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This list portrays China’s “top annual tech show” landscape for digital humans as a broad, recurring multi-industry circuit rather than a single dominant expo, where digital humans are routinely showcased as deployable front-end interaction agents across AI/cloud, cybersecurity, digital government, trade and services, manufacturing, healthcare, marketing and advertising, culture and creative industries, media and broadcasting, and developer infrastructure events; it suggests these venues function as consistent launch and demonstration stages (including live “host/speaker” roles, docenting and guidance, bilingual trade presentations, livestream commerce operations, medical training simulations, HR workflow applications, and newsroom production), while also serving as legitimacy and policy-adjacent platforms where ecosystem reports, pilot initiatives, awards, and “landing cases” circulate, and it highlights a maturation trend in what gets emphasized: increasing focus on toolchains and full-stack infrastructure narratives (including domestic GPU/developer ecosystems), operational governance/compliance framing, and even performance scoring or benchmarking of digital replicas, implying the circuit is moving from spectacle toward measurable quality and commercialization-ready deployment.
A typical entrance cost for a foreign visitor to a tech trade show in China is often nothing at all if the visitor pre-registers, because many major trade shows allow free entry for registered trade attendees. If the visitor does not pre-register, the usual on-site admission cost is still fairly low and is often around US$5 to US$15. As a simple planning figure, US$0 is a reasonable expectation with advance registration, while a small fee is more likely without it.
Annual calendar of events:
March — Shenzhen Spring Trade Fair (LED CHINA & SIGN CHINA) — Annual display and signage industry trade fair held in Shenzhen, covering LED technology, digital signage, and visual communication products.
March — FILMART — annual four-day film and TV market held mid-March in Hong Kong .
March — ISLE — Integrated Systems and Live Entertainment expo held in Shenzhen, focused on audiovisual integration, display technology, and live event production.
March — Zhongguancun Forum — Annual technology and innovation conference held in Beijing, featuring digital human demonstrations, AI-driven panels, and frontier science showcases.
April — CITE — China Information Technology Expo held in Shenzhen, focused on electronic information, artificial intelligence, smart terminals, integrated circuits, and related digital technologies.
April — CMEF (Spring) — China Medical Equipment Fair spring edition held in Shanghai, covering medical devices, health technology, and hospital equipment.
April — Digital China Summit — Annual national conference held in Fuzhou on digital governance, smart cities, and China's digital economy strategy.
May — China (Shenzhen) ICIF — China International Cultural Industries Fair held in Shenzhen, the country's largest trade fair for cultural products, creative industries, and digital content.
July — China Internet Conference — Annual industry conference held in Beijing covering internet policy, platform economy, and emerging digital technologies.
July — WAIC — World Artificial Intelligence Conference held in Shanghai, showcasing AI research, products, and policy from Chinese and international participants.
August — China Internet Security Conference (ISC.AI) — Annual cybersecurity summit held in Beijing focused on network security, AI-driven threat response, and digital infrastructure protection.
August — China (Guizhou) Big Data Expo — Annual exposition held in Guiyang dedicated to big data policy, industry applications, and cloud computing ecosystems.
September — CIFTIS — China International Fair for Trade in Services held in Beijing, covering digital services, intellectual property, finance, education, and cultural trade.
September — World Manufacturing Convention — Annual industrial conference held in Hefei focused on smart manufacturing, industrial automation, and advanced production technologies.
September — China International Digital Publishing Expo — Annual publishing and digital content trade expo held in Haikou covering e-books, digital education, and online media.
September — ICT China / PT Expo — Annual telecommunications and information technology expo held in Beijing, covering 5G, broadband infrastructure, and carrier networks.
September — Yunqi Conference — Alibaba Cloud's annual developer and enterprise technology conference held in Hangzhou.
September — Global Digital Trade Expo — Annual digital trade exposition held in Hangzhou focusing on cross-border e-commerce, digital services, and data economy.
September — CMEF (Autumn) — China Medical Equipment Fair autumn edition held in Guangzhou, covering medical devices, diagnostics, and health technology.
October — Canton Fair (Autumn) — China Import and Export Fair autumn session held in Guangzhou, one of the world's largest trade fairs spanning consumer goods, electronics, and industrial products.
October — Nanchang VR/AR Industry Expo — Annual virtual and augmented reality industry expo held in Nanchang alongside the World VR Industry Conference, covering XR hardware, content, and enterprise applications.
November — World Internet Conference – Wuzhen Summit — Annual global internet governance and technology summit held in Wuzhen, convening government leaders, tech executives, and researchers.
November — National New-Media / Broadcasting Conference — Annual industry conference held in Changsha covering digital broadcasting, streaming media, and new-media content production.
November — Baidu World — Baidu's annual technology showcase held in Beijing presenting advances in AI, autonomous driving, large language models, and digital human products.
November — China Hi-Tech Fair (CHTF) — Annual high-technology trade fair held in Shenzhen covering AI, robotics, biotechnology, new energy, and advanced manufacturing.
November — China International Advertising Festival — Annual advertising and marketing industry conference held in Xiamen covering brand strategy, digital marketing, and media innovation.
November — Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area Cultural Industry Investment Conference — Annual cultural investment forum held in Guangzhou connecting cultural enterprises with financial institutions across the Greater Bay Area.
November (odd years) — Wuhan Design Biennale (武汉设计双年展), Wuhan — biannual government-hosted professional design exhibition, held since 2011. (Not to be confused with the Wuhan Biennale (武汉双年展), a contemporary art exhibition held in even-numbered years.)
December — China Digital Entertainment Conference — Annual digital entertainment industry conference held in Guangzhou's Tianhe District covering games, digital music, AIGC, and virtual content ecosystems.
December — Shanghai International Artificial Intelligence Exhibition — AIE 2026 is a broad AI expo where digital humans appear as one application area
Annually recurring events:
Baidu World (百度世界) - A high-visibility launch and demo stage where celebrity-style digital humans are showcased, and it is also described as signaling commoditization pressure in the market, including pricing compression and scale-first narratives.
