference Lhasa High-Level Forum (2025全球数字经济大会拉萨高层论坛), organized by the Lhasa Municipal People's Government (拉萨市人民政府) together with the Lhasa High-tech Zone Management Committee, the Lhasa Bureau of Economy and IT, and the Lhasa Investment Promotion Bureau. Three companies delivered keynote speeches in the forum's main segment, and Hangzhou Yunshenchu Technology Co., Ltd. (杭州云深处科技有限公司) was among them, alongside Huawei and Jiangsu Future Network Group. Yunshenchu, a Hangzhou-based robotics company founded by researchers from Zhejiang University and known primarily for its quadruped robot dog series and humanoid robots, used its keynote to share insights on generative AI, intelligent agents, and multimodal digital humans, explicitly linking these technologies to practical scenarios including high-plateau cultural tourism, government services, and education in Tibet. The forum also produced twelve strategic cooperation agreements signed between companies and Lhasa's High-tech Zone and Economic Development Zone, with participants including China Mobile, China Telecom, Oriental Wealth, and China Life. While Yunshenchu's keynote in Lhasa signaled emerging interest in digital human applications within Tibet's development context, no commercial digital human deployment was announced at or resulting from the forum. In October 2025, a documentary titled "Potala Palace: Decoding Time and Space" (《布达拉宫 时空解码》) using extended reality technology was launched on Migu and described as the first large-scale use of XR virtual technology in a documentary about the Potala Palace, though the production involved AI-assisted restoration of wall paintings rather than any confirmed interactive digital human avatar component.
Through February 2026, Tibet's digital human ecosystem remained exceptionally limited in scope, confined primarily to state broadcasting and meteorological applications. Tibet Radio and Television Station and the Tibet Meteorological Bureau together accounted for the only confirmed deployments of visual digital human technology within the Tibet Autonomous Region itself, while the Tibetan-language dimension of the field had been advanced more substantially from Beijing by People's Net than from within the region. No commercial bank, telecom operator, government service hall, museum, cultural site, or tourism platform in Tibet had deployed a digital human by that date, and no Tibet-themed virtual influencer had appeared on any major platform. The region held fewer than five hundred registered enterprises in the digital human sector, among the lowest counts of any Chinese province, in sharp contrast to provinces such as Guangdong with approximately twenty-seven thousand. The foundational infrastructure for future growth was nonetheless taking shape, including a Tibetan-language speech corpus and recognition systems developed at Tibet University's Tibetan Language AI Lab and a planned high-capacity intelligent computing center in Shannan Prefecture backed by nine hundred million yuan in investment, but these prerequisites had not yet produced new digital human applications within the region by March 2026.
[Mar 2026]
2025
July 28, 2025: 2025 Global Digital Economy Conference Lhasa High-level Forum – Hangzhou Yunshenchu Technology showcased “AI+” innovations including generative artificial intelligence, intelligent agents, and multimodal digital humans.
July 28, 2025: Tibet Yizhou Technology – Systematically elaborated on low-altitude logistics digital transformation and the “Smart Wing Plateau” digital new ecosystem.
July 20, 2025: 2025 Global Digital Economy Conference Lhasa High-level Forum – Successfully concluded with comprehensive digital human technology demonstrations and applications.
April 17, 2025: Chamdo City People’s Government – Released the fourteenth episode of digital human interpretation of Chamdo City’s 2024 Government Work Report.
March 24, 2025: Qingpu District Data Bureau – Launched AI digital human services in collaboration with DeepSeek for government affairs applications.
February 7, 2025: Tibet Autonomous Region CPC Committee website – Published investigation report on AI face-swapping technology abuse, mentioning digital human avatar applications for video fraud.
2024
December 16, 2024: Tibet Meteorological Bureau launches the first meteorological digital human broadcaster in Tibet, marking the beginning of a new era in high-altitude weather broadcasting.
November 30, 2024: Lhasa Science and Technology Bureau announces funding for “AIGC-based Tibetan Culture Super-Realistic Digital Human Generation Technology Research and Industrialization” project by Wondershare Technology Group.
September 6, 2024: China Media University holds training classes for Tibet news workers to enhance their “four forces” capabilities.
July 30, 2024: Tibet Jibubang Cultural Digital Technology Co., Ltd. is featured in the “Digital Collection Charm: Digital Human Cultural Creativity and Heritage” project listing.