China’s Digital Humans Rise From Spectacle to State Priority

In December 2022, the term "digital human" (数字人) was formally recognized as one of China's top ten new words of the year, ranking sixth on the annual list announced by the National Language Resources Monitoring and Research Center, the Commercial Press, and Guangming Online at a ceremony in Beijing. The selection captured something that had been building for years across Chinese media, commerce, and governance: digital humans had moved from novelty to national discourse, becoming a category of technological and cultural production significant enough to warrant its own linguistic milestone.

The trajectory of digital humans in Chinese broadcasting illustrates the speed and ambition of this adoption. Xinhua News Agency, in collaboration with Sogou, debuted what it called the world's first AI news anchor at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen in November 2018, with a Chinese-language anchor modeled on the real journalist Qiu Hao and an English-language counterpart modeled on Zhang Zhao. Xinhua followed this with the female AI anchor Xin Xiaomeng in 2019 and the world's first three-dimensional AI news anchor, Xin Xiaowei, in 2020, deployed for coverage of the Two Sessions. These were not isolated experiments but the beginning of a pattern in which state media institutions treated digital humans as a legitimate and permanent extension of their broadcast infrastructure.

The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics became another proving ground. Alibaba's DAMO Academy introduced Dong Dong, a virtual influencer who engaged fans via livestream and promoted Olympic merchandise to an audience exceeding two million viewers. Baidu AI Cloud, through its XiLing platform, launched a round-the-clock AI sign language anchor on CCTV News, providing real-time sign language interpretation of Olympic coverage for China's estimated 27.8 million hearing-impaired citizens, drawing cumulative viewership of over one hundred million. XiaoIce contributed Feng Xiaoshu, a digital twin of real weather host Feng Shu, who delivered venue-specific weather forecasts throughout the Games.

The CCTV Spring Festival Gala, China's most-watched annual broadcast, became a recurring showcase for the evolving capabilities of digital human technology. As early as 2019, the CCTV Network Gala featured AI-generated digital twins of hosts including Sa Beining and Zhu Xun. By 2022, the main Gala incorporated multi-modal motion capture, animating a Sanxingdui bronze figure in a dance performance and deploying XR, AR, holographic scanning, and naked-eye 3D effects. In 2023, the virtual idol Ling, created by Xmov, performed alongside human celebrities during the CCTV Network Gala in a metaverse venue, while Beijing Television staged a cross-temporal duet featuring a virtual Teresa Teng. The 2024 Gala introduced an AI-generated Li Bai in a segment called "Mountain and River Poem Chang'an," marking the first use of XR combined with virtual production on the program. By 2026, the Gala had advanced to deploying CMG's Media AI Model 2.0 for hyper-realistic digital humans, using four-dimensional Gaussian splatting to create a digital duplicate of dancer Liu Haocun, and integrating ByteDance's Doubao AI chatbot as a virtual co-host appearing alongside real presenters.

One pivotal episode in January 2023 crystallized the cultural ambitions behind these technologies. During Episode 5 of the eighth season of the Chinese Poetry Conference on CCTV-1, a digital Su Dongpo appeared on stage, interacting in real time with the host, contestants, and an actor portraying the poet Huang Tingjian. Produced by the Zhonghua Book Company and Diting Shijie, the figure was created using holographic projection built on a first-of-its-kind submerged multi-reflective holographic imaging structure, combined with mixed reality, motion capture with three-layer real-time cloth and hair simulation, and over three hundred AI-generated elderly facial expression models. The motion capture performance was delivered by Professor Hai Bin of Hainan University, a Su Dongpo scholar, lending the digital figure an authority grounded in academic expertise. The production team rendered both middle-aged and elderly versions of the poet within a one-month production window. The figure was described as China's first hyper-realistic digital historical character.

The rise of digital humans in China was not driven by technology alone. The year 2021 became widely known as the inaugural year of idol house collapse, a reference to a rapid succession of celebrity scandals that devastated the commercial endorsement ecosystem. Zheng Shuang was fined approximately forty-six million US dollars for tax evasion amid surrogacy and child abandonment revelations. Kris Wu was criminally detained on charges of raping underage girls. The pianist Li Yundi was arrested for soliciting prostitution. Wang Leehom's public divorce exposed cheating allegations. Zhao Wei effectively vanished from the Chinese internet. In 2023, Cai Xukun's abortion scandal continued the pattern. The commercial fallout was immediate, and brands began migrating to virtual spokespeople perceived as immune to reputational risk. KFC and L'Oréal partnered with A-SOUL, the virtual idol group whose parent company Lehua Entertainment had launched it under the explicit slogan "never collapse." Florasis created its own virtual spokesperson. McDonald's China introduced "Happy Sister." Tesla, Vogue, and Nayuki aligned with the virtual idol Ling. Market data from iiMedia Research showed the virtual idol core market growing from 3.46 billion yuan in 2020 to 6.22 billion yuan in 2021, with projections reaching 12.08 billion yuan by 2022. ByteDance and Alibaba's film division invested in Lehua Entertainment in July 2021, the same month Wu was arrested, signaling institutional confidence in the virtual alternative. The promise of invulnerability proved incomplete, however, as the A-SOUL "Jiayue hibernation incident" of May 2022 demonstrated that labor disputes involving the real performers behind virtual characters could provoke fan backlash just as damaging as any celebrity scandal.