Baidu World is Baidu’s annual flagship conference for announcing strategy, major AI capabilities, and product launches, positioned by the company as its top-tier event for industry, partners, media, and users and described on the official conference site as a long-running series dating back to 2006. In the digital-human context, Baidu World 2025 (held on November 13, 2025) centered “real-time interactive” digital humans and livestream-oriented digital human agents as a practical interface layer for commerce and content, including the announcement that Huibo Xing (慧播星) digital human livestream technology would be opened globally, with Robin Li framing digital humans as a foundational technology and even a general interactive interface in the AI era, and Baidu-backed reporting highlighting Double 11 performance claims such as GMV up 91% year over year, livestream-room counts up 119%, and 83% of active streamers having used Huibo Xing digital humans. The same event also illustrated the operational challenges of live, on-stage digital-human interaction when a planned real-time link with a “digital-human Luo Yonghao” failed (black screen/connection failure), which Li publicly described as regrettable, underscoring that Baidu World functions both as a launch platform for digital-human commercialization and as a high-visibility proving ground for real-time robustness.
Canton Fair / China Import & Export Fair (中国进出口商品交易会（广交会）) - A trade-show operations venue where virtual AI hosts and real-time bilingual avatar presentations are used to support international trade presentations and interactions.
Canton Fair, formally the China Import and Export Fair, is China’s long-running, large-scale international trade fair held in Guangzhou and administered under national trade authorities including the Ministry of Commerce of the People's Republic of China, and in recent editions it has positioned “digital humans” as part of its broader digital services stack for exhibitors and overseas buyers rather than as a standalone showcase: coverage of the 136th fair (October 15–November 4, 2024) describes upgrades to the fair’s online platform (including new or improved functions), the launch of a dedicated mobile app to support participation and navigation, and the first-time introduction of a virtual digital-human service, with at least one named digital-human guide, Xiaohui, described as providing bilingual introductions and on-site assistance; adjacent policy and fair-related reporting in the same period links these deployments to a wider push to use digital humans in cross-border e-commerce and livestreaming in a lawful, compliant way, and later items around subsequent fairs describe continued expansion of AI/digital-human style interactive guidance in related trade and logistics contexts and exhibitors presenting “digital human” offerings, framing the technology as practical buyer-services infrastructure and export marketing enablement within the fair ecosystem.
China (Guizhou) Big Data Expo (中国国际大数据产业博览会) - A show-floor context pairing large models with embodied digital humans for close-range interactions, positioning digital humans as interactive front ends for big-model demos.
The China (Guizhou) Big Data Expo (数博会) is an annual international exhibition-and-forum platform held in Guiyang, Guizhou that began in 2015 and is widely described by its organizers as the world’s first large-scale expo themed specifically around big data; in recent editions it has been positioned as a venue where governments, enterprises, and research groups demonstrate data-infrastructure, digital-economy, and “AI+” applications through themed exhibition halls and parallel exchange activities, and the 2025 edition was stated by organizers to be hosted by the National Data Administration and undertaken by the Guizhou provincial government, scheduled for late August in Guiyang. In the specific context of digital humans, the Expo has increasingly treated them as a “front-end” for data-and-model capabilities, using digital-human guides and reception-style interfaces to help attendees navigate venues and consume exhibit explanations, including reported deployments of “digital human tour guidance + exhibitor commentary” style services and mini-program-based digital navigation experiences; it also highlights public-service and digital-government use cases where a digital human acts as a policy-consultation and query interface, such as the Karamay “government service digital human” case described as built on Huawei Cloud AI technology and showcased in connection with Expo digital-government programming.
China (Shenzhen) International Cultural Industry Fair (China (Shenzhen) ICIF) (中国（深圳）国际文化产业博览交易会（文博会）) - A culture-and-tech exhibition setting where “AI digital people”/digital humans are highlighted in dedicated exhibition areas tied to cultural industry integration.
China (Shenzhen) ICIF (深圳文博会) is a large cultural-industry expo held in Shenzhen that has increasingly treated digital humans as a mainstream “culture + technology” exhibit format rather than a niche demo: reported uses around recent editions include AI digital-human livestreaming as a headline application, digital-human presenters and booth “explainers” that answer audience questions in real time, and province or city pavilions that embed digital humans into “smart culture and tourism” storytelling (for example, museum-style guided experiences), alongside consumer-facing experiences that let visitors create a personal digital avatar quickly and interact with it on-site; exhibitors also frame digital humans as front ends for larger AI stacks such as cultural large models and interactive content generation, including deployments described as enterprise “spokesperson/guide” roles (for example, CloudWalk Technology describing an AI-agent digital human used as an on-site commentator) and cultural-model-driven installations that combine digital humans with literary or heritage content.
China Digital Entertainment Conference (中国数字文娱大会) - A venue where digital humans are presented as part of the broader digital entertainment industry stack through culture-tech integration and new formats, rather than being limited to “virtual idols.”
China Digital Entertainment Conference is a national-scale digital-culture and entertainment industry event that, in recent editions, has positioned “digital humans” as a core demonstration and commercialization track rather than a side exhibit: the 2024 conference was described as being co-hosted by China Cultural Entertainment Industry Association (中国文化娱乐行业协会) and the People's Government of Tianhe District and staged at venues including Guangzhou Library, with show-floor setups explicitly featuring “digital virtual humans,” AI-interactive digital humans, and integrated “all-in-one” digital human devices intended for public-facing interaction and content delivery. Coverage around the 2024 “conference + exhibition” format also highlights immersive demo areas where digital humans are bundled into broader AIGC/immersive pipelines (for example, AIGC 3D digital human video-creation platforms and other interactive tech), framing digital humans as production infrastructure for ongoing media output, not only as characters or mascots. By late 2025 reporting, the event is described as having been permanently located in Tianhe District starting in 2024, and the “digital human” storyline expands from devices and demos into applied scenarios such as event or venue services (including references to “digital human volunteers”) and cultural experiences where digital humans “animate” heritage or accompany visitors, reflecting a shift toward operational deployment across cultural venues and large-scale public events.
China Hi-Tech Fair (China Hi-Tech Fair, CHTF) (中国国际高新技术成果交易会（深圳高交会）) - An exhibitor-driven demo venue where exhibitors present “virtual digital human” platforms and products, including examples such as Mobvoi’s virtual digital human technology.
