China's 100 Digital Humans Plan Vanished Before It Delivered

The Nvwa Plan (女娲计划) is a strategic initiative launched in October 2023 by Zhongchuan Cultural Tourism (Beijing) Cultural Development Co., Ltd. (中传文旅), a subsidiary of China Cultural Media Group (中国文化传媒集团, hereafter CCMG), to create 100 digital human IPs rooted in Chinese cultural heritage and intended for global dissemination. Named after the mythological goddess Nvwa, who shaped humanity from clay in Chinese creation mythology, the plan aspires to do in the digital realm what its namesake accomplished in legend: bring into being a population of figures that embody the full richness of Chinese civilization. The initiative sits at the intersection of China’s cultural heritage digitization agenda, its rapidly maturing digital human industry, and its broader ambitions to project cultural soft power through emerging technologies. Despite its institutional weight and ambitious scope, the plan’s 2023–2025 timeline has now nominally expired, and publicly verifiable outcomes remain conspicuously absent.

The institutional provenance of the Nvwa Plan is essential to understanding its significance and its limitations. CCMG is a central state-owned cultural enterprise (文化央企) established in November 2009, directly supervised by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and funded by the Ministry of Finance on behalf of the State Council. CCMG owns the China Culture Report (中国文化报), which serves as the official newspaper of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and operates the Wenlu China (文旅中国) digital platform. As of September 2024, CCMG holds designation as a Central Key News Organization (中央主要新闻单位). This organizational lineage gives the Nvwa Plan quasi-governmental authority and institutional credibility that extends well beyond a typical corporate project, yet the plan itself is not a State Council directive, nor is it a policy document issued by any ministry. It is a business initiative from an SOE subsidiary, a distinction that matters considerably when assessing its binding force and enforcement capacity.

The plan was formally announced on October 19, 2023, at the Second Ecosystem Conference of Cultural Tourism China Metaverse (文旅中国元宇宙第二届生态大会) in Beijing. General Manager Ran Hang (冉航) of Zhongchuan Cultural Tourism unveiled the initiative during a sub-forum presentation. At the same conference, Vice Minister of Culture and Tourism Du Jiang (杜江) jointly inaugurated the Cultural Tourism China Metaverse platform alongside officials from the China Journalists Association, the China Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection Association, and CCMG Chairman Liu Qiang (刘强). The Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s Industry Development Department (产业发展司) provided formal guidance for the broader metaverse project within which the Nvwa Plan operates. This configuration of ministerial endorsement without ministerial authorship is characteristic of how China’s central SOEs frequently operate: they carry policy-aligned mandates and enjoy high-level political backing while retaining commercial flexibility in execution.

The plan’s numerical target of 100 digital human IPs is verified by the original speech text published on the official Wenlu China platform. Ran Hang articulated a tripartite sourcing structure for these 100 IPs. Twenty digital humans would be derived from China’s top-tier cultural tourism IPs (取材于国内顶级的文旅IP), drawing on nationally recognized heritage brands, scenic landmarks, and major cultural institutions. Thirty existing digital human IPs already operating in the domestic market would be invited to join the Nvwa Plan ecosystem and take up residence in the Cultural Tourism China Metaverse Center City (邀请国内优秀的文旅数字人IP入驻). The remaining fifty digital humans would be co-created with local cultural tourism institutions across China and jointly operated by those institutions and Zhongchuan Cultural Tourism (联合各地文旅相关机构共创并联合运营). This 20-30-50 breakdown reveals a strategy that blends original creation, aggregation of existing assets, and distributed co-production, hedging against the considerable difficulty of building 100 high-quality digital human IPs from scratch within a compressed timeframe. The thirty IPs in the middle category represent recruitment of pre-existing digital human assets into a centralized ecosystem rather than the creation of new ones, a meaningful distinction that the original transcript of the plan mischaracterized as inviting “30 talented domestic digital human IP creators.”

The plan’s operational timeline spans 2023 to 2025, as confirmed directly by Ran Hang’s speech. The collaborative vision he articulated was to work together with digital human ecosystem enterprises and cultural tourism organizations during that period to discover China’s premium traditional cultural IPs and tourism scenario IPs, extract Chinese cultural elements, symbols, and identifiers with historical heritage value, transform them into visual digital content, and further develop them through innovative and creative transformation. This language closely mirrors the official vocabulary of China’s broader National Cultural Digitization Strategy (国家文化数字化战略) and the Metaverse Industry Innovation and Development Three-Year Action Plan (2023–2025) (元宇宙产业创新发展三年行动计划), the latter jointly issued by five ministries including MIIT and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in September 2023. The Nvwa Plan was explicitly positioned within this national policy architecture, aligning itself with the Digital China Construction Overall Layout Plan (数字中国建设整体布局规划) issued by the CPC Central Committee and State Council in February 2023.

Revenue-sharing arrangements are a confirmed component of the Nvwa Plan, structured as a co-investment model rather than simple royalty splits. Zhongchuan Cultural Tourism invites scenic spots, museums, and local cultural tourism platform companies to jointly invest in building digital human IPs, with the company committing to funding between 20% and 80% of total project costs. This investment ratio is calibrated by three factors: the IP’s assessed commercial value, the IP holder’s level of cooperation and resource contribution, and the derivative and extensibility potential of the resulting digital human. Revenue streams are projected to flow from social media account operations, digital anchor livestreaming sales (数字主播直播带货), digital human IP derivative product development, and integration of digital humans into cultural tourism large language models for applications such as automated tour guidance and news broadcasting. Profits generated through these channels are to be shared between all participating parties under what the plan terms a co-win profit sharing (共赢分润) framework. The broader Cultural Tourism China Metaverse platform provides additional transactional infrastructure through the China Cultural Tourism Chain (中国文旅链), a blockchain system designed to enable transaction access, intelligent revenue splitting (智能分账), copyright revenue sharing (版权分润), and data monitoring, with the platform also supporting consumer-to-consumer digital cultural goods trading.