The concept that made both real celebrity branding and digital human design intelligible in China is "renshe," abbreviated from "character and persona design." The term originated in Japanese anime, comics, and games production as the professional workflow for defining a character's appearance, personality, and backstory. It migrated into the Chinese entertainment industry around 2015 as a framework for celebrity packaging and personal branding, then entered general internet usage as a term for curated social media personas. Virtual idol companies adopted it explicitly as a foundational step in digital human development, applying it to characters including AYAYI, described as China's first metahuman, as well as Luo Tianyi, A-SOUL, and numerous other virtual figures. The related term "persona collapse" traces to the Japanese concept of character breakdown and became widespread in Chinese internet culture as shorthand for the moment a constructed public identity falls apart.

Programs such as Tang Palace Night Banquet, which premiered on Henan Satellite Television's 2021 Spring Festival Gala, demonstrated the broader appetite for digitally enhanced cultural expression even when digital humans were not directly involved. The performance featured fourteen live dancers portraying Tang Dynasty court musicians against AR-composited backgrounds incorporating classical paintings, generating over twenty billion video views and nearly five billion Weibo reads. It spawned an entire series of festival-themed cultural programming on Henan Television. In January 2024, Henan Television partnered with New H3C Group to create Tang Xiaomei, a three-dimensional hyper-realistic AI digital human derived from the original performance, extending its cultural legacy into the digital human domain.

Digital humans are recognized within China's official framework for network literature and art, a policy category encompassing cultural production enabled by internet and digital technologies. The Fourteenth Five-Year Plan for Radio, Television, and Network Audiovisual Science and Technology, issued by the National Radio and Television Administration in 2021, explicitly called for the promotion of virtual hosts and animated sign language in news, weather, variety, and educational programming as a means to innovate program formats. The China Network Audiovisual Association has co-published the China Digital Human Influence Index Report annually since 2022, with the fourth edition in 2025 covering 360 domestic and 164 overseas digital human intellectual properties and noting that the term "digital human" has become the conventional shorthand in the industry, supplanting the earlier modifier "virtual."

China's regulatory architecture for digital humans has developed in parallel with the technology's commercial expansion. The Deep Synthesis Provisions, jointly issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Ministry of Public Security, took effect in January 2023, establishing requirements for labeling and algorithm filing for content involving virtual scenes and digital figures. The Generative AI Interim Measures followed in August 2023, extending regulatory coverage to the broader category of AI-generated content used in digital human creation. In June 2022, the National Radio and Television Administration and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism issued behavioral norms requiring AI-synthesized virtual hosts and streamers to follow the same conduct standards as real human streamers. Beijing had already positioned itself at the forefront of municipal policy in August 2022 with the first city-level digital human industry action plan in China, targeting a five-hundred-billion-yuan industry by 2025 and later establishing the Beijing Digital Human Base in Chaoyang District, which housed forty-nine companies by November 2024. The Cyberspace Administration launched a three-month enforcement campaign in April 2025 targeting AI technology abuse, resulting in the removal of over 3,500 AI products, the deletion of more than 960,000 illegal items, and penalties against over 3,700 accounts. In December 2025, the State Administration for Market Regulation and the Cyberspace Administration jointly issued livestreaming e-commerce measures requiring clear labeling of AI-generated human images and videos, effective February 2026. That same month, the Cyberspace Administration published draft measures for human-like interactive AI services, proposing requirements including pop-up warnings, two-hour break reminders, and emotional state assessments for AI systems simulating human personality and emotional interaction.

The most significant regulatory development arrived on April 3, 2026, when the Cyberspace Administration released a draft regulation titled the Digital Virtual Person Information Service Management Measures. This marked the first regulation in China specifically targeting digital virtual persons as a distinct category. The draft defines a digital virtual person as a non-physical entity that uses computer graphics and artificial intelligence to simulate human appearance with voice, behavior, interaction, and personality. It requires explicit consent for the use of biometric data, prohibits the creation of virtual relatives or romantic partners for minors, mandates that all digital human content carry a "digital human" label, bans digital impersonation without consent, and establishes fines of up to two hundred thousand yuan for violations, with oversight distributed across multiple ministries. The public comment period runs until May 6, 2026. In June 2025, National People's Congress representatives had already proposed the creation of a comprehensive China AI Law that would establish innovation support frameworks, risk classification systems, ethical assessment requirements, lifecycle legal obligations, and international cooperation mechanisms. The AI digital human market in China is projected to exceed 10.24 billion yuan by 2026, according to a Tencent digital human industry development trend report, a figure that reflects both the commercial momentum driving the sector and the regulatory urgency accompanying it.

[Apr 2026]