China Hi-Tech Fair (高交会/深圳高交会) is a long-running, government-approved technology exhibition held in Shenzhen since 1999, positioned as a national marketplace for showcasing and commercializing high-tech achievements across many sectors. In the context of digital humans, recent editions have treated digital humans as both an exhibition format and an exhibited capability: the 25th fair was reported as pioneering a “digital human livestream” approach for event explanation and promotion, aligning the show itself with platform-native dissemination. By the 26th fair, digital humans were framed as deployable services, including an “AI digital human 24-hour livestream recruitment” initiative run by Kuaishou with Shenzhen Talent Group, and exhibitors highlighted interactive digital-human systems as part of booth demonstrations. The 27th fair (scheduled for November 14–16, 2025, at the Shenzhen World Exhibition & Convention Center) continued to present digital humans as a mainstream interactive modality, with reporting noting visitors conversing with digital humans on-site, while also serving as a launch venue for Bangyan Technology’s NuwaAI V1.0, described as enabling “one sentence” creation of task-executing agent digital humans—an explicit shift from display-oriented avatars toward workflow execution. The fair’s institutional recognition mechanisms also reflect this positioning: an awards list for the 27th edition includes an “interactive digital human” entry associated with Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (深圳市人工智能与机器人研究院), indicating that digital-human systems are treated as evaluable technical achievements alongside other AI infrastructure.
China International Advertising Festival (中国国际广告节) - A marketing-industry stage where virtual humans are framed as mainstream channels, with keynote discourse focused on virtual-human brand marketing.
China International Advertising Festival is a long-running national advertising and marketing industry event in mainland China that traces its origins to 1982 and is organized by China Advertising Association, evolving from an earlier “excellent advertising works” exhibition into a multi-day festival that mixes award programs, exhibitions, and high-density forums designed to connect regulators, platforms, brands, agencies, and technology providers. In the current AIGC cycle, the festival functions as a high-visibility stage for digital-human use in marketing, where “digital humans” are treated primarily as production-and-delivery infrastructure for advertising content (virtual presenters/spokespeople, rapid video generation, and scalable creative variants) rather than as entertainment characters, with vendors presenting end-to-end toolchains and cost/time claims tied to multimodal models; for example, festival-linked coverage of Baidu Marketing frames a progression from model-and-green-screen based pipelines toward more real-time generation for marketing scenarios. Recent editions also show institutionalization of “AI marketing” and “digital-intelligence ecosystem” framing through upgraded digital-marketing forums run by industry committees and partners (including IAB China) as part of the festival program, indicating that digital humans are being positioned as a mainstream capability inside the broader digital advertising stack rather than a niche demo. The festival’s hosting city rotates, and the 31st edition was held in Xiamen on November 27–30, 2024 with local-government and international-industry support noted in official festival communications, reflecting the event’s role as both an industry marketplace and a policy-adjacent convening space. Alongside showcases, festival programming increasingly treats digital humans as a governance problem in advertising markets—discussing risk themes such as synthetic media misuse and AI-related ad compliance—consistent with the inclusion of “social co-governance” sessions that explicitly frame AI’s impact and risk governance as a core agenda item.
China International Consumer Electronics Expo (CITE) - CITE is an annual Shenzhen tech expo that presents digital humans as part of China’s broader AI industry.
CITE, the China Information Technology Expo, is a large annual national electronics and information industry exhibition in Shenzhen that is relevant to digital humans as a broad commercialization and ecosystem venue rather than a dedicated digital-human expo. The official site describes it as an annual platform for displaying the latest products and technologies in the global electronic information industry, and its current planning places digital humans within the expo’s wider artificial intelligence structure, especially under the embodied-intelligence and AI application context rather than as a standalone category. In CITE’s exhibition planning and hall materials, virtual or digital humans appear alongside humanoid robots, service and industrial robots, AI chips, computer vision, and other AI deployment technologies, which shows that the event frames digital humans as part of a larger industrial stack involving infrastructure, hardware, software, and applied solutions. This positioning is reinforced by official exhibitor news showing products such as AI virtual human interactive systems and AI real-time motion-capture experiences combined with virtual digital humans for face-to-face interaction, consultation, guidance, entertainment, and other applied scenarios.
China International Digital Publishing Expo (中国国际数字出版博览会) - A culture-centric expo that functions as a tech-show setting for avatars, where digital-human interpreters and media pipeline applications are surfaced.
China International Digital Publishing Expo is a recurring national-scale trade and policy-oriented showcase for China’s digital publishing sector, used to convene publishers, technology firms, research bodies, and government-linked institutions around “smart publishing” (智能出版) priorities such as platformization, content digitization, rights and data services, and AI-enabled production; in the specific context of digital humans, the expo functions as a high-visibility venue where exhibitors demonstrate “digital human” presenters, guides, and interactive cultural-IP characters as front-end interfaces for reading services, educational content, museum-style interpretation, and brand storytelling, alongside enabling stacks such as speech synthesis, facial/gesture animation, motion-capture pipelines, and multimodal interaction; the 14th edition was held in Haikou, Hainan from September 21–23, 2024 and was accompanied by the release of an annual industry report stating that China’s digital publishing industry scale reached 1.618 trillion yuan in 2023, underscoring how the event frames digital humans as part of a larger productivity and commercialization narrative rather than a standalone novelty.
China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) (中国国际服务贸易交易会) - A services-trade venue where city pavilions and exhibitors use digital humans for docenting, culture/tourism “travel online” demonstrations, and policy “promotion officer” roles.
China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) is an annual, Beijing-based national-level services trade fair co-hosted by China’s Ministry of Commerce (中华人民共和国商务部) and the Beijing Municipal Government, launched in 2012 and held across major venues such as the China National Convention Center and Shougang Park (with Beijing indicating Shougang Park as a permanent venue and a fixed annual September schedule from 2025 onward). In the context of digital humans, CIFTIS functions as a high-visibility commercialization and procurement showcase for “AI-powered digital humans” as service-delivery interfaces across sectors that depend on scalable, multilingual, and interactive front-end labor, with recent editions publicly highlighting digital-human guides/commentators and other scenario-based demonstrations of digital trade capabilities. Typical exhibition framing positions digital humans less as entertainment characters and more as deployable service endpoints for customer engagement, explanation, and transaction assistance (for example, corporate exhibitors have used the fair to demonstrate digital-human applications in areas like retail operations and related service workflows).