The Nvwa Plan does not operate in isolation but rather within a broader tripartite ecosystem framework organized around the concept of “People, Scenes, Things” (人、景、物), corresponding respectively to digital humans, digital environments, and digital assets. A companion initiative called the Pangu Plan (盘古计划), named after the creation deity who separated heaven and earth, was announced simultaneously and scheduled for formal launch in 2024. The Pangu Plan targets the creation of 100 representative cultural tourism digital twin scenes, mirroring the Nvwa Plan’s numerical ambition in a parallel domain. The mythological pairing is deliberate: as Ran Hang framed it, having joined hands to “create people” in the digital age, the partners would also jointly “open heaven and earth.”

The technology partnership ecosystem assembled around these plans is substantial. At the Second Ecosystem Conference, formal agreements were signed with Baidu for computing power, storage, and transmission capabilities; with Ant Group (an Alibaba affiliate) for blockchain and digital technology support; and with China Telecom through its cultural communications subsidiary. Additional ecosystem partners include Unity China, which co-organized the first Cultural Tourism China Metaverse Innovation Competition; the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), which contributes to industry standards development; the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles’ Online Arts Communication Center, which collaborates on digital human co-development; and Jinshangtianhui Cultural Tourism Group, which brings over ten large-scale “night city” (夜游城) tourism projects into the metaverse ecosystem. First-batch platform users identified at launch include Ning’an City Culture Bureau, Beijing Weijingshu Technology, and Guizhou Xiaohei Technology. The broader Cultural Tourism China Metaverse Ecosystem Alliance (文旅中国元宇宙生态联盟), initially established at the First Ecosystem Conference held in Fuzhou in December 2022, had reportedly grown to over 500 member organizations by late 2023.

The sole digital human IP identified as having been developed under the Nvwa Plan is Hua Shiyuan (华诗远), whose three Chinese characters evoke “Chinese poetry and distant places” (诗和远方), a culturally resonant phrase that alludes to the ideal union of culture and travel. Positioned as a digital employee, digital tour guide, and digital host for cultural tourism applications, Hua Shiyuan was described at the time of announcement as still being in the early research and development stage (还在初期研发的过程中). No subsequent reporting from any source confirms that Hua Shiyuan has progressed beyond prototype, and no other specific digital human IPs have been publicly attributed to the Nvwa Plan.

The most striking finding from research conducted through April 2026 is the near-total absence of publicly verifiable outcomes against an expired timeline. No progress reports, milestone announcements, or outcome assessments have been released for the Nvwa Plan. There is no public reporting on how many of the targeted 100 digital human IPs were achieved, no announcement of any timeline extension, no disclosed financial results or revenue data, and no formal evaluation by any party. The broader Cultural Tourism China Metaverse project received recognition as a Fourth China Newspaper Industry Fusion Innovation Case in July 2024, but this commendation referenced the platform in general terms rather than the Nvwa Plan specifically.

Several contextual factors may explain this execution gap. The global metaverse narrative cooled considerably after 2023 as corporate and investor enthusiasm declined worldwide, with major technology companies scaling back or rebranding their metaverse divisions. In China, AI-generated content (AIGC) and large language models rapidly overtook the metaverse as the dominant technology and investment narrative during 2024 and 2025, potentially redirecting institutional attention and resources. The regulatory environment also evolved in ways that added complexity to digital human projects: in April 2026, the Cyberspace Administration of China drafted new administrative measures for digital humans that would mandate clear labeling of AI-generated digital humans, require informed consent for the use of real individuals’ likenesses, and impose restrictions on digital human interactions with minors.

The Nvwa Plan should not be confused with several other initiatives sharing the “Nvwa” name. Kuaishou operates a commercial platform called the Nvwa Digital Human Platform (女娲数字人平台) designed for AI-powered livestreaming by advertisers. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has an entirely separate project called the NyuWa Chinese Population Genome Plan. Various cybersecurity and software projects across China also share the name. In the broader cultural digital human landscape, notable parallel projects developed independently of the Nvwa Plan include the National Museum of China’s digital humans Ai Wenwen and Tong Gujin (created in partnership with Tencent), the National Peking Opera Theater’s digital student You Zixi, the Dunhuang-inspired digital maiden Tianyu developed by Yuan Yuan Technology, and China’s first Laozi digital human unveiled in Sanmenxia, Henan Province in May 2025.

The Nvwa Plan remains an architecturally ambitious initiative whose most durable contribution may prove to be conceptual rather than operational. It articulated a systematic framework for converting cultural heritage into interactive digital IP at national scale, proposing the 20-30-50 sourcing model backed by a flexible co-investment revenue structure and embedded within a mythopoetic branding strategy that connects China’s digital future to its civilizational past. The quasi-governmental provenance, endorsed by a Vice Minister at launch and backed by partnerships with major technology firms, gives the plan institutional weight that extends well beyond a typical corporate project. Yet the absence of binding policy status, combined with the evaporation of the metaverse narrative that originally animated the initiative, has left the plan’s practical legacy uncertain. No English-language coverage of the Nvwa Plan has been identified, suggesting it has not achieved the global reach embedded in its founding vision. Whether the plan’s silence reflects quiet execution without public reporting, a strategic pivot toward AI-native approaches that have superseded the original metaverse framing, or a genuine failure to execute remains an open question that available sources cannot resolve. Analysts tracking China’s digital human market, projected to surpass 640 billion yuan in industry-driven value and 48 billion yuan in core market value by 2025, would do well to distinguish carefully between the plan’s documented aspirations and its undocumented results.