China International Medical Equipment Fair (CMEF) (中国国际医疗器械博览会) - A national exhibition circuit where vendors show medical training systems built on digital human modeling, emphasizing healthcare simulation and training use cases.
China International Medical Equipment Fair (CMEF) is a long-running mainland Chinese medical-device trade fair that functions as a showcase for hospital-grade hardware, clinical software, and “smart hospital” (智慧医院) deployments, and in that context digital humans increasingly appear as front-end, human-presenting interfaces for clinical and operational workflows rather than as standalone media characters: recent CMEF coverage describes SenseTime (商汤科技) presenting an AI digital human used for patient triage and wayfinding, Neusoft Medical (东软医疗) highlighting a “NeuEVA” digital-human agent positioned to support patient communication across the admission-to-discharge journey, and Shukun Technology (数坤科技) promoting a “Digital Human Body” platform linked to imaging-driven diagnosis and broader medical large-model ecosystems, alongside research institutions such as CAIR (Chinese Academy of Sciences) exhibiting augmented-reality digital-human concepts—together indicating that CMEF is a commercialization venue where digital humans are packaged with medical AI, imaging, and hospital information systems to reduce front-desk load, standardize intake/education, and extend clinician-facing decision support into patient-facing experiences.
China Internet Conference (中国互联网大会) - An industry conference that includes a Digital Human Development Promotion Forum track, and it is also described as featuring “plans” and partner recruitment activity around the digital-human ecosystem.
China Internet Conference is an annual national industry event in China whose numbered editions (for example, the 22nd in 2023, the 23rd in 2024, and the 24th in 2025) have increasingly treated “digital humans” as both a technology track and an application category, alongside broader AI and digital-economy themes; in the digital-human context, the conference has hosted dedicated forums such as the “Digital Human Development Promotion Forum” (数字人发展推进论坛) that convene industry and association stakeholders to discuss ecosystem building, policy and standards, technical innovation, talent development, and practical deployment in vertical domains including media and services, while also using the conference as a platform for industry programs and showcases (for example, initiatives described as a “China Digital Human Leadership Program” (中国数字人领航计划) and curated “boutique” exhibitions of digital-human projects) that aim to accelerate adoption and normalization of digital humans as customer-facing presenters, service agents, and interactive media/commerce interfaces rather than as purely experimental demos.
China Internet Security Conference (ISC) (ISC互联网安全大会) - A security conference where digital humans appear as hosts/speakers and “digital personas,” including high-visibility on-stage roles.
China Internet Security Conference (ISC) is a large China-based cybersecurity summit associated with the ISC@360 ecosystem and positioned as a high-profile forum for security strategy, technology, and industry coordination; in recent editions it has explicitly treated “digital humans” as both a conference delivery format and a security topic, using digital-human hosts and “digital guest” participation to stage key sessions (for example, the digital human host "可心" and other virtual guests featured at ISC 2023), while also framing AI-era risks such as deepfakes, voice cloning, and synthetic identity as core drivers of “digital security” practice and governance. It has additionally signaled an ecosystem-building approach by recruiting vendors focused on AI virtual human applications for ISC.AI 2024 and by experimenting with metaverse-style participation models (digital avatars/digital “town” experiences), which positions digital humans simultaneously as a live demonstration of human-like interfaces for security products (e.g., digital-human front ends for large-model security assistants) and as a catalyst for new threat models and countermeasures around identity, authenticity, and fraud. (360 Group is a Chinese internet and cybersecurity company best known for security software and services and as the organizer behind the ISC/ISC@360 conference ecosystem.)
Digital China Summit (数字中国建设峰会) - A digital-government and industry gathering where digital humans are used as “virtual employees” and as booth attractions, including an example of NetDragon’s Tang Yu appearing at the summit.
Digital China Summit is a major annual digital-economy and e-government showcase held in Fuzhou that has increasingly treated digital humans (including interactive avatars and service-oriented virtual agents) as a practical interface layer for public-facing digital services and industry demonstrations: recent editions highlight on-site “experience zones” where digital humans handle conversational Q&A for visitors and are presented as deployable assistants in government-style guidance and specialist desk scenarios, alongside broader “AI + industry” applications; in parallel, the summit’s forum programming has explicitly organized ecosystem-building around the digital human supply chain, including initiatives such as a “digital human ecosystem partner plan” (数字人生态伙伴计划) launched through the summit’s digital-interaction forum track, positioning digital humans not as novelty characters but as packaged products integrating speech, dialogue, and multimodal interaction for vertical workflows in tourism/culture, public service, and enterprise service delivery.
Global Digital Trade Expo (全球数字贸易博览会) - A recurring venue featuring digital-human debates, product showcases, IP stewardship tooling, hands-on avatar creation, and livestream commerce booths, linking digital humans to trade, IP, and conversion workflows.
Global Digital Trade Expo is a recurring international trade event held in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, positioned as a showcase for “digital trade” technologies and services and used as a public stage for applied AI. In the specific context of digital humans, the expo is repeatedly framed as a venue where exhibitors and organizers demonstrate practical, commerce-facing deployments such as human-like virtual presenters and guides that deliver scripted explanations on-site, digital customer-facing staff for continuous inquiry handling, and avatar-led selling and promotional video workflows, including multilingual content aimed at cross-border trade audiences. Programming and media coverage linked to the expo also highlight competitive and showcase formats that explicitly foreground digital-human capability demonstrations, including a “digital human debate” style event and adjacent AIGC-oriented activities, which together situate digital humans less as a novelty and more as a packaged interface layer for digital commerce, exhibition interaction, and outward-facing marketing at scale.
Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area Cultural Industry Investment Conference (粤港澳大湾区文化产业投资大会) - An investment-oriented forum where digital humans are framed as funded, investment-ready “landing cases” within culture-tech fusion rather than as gimmicks.
The Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area Cultural Industry Investment Conference is positioned as an investment-and-financing matchmaking forum that connects cultural projects with investors and partners across the Greater Bay Area, with recent editions framed around “digital-intelligence” driven upgrading of the cultural sector and the commercialization of “AI + culture” applications. In the context of digital humans, the conference frames digital humans as deployable cultural-production infrastructure rather than a purely demonstrative technology, emphasizing practical “landing cases” where digital-human systems are used to deliver or scale cultural services in areas such as publishing, education, and study-tour style learning scenarios. It also characterizes an industry shift in digital humans from earlier, primarily presentational roles toward more interactive, agent-like forms that can operate across multiple application scenes, aligning with the conference’s roadshow and project-pitch format that encourages productization, partnerships, and market entry. The event is described as being hosted in Guangzhou, including activity in Huangpu District, reinforcing its positioning as a regional hub where cultural-technology projects, including digital-human deployments, are packaged for investment and wider adoption.
Hong Kong International Film & TV Market (FILMART) .. Hong Kong annual film market tracking digital human adoption in pan-Asian entertainment since 2020.
The Hong Kong International Film & TV Market (FILMART), 香港国际影视展, organised annually by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, is Asia's premier film and television trade event and one of the largest of its kind globally, drawing thousands of industry professionals from across 40-plus countries each March. In the context of digital humans, FILMART has emerged as a meaningful bellwether for AI-driven production technology in the Chinese-language and pan-Asian entertainment industries, with successive editions from at least 2020 onward reflecting the sector's accelerating integration of virtual human technology into mainstream film and television workflows. The 2020 edition saw the debut showcase of the virtual KOL Ling (翎), co-created by MoFa Technology (魔珐科技) and Xicimeta (次世文化), signalling early commercial ambition in the space. By 2024, major players including Huace Film & TV (华策影视) and Youku (优酷) were presenting AIGC research infrastructure and live digital human co-performance pipelines, with AI tools compressing production timelines at scale. The 2025 edition formalised this trajectory with the launch of the AI Hub (人工智能影坊), a dedicated pilot zone covering the full AI production workflow from pre-production through post and distribution, and foregrounding emerging legal and commercial questions around digital human portrait rights — marking FILMART's transition from passive showcase to active policy-adjacent platform for the industry's digital human ecosystem.
ICT China / PT Expo (中国国际信息通信展览会) - A telecom-focused expo where carrier-grade “AI digital human” calling and accessibility use cases receive awards and spotlight, linking digital humans to communications services.
ICT China / PT Expo is a long-running Beijing-based ICT industry exhibition founded in 1990 that combines a large trade-show floor with the “ICT China” forum and related industry activities, and in recent editions it has treated digital humans as a practical interface layer for telecom-AI convergence rather than a standalone entertainment novelty, positioning AI-generated presenters, service avatars, and “digital self” calling features alongside 5G messaging, cloud and XR entertainment, and other “smart life” demonstrations that operators and vendors use to show how network capabilities translate into consumer and enterprise services. Within this framing, “New Calling” (5G新通话) is promoted as a carrier-grade pathway for digital-human interactions in real-time communications, including demonstrations and case evaluations that describe an AI-generated “another me” style of digital-human calling based on a user’s facial traits for interactive voice/video scenarios. At the same time, the show is used to signal roadmap ambitions beyond current deployments, with recent coverage pairing interactive digital-human showcases with forward-leaning infrastructure narratives such as satellite internet and 6G-oriented “fully realistic” digital human demonstrations, reinforcing the event’s role as a venue where digital humans are presented as a network-enabled service endpoint shaped by operator platforms, standards evolution, and next-generation connectivity.
ISLE (国际智慧显示及系统集成展) - Shenzhen annual expo showcasing AI digital humans, holographic displays, and smart integration systems.
ISLE (International Smart Display and System Integration Exhibition), held annually in Shenzhen and co-organized by Canton Fair Advertising Co., Ltd. (广州交易会广告有限公司) and China Foreign Trade Guangzhou Exhibition General Corp. (中国对外贸易广州展览有限公司), is Asia's largest exhibition for smart display and system integration technology, drawing over 200,000 visitors and more than 1,000 exhibitors from over 200 countries and regions. Digital humans have become an increasingly prominent exhibit category at the show, appearing in combination with holographic transparent screens, naked-eye 3D displays, and AI-driven interactive terminal systems. At ISLE 2025, held March 7–9 at the Shenzhen World Exhibition and Convention Center, Shanghai Sansi (上海三思) demonstrated AI digital humans powered by large language models and virtual digital human technology, capable of natural language interaction and emotion recognition, drawing significant attention from floor attendees. At ISLE 2026, held March 5–7 at the same venue, the show introduced a dedicated AI+ Smart Display and System Integration Application Area, with Colorlight (卡莱特) among the exhibitors presenting full-stack AI display control solutions in that context. The fair's digital human showcase encompasses AI interactive terminals, virtual anchor broadcast screens, and intelligent conversational avatars deployed across retail, education, and enterprise scenarios, positioning ISLE as a key commercial platform for digital human hardware and integration ecosystems within China.
Metaverse Development Forum / Shanghai Metaverse Innovation Conference (元启上海元宇宙发展论坛 / 上海元宇宙创新大会) - A recurring Shanghai forum series combining policy-and-industry releases with hands-on XR and digital human showcases.
The Metaverse Development Forum, also referenced under the name Shanghai Metaverse Innovation Conference, is an annually recurring Shanghai-based convening organized by the Shanghai Yuanqi Metaverse Industry Promotion Center (上海元启元宇宙产业促进中心) under the guidance of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization. Its editions have combined policy-and-industry release programming with hands-on exhibition experiences where digital humans function as the primary visible interface for demonstrating spatial computing, AR interaction, and real-time content generation. The 2025 edition, themed "元启上海·数智新界" and staged at the Caohejing Conference Center on September 28–29, showcased the city's metaverse progress through "virtual–real integration" demonstrations combining video, XR devices, and digital human personas, and served as a release platform for a first batch of 40 metaverse innovation products and solutions that explicitly include digital humans alongside digital content, XR hardware, service platforms, and 3D engines, linking these to Shanghai's application-scenario rollout and district-level project signings within a claimed metaverse industry scale exceeding 300 billion yuan. Across editions, practical demonstration formats have included phone-based AR activations that render digital human scenes in designated exhibition spaces — such as a dancing digital human girl — illustrating how digital humans are positioned less as standalone products and more as an application layer that makes metaverse infrastructure legible to ordinary users, deployable for guided experiences, interactive presentations, and immersive brand or public-service demonstrations that depend on device-mediated perception and scene anchoring.
Nanchang VR/AR Industry Expo (南昌VR/AR产业博览会) - An XR expo where AR/AI guided digital humans are used for route guidance and exhibit explanations, emphasizing on-site guidance roles.
Nanchang VR/AR Industry Expo is a Nanchang-based VR/AR trade exhibition that is commonly framed as part of the city’s broader World VR-focused conference-and-exhibition cycle, bringing together vendors, integrators, and public-sector and enterprise buyers to show deployable XR products and application cases rather than purely conceptual demos. In the context of digital humans, the expo functions as a practical showcase for AI-driven, human-presenting virtual beings used inside immersive VR/AR scenarios and on conventional screens, with typical demonstrations spanning virtual tour guides for cultural tourism, interactive service staff for venues and retail, training instructors for industrial or safety simulations, and event presenters that combine real-time speech, facial animation, and sometimes multilingual interaction. What matters for digital-human work is that the expo environment stresses integration—linking character pipelines and real-time rendering with speech recognition, language models, knowledge bases, and venue-specific content—so the “digital human” is positioned as an interface layer that makes XR experiences feel staffed, guided, and operational in commercial settings.
National New-Media / Broadcasting Conference Circuit (全国性新媒体大会（长沙等）) - A media-industry conference circuit where digital humans are normalized as newsroom-grade anchors integrated with AI editorial workflows and vertical models.
National New-Media / Broadcasting Conference Circuit, commonly referred to as the China New Media Conference (中国新媒体大会), is a national-level annual industry gathering in China that convenes mainstream media organizations, broadcasting and new-media platforms, regulators, researchers, and technology providers to discuss and showcase practical pathways for media convergence, content innovation, and “intelligent media” transformation, with editions frequently hosted in Changsha and structured around an opening program plus parallel forums and themed activities. In the context of digital humans, the conference functions as a high-visibility venue where human-like virtual beings are positioned as applied media infrastructure rather than novelty, including use cases such as AI-driven virtual hosts and anchors for live and recorded programming, digital presenters for short-form and multi-platform news distribution, interactive public-service explainers, multilingual or regionally localized spokesperson-style avatars for international communication, and newsroom workflow augmentation through synthetic characters that can standardize delivery, extend coverage hours, and support experimentation with personalized formats. Because the event emphasizes production-ready deployment and governance alongside technical capability, digital humans are typically discussed in relation to content quality control, disclosure and trust, rights management and likeness authorization, safety and misinformation risk, and operational integration into editorial processes, making the conference a useful barometer for how Chinese media institutions frame digital humans as part of broader AI-enabled media system upgrades.
Shanghai International Artificial Intelligence Exhibition - AIE 2026 is a broad AI expo where digital humans appear as one application area
2026上海国际人工智能展览会, abbreviated as AIE, is best profiled in the digital-human context as a broad commercial AI exhibition in Shanghai rather than a specialist virtual-human event: the organizer positions it as an annual industry platform scheduled for December 9 to 11, 2026 at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre, with an exhibition scope spanning AIoT, AI chips, digital twins, human-computer interaction, embodied intelligence, large models, computing power, algorithms, and applied AI solutions, while the published display-range listing explicitly includes digital humans among immersive and interactive display technologies. In practical terms, that makes digital humans one visible application category within a wider ecosystem of AI infrastructure, interfaces, and sectoral deployments, so the event is relevant to digital humans chiefly as a trade-show venue for showcasing commercially oriented AI digital human systems alongside adjacent technologies rather than as a dedicated digital-human conference.
Shenzhen Spring Trade Fair (深圳春交会) - umbrella name for the co-located LED CHINA and SIGN CHINA exhibitions, held annually at the Shenzhen Convention Center (Futian).
The 25th LED CHINA (深圳国际LED智显新科技春交会) & SIGN CHINA (深圳国际广告新科技春交会) Shenzhen Spring Trade Fair (深圳春交会), held March 1–3, 2026 at the Shenzhen Convention Center (Futian), featured AI digital humans as a central exhibit category under the banner of "AI digital signage and commercial display." Key applications demonstrated included digital humans deployed on LED screens for low-cost intelligent Q&A and multilingual interaction, digital humans functioning as in-store virtual assistants in retail settings, and digital humans used in corporate live-streaming contexts. The full production chain — covering AI digital humans, virtual anchor broadcast screens, and interactive digital human terminals — was represented on the show floor. Exhibiting companies in this category included Wanguo, Bojue China, Ruyuan Intelligence, and Gongxian Shengshi. Digital human technology at the fair was presented in combination with naked-eye 3D displays, holographic projection, and metaverse applications, with the MES Metaverse Innovation Award established on-site under the guidance of the China Electronics Video Industry Association (中国电子视像行业协会). The fair positioned digital humans as a driver of transformation in the advertising, retail, and cultural tourism industries.
World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) (世界人工智能大会) - A staple AI venue for avatar technology demonstrations and virtual human volunteer deployments, with an example noting Digital Domain’s virtual humans appearing at WAIC 2025.
World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) is a large-scale AI event held in Shanghai that functions as a public showcase and industry marketplace where “digital humans” are repeatedly positioned as the most legible, customer-facing expression of applied AI. In this context, digital humans are typically presented as human-like virtual representatives embedded in booths, service counters, and demo environments to perform greeting and guidance, explain products, conduct scripted consultations, host livestream or stage-style presentations, and simulate domain roles in areas such as finance, government services, education, healthcare, and cultural exhibition. WAIC’s digital-human demonstrations tend to emphasize three practical messages: that multi-modal interaction (voice, vision, and dialogue) can be packaged into an approachable persona; that realism and expressive performance can be productized as templates rather than bespoke animation work; and that deployment is shifting toward repeatable pipelines, platforms, and hardware-integrated endpoints that support scaled rollout, localization, and integration with enterprise workflows.
World Internet Conference – Wuzhen Summit (世界互联网大会·乌镇峰会) - A legitimizing governance-adjacent venue where digital humans appear as heritage/storytelling guides, framing deployments as culture-tech and “governance-ready.”
World Internet Conference – Wuzhen Summit is a high-profile annual internet and technology conference held in Wuzhen, Tongxiang, Zhejiang, China, combining policy dialogue on internet governance with large-scale industry exhibitions and product demonstrations. In the context of digital humans, the summit functions as both a showcase venue and a deployment testbed, where organizers and exhibitors present AI-driven digital human hosts, virtual guides for venues and exhibitions, service avatars for navigation and information access, and increasingly “large-model” enabled interactive figures used for multilingual assistance, content presentation, and cultural or tourism-oriented experiences. The adjacent exhibition programming, often associated with the “Internet Light” expo activities, provides a structured space for companies and local government partners to demonstrate digital human capabilities as part of broader “smart event” systems, including immersive displays and integrated on-site services, while the conference agenda also provides a platform where synthetic media, AI-generated content, and governance approaches relevant to digital humans are discussed alongside other foundational internet issues.
World Manufacturing Convention (世界制造业大会) - A manufacturing-focused venue where “digital human + docent + automation” formats are used for exhibit explanation, aligning digital humans with industrial exposition and explanation roles.
World Manufacturing Convention is a major manufacturing-industry conference and expo held in Hefei, Anhui, that has repeatedly positioned AI-enabled presentation and interaction as a core part of its on-site experience, making it a practical showcase for how digital humans are used in large-scale public industrial events. In the materials provided, digital humans appear as virtual hosts and presenters in opening or press contexts and, more importantly, as exhibition-floor explainers that guide visitors through displays via scripted narration, interactive Q&A, and multimodal interfaces such as voice, gesture, and touchscreen kiosks, often paired with “smart” electronic brochures and other automated guidance systems. The convention’s exhibition design is described as increasingly immersive, using metaverse-style framing and XR/VR/AR/3D visualization to make manufacturing processes and products easier to understand, and at least one recent edition is characterized by scenario-based demonstration zones where visitor engagement is organized around coordinated guidance that blends digital-human explanations with human staff and automated guide devices. In this context, the convention functions less as a single “digital human project” than as a recurring deployment venue where digital humans are integrated into event operations and industrial storytelling, showing how virtual presenters and guides can be operationalized to scale explanations, standardize messaging, and support interactive visitor experiences in manufacturing-focused public exhibitions.
Yunqi Conference (云栖大会) - A large pavilion-style event where digital-human cultural/AI exhibits are showcased with broad participation, positioning digital humans within cloud/AI and culture-tech exhibition spaces.
Yunqi Conference is an annual technology conference organized by Alibaba Cloud in Hangzhou that presents product launches, research updates, and partner case studies across cloud computing and AI, and in the specific context of digital humans it has functioned as a recurring showcase for production-oriented “digital human” systems used in exhibition halls, livestreaming, and enterprise workflows, including virtual presenters and hosts, interactive guide avatars for booths and cultural demonstrations, and customer-facing or internal-facing digital-persona agents that combine speech, vision, and knowledge integration to answer questions, deliver scripted or semi-scripted experiences, and demonstrate agent-like task handling; across editions, the digital-human content typically appears as staged demos and reference implementations rather than a single unified program, with vendors and industry teams using the conference to frame digital humans as applied interfaces to cloud services such as real-time rendering, speech synthesis and recognition, multimodal models, and orchestration tools, and to position them as practical front ends for information delivery, sales and service, education-style experiences, and event interaction within broader “AI + cloud” deployments.
Zhongguancun Forum (中关村论坛) - Annual spring Beijing technology forum featuring digital human demos, panels and AI conference operations.
Zhongguancun Forum (中关村论坛) is an annual science and technology conference held in Beijing, organized under the auspices of China's central government and closely associated with the Zhongguancun National Innovation Demonstration Zone, the country's foremost technology hub. The forum functions as a flagship platform for showcasing China's advances in frontier technologies, and digital humans have featured with increasing prominence across successive editions. At the 2024 annual forum's parallel session on Internet 3.0, a digital human rendering of the late scientist Qian Xuesen was presented in a cross-temporal dialogue with Chinese Academy of Engineering academician Jin Yong, staging one of the forum's most high-profile heritage digital human demonstrations to date. By the 2026 edition, which opened on March 25, digital humans and AI-driven conference services had moved from showcase to operational infrastructure: Shiyou Technology (世优科技) deployed an AI digital human all-in-one system as a full-scenario smart campus assistant, the digital human ViviDora participated as a named guest in panel discussions, and the forum hosted dedicated thematic sub-forums addressing humanoid robot advancement and AI-driven industrial upgrading. The trajectory across editions reflects Zhongguancun Forum's role not merely as an observer of digital human development in China but as an active venue for its public demonstration and institutional legitimation.
Biannual recurring event:
The Wuhan Design Biennale (武汉设计双年展) - held in odd-numbered years since 2011, is a government-hosted professional design exhibition. (Not to be confused with the Wuhan Biennale (武汉双年展), a contemporary art exhibition held in even-numbered years.)
The Wuhan Design Biennale (武汉设计双年展) is a recurring large-scale professional exhibition hosted by Wuhan Municipal People's Government, first held in November 2011 and running biennially since, with its founding and sustained institutional purpose being to advance Wuhan's standing as a world engineering design capital through programming centered on architecture, urban planning, engineering, and industrial design. Over successive editions it has broadened to include creative industries and technology, and the 8th edition — opening November 7, 2025 at Wuhan International Expo Center and Caodian Chenhu International Town — formalized this by including an AI Creative Design Exhibition (人工智能创意设计展) as one of its seven main thematic sections, within which Wuhan AI Research Institute presented the Zidong Taichu (紫东太初) multimodal large model demonstrating how AI transforms digital human design, with its associated 3D digital human persona Xiaochu (小初) serving as an interactive demonstration interface alongside real-time virtual imagery installations, immersive environments, and AI-generated outputs across fashion, architecture, and animation. Digital human content is not a recurring programmatic feature across the biennale's history and was specific to the 8th edition, reflecting both the 2025 thematic emphasis on AI as a design co-creator and the local context of Wuhan's AI industry cluster of which Zidong Taichu is the flagship.
Not recurring events:
January 22, 2026 — Moment Conference — One-off Baidu product launch event held in Shanghai; not positioned as a recurring conference series.
Moment Conference was a Baidu-run product and developer event held in Shanghai on January 22, 2026, positioned around the company’s Wenxin/ERNIE roadmap and used as a showcase for “real-time interactive” digital humans as a flagship application layer. In reporting about the event, Baidu demonstrated a digital-human interaction segment in which a guest conversed with a Luo Yonghao digital human built with its Huiboxing tooling, including a deliberate test prompt to reproduce his recognizable catchphrase to probe how well the avatar could mimic persona-specific speech habits; observers described the result as noticeably improved but still limited by stiffness and uneven pacing, illustrating the gap between convincing visual-and-voice performance and the broader ambition of lifelike, responsive digital presenters. In that context, the conference messaging treated digital humans as an end-to-end system problem spanning model capability, voice generation, and video rendering, and framed these avatars as commercially relevant to scenarios like livestreaming and public-facing presentations where authenticity, latency, and controllable character consistency matter as much as raw model intelligence.
Late December 2025 — Moore Threads MUSA Developer Conference — Single documented developer conference held in Beijing by GPU manufacturer Moore Threads; no confirmed recurring schedule.
Moore Threads MUSA Developer Conference, also branded in English as the MUSA Developer Conference and referenced in some materials as MDC 2025, was a Moore Threads developer-facing event held in Beijing in late December 2025 that used “digital humans” to demonstrate how the company wants developers to build complete AI-and-graphics applications on its domestic GPU platform. In the event framing, digital humans functioned as an integration test for the whole stack—real-time rendering, model inference, and application tooling—rather than as a single model demo, and the conference materials highlighted a lightweight 2D digital-human assistant called Xiaomai as a reference experience that could generate a customized avatar quickly and run locally on the company’s AI notebook product paired with an on-device agent and development environment. Within that context, the conference positioned Moore Threads’ MUSA ecosystem as the enabling layer for deploying digital-human interfaces on homegrown compute, and it also presented partner ecosystem work, including an “all-domestic” digital-human solution jointly promoted with Shiyou Technology, as evidence that digital humans are becoming a practical workload for showcasing performance, usability, and deployment pathways across China’s GPU and AI software ecosystem.
September 23–24, 2024 — China Digital Human Conference — Inaugural edition held in Beijing; too early to classify as an established annual event.
China Digital Human Conference is an industry convening focused on “digital humans” as AI-driven, human-presenting digital agents and content systems, positioned at the intersection of AIGC, interactive agents, and applied deployment across government, media, telecom, and consumer platforms; its inaugural 2024 edition was held in Beijing’s Zhongguancun National Innovation Demonstration Zone on September 23–24, organized by the China Internet Association around the theme “digital human applications and the future,” and structured as an opening conference plus multiple sub-forums that framed the field in terms of strategy, core enabling technologies, application scenarios, security/governance, standards, ecosystem building, and talent development, with prominent participation from research institutes and major Chinese internet and telecom players; the event also functioned as a release and signaling venue for sector narratives such as the China Digital Human Development Report (2024) and related pilot, competition, and award programs intended to accelerate adoption and coordination across the digital-human supply chain.
March 31, 2023 — China Virtual Human Industry Conference + AIGC Innovation Forum — Single documented edition combining virtual human industry discussion with an AIGC innovation forum; no subsequent editions confirmed.
China Virtual Human Industry Conference + AIGC Innovation Forum is a China-based industry event positioned at the intersection of digital humans (including virtual anchors, brand avatars, and virtual idols) and AIGC tooling for scalable content production and commercial deployment; reported editions have been staged as a concentrated one-day program in Guangzhou (for example, March 31, 2023) with an agenda built around industry trend framing, practical commercialization discussions, and showcases of “digital human + AIGC” workflows such as synthetic presenters, short-video and livestream retail enablement, multilingual marketing assets, and template-driven video generation, alongside an awards-and-rankings layer that functions as an industry signaling mechanism (for example, “TOP100” style lists) and a speaker roster drawn from platform, media, and tool vendors active in digital human production and distribution, including iiMedia Research (艾媒咨询) as host/organizer and participating companies such as Wondershare (万兴科技), Baidu (百度), JD Technology (京东科技), and 360 Group (360集团), as reflected across official announcements, vendor newsrooms, and event-recap coverage linked in the provided source list.
November 10–11, 2022 — Global Metaverse Conference (Shenzhen Summit) — One documented Shenzhen summit; subsequent metaverse conference activity migrated into Digital China Tech Week programming.
Global Metaverse Conference (Shenzhen Summit) is a Shenzhen-based industry conference positioned as a metaverse and digital-economy convening platform, and it has treated digital humans as a practical, application-led pillar of the metaverse rather than a purely speculative concept by allocating dedicated forums to digital human technology, production pipelines, and scenario deployment; the Shenzhen edition held on November 10–11, 2022 was described as being guided by Shenzhen Municipal People's Government (深圳市人民政府) and jointly hosted by China Mobile Communications Association (中国移动通信联合会) and Shenzhen Municipal Bureau of Industry and Information Technology (深圳市工业和信息化局), and it included a digital-human forum co-produced with Wondershare (万兴科技) that framed digital humans as implementable tools within creator workflows and “video metaverse” production, including an announced strategic cooperation with Ulink Times (优链时代) aimed at combining video creation capabilities with digital human technology for commercial rollout; later Shenzhen editions under the Digital China Tech Week umbrella continued to present digital humans alongside enabling layers such as spatial computing and mixed reality, reinforcing the summit’s role as an ecosystem venue where digital humans are discussed in terms of content production, service delivery, and sector-specific applications in Shenzhen.