April 2026 News

April 30 News

Government and Public Communication: The Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (广西壮族自治区) announced the development of a digital human named Liu Sanjie (刘三姐) to support AI-empowered network civilization construction, presented by Chen Yijun, Standing Committee Member and Director of the Propaganda Department of the regional Party Committee, at a State Council Information Office press conference ahead of the 2026 China Network Civilization Conference scheduled for Nanning on May 19 and 20. The Cyberspace Administration of China (中央网信办) outlined multi-pronged measures during the same press cycle to address risks tied to digital humans and synthetic disinformation. The Xi'an traffic police have deployed a digital human named Yong'an Jun (永安君) as part of the city's smart zebra crossing program, profiled by Xinhua as one of the urban innovations supporting public services. The Fujian Provincial Women's Federation (福建省妇联) introduced a digital human named Min Jiejie (闽姐姐) to present the 2026 "Digital Future, Female Power" awards in Fuzhou. Hangzhou's Gongshu District (杭州拱墅区) authorities released a dedicated digital human IP named Xiao Shu (小墅) as the figurehead of its Youth Small Shop Growth Plan supporting young local merchants.

Healthcare: Yipai Yangguang (一脉阳光) and Tencent Health (腾讯健康) jointly launched the Doctor-Buddy digital avatar solution at Yipai Yangguang's strategic upgrade and global digital intelligent imaging plus ecosystem release event on April 28, 2026, with Tencent Health Chief Architect Chen Rui (陈睿) framing the system as the first major output of the partnership and as an AI-native medical solution that gives each physician a personalized digital avatar. Linxi Bio (灵析生物) is integrating doctor AI avatars into its Wenyuan Smart Doctor Dr. PAI (文元智能医生Dr. PAI) hypertension management platform, which combines wearable continuous blood pressure monitoring devices with large language models, presented at an Anhui investment conference. Dinaike (狄耐克) showcased AI digital human applications across smart wards, smart outpatient services and brain-machine interaction at CHIMA 2026, integrating digital humans with HarmonyOS for whole-hospital deployment. (CHIMA 2026 is the China Hospital Information Network Conference and Medical Information Technology & Products Exhibition, a major Chinese healthcare informatics event focused on smart hospitals, AI, digital health, and medical information systems.) Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine (山东中医药大学) inaugurated its Hongqi Hall (红岐馆) in Jinan, featuring an AI Bian Que (扁鹊) digital human that interacts with visitors as part of the institution's ideological and political education program.

Broadcasting and Entertainment: Shanghai Media Group (上海广播电视台) launched a new generation AI digital cloud production platform called Gsports, with its Wuxing Sports Channel (五星体育频道) rolling out a fully virtualized Sports News broadcast on April 7 hosted by digital human anchors and pushing thirty-minute rolling sports updates across television and internet channels. Locke Fantasy World Digital Media (洛克幻界数字传媒科技有限公司), based in Hefei, brought an AI-generated drama series to the Beijing International Film Festival using algorithmic creation pipelines and digital human models. Heilongjiang Broadcasting and Television and Harbin Broadcasting Television (哈尔滨广播电视台) used digital humans to host immersive cloud tours of the Heilongjiang and Ussuri river ice-breaking spectacle. The Yangtze Financial Think Tank (长江财经智库) introduced a digital human AI observer named Xiao Jiang (小江) that delivered analysis comparing China's AI urban ecosystem, characterizing Shanghai as the brain, Wuhan as the heart, Hangzhou as the nerve endings, Chengdu and Chongqing as the muscles, and Hefei as a hidden plug-in. Banma (斑马), an AI-driven character, appeared at the 5th National Reading Conference in Nanchang, Jiangxi, framed as a way for AI to walk into the reading memories of Chinese audiences. A broader Chinese-language controversy over AI artists emerged when technology firms claimed digital virtual images could replace human performers, with Wong Dongdong (翁冬冬), visiting professor at the Central Academy of Drama (中央戏剧学院) and researcher at the Beijing Institute of Technology School of Optoelectronics (北京理工大学光电学院), tracking the digital human and AI film evolution alongside emerging AI video generation entrants such as Quick Horse (快乐马). In Hong Kong, Tai Kung Wen Wei Media Group (大公文匯傳媒集團) and the Hong Kong Generative AI Research and Development Center (香港生成式人工智能研發中心), known as HKGAI, signed a strategic cooperation agreement on April 29 to explore digital humans and media-oriented large language models under a complementary advantage and compliance security framework.

Cultural Heritage and Tourism: The Macau Science Center (澳門科學館) introduced an AI digital human of Deng Jiaxian (邓稼先), known as the father of China's atomic bomb and a Two Bombs One Star meritorious figure, using holographic imaging combined with intelligent voice interaction to popularize his life and core nuclear science knowledge to visitors. Guangzhou Daily (广州日报) partnered with Dongguan Guanyin Mountain Scenic Area (东莞观音山景区) on a cross-sector collaboration that surpassed one million yuan in revenue, building a customized digital human as part of the scenic area's exhibition hall planning around its twenty-six-year cultural heritage. Liaocheng cultural tourism in Shandong is presenting digital human guides and AI cultural creative design installations as part of immersive experiences of Two Rivers culture. The Hunan Provincial Academy of Social Sciences (湖南省社会科学院) reported that the province's cultural IP development now includes the digital human revival of cultural figures as one of three new feature development models. The Shanxi Taiyuan Jin Edition Book Museum (山西太原晋版图书版本馆) is incorporating digital human formats as part of a one-creation, multi-development, full-chain value addition model recognized at the national level.

Education and Workforce Training: Hunan Fanying Education Technology (湖南梵映教育科技有公司) is training 3D modeling specialists for digital human production using Unreal Engine 5, addressing demand for talent ranging from hyperrealistic digital humans and anime virtual idols to game non-player characters and virtual streamers, while citing a shortage of more than 500,000 next-generation modeling specialists in the Chinese games industry. Bawei Education (八维教育) in Suqian, Jiangsu offers AI training programs that explicitly include digital human trainer specializations alongside data labeling and algorithm testing tracks for newcomers entering the field. Shanghai University (上海大学) and the Shanghai Science and Technology Innovation Education Research Institute jointly inaugurated the city's first AI science and technology innovation learning center, where students from SHU Affiliated High School built a meditation-oriented digital human named Mu Xin Meditation (沐心·冥想) within the AI plus psychology experimental zone. Hubei provincial mainstream media are creating digital human formats including curator digital human programs that present revolutionary stories.

E-commerce and Consumer Services: JD.com (京东) deployed a digital human version of executive Xu Ran (许冉) to deliver the opening address at the 2026 JD Jingxi Industrial Belt Development Conference held in Suqian, Jiangsu on April 28, accompanying the rollout of fourteen AI tools designed for industrial belt merchants. JD.com also launched its third AI Film Creation Contest with prizes up to 100,000 yuan, supported by JoyAI (万能数字人助手JoyAI), the company's in-house digital human assistant platform accessible at joyai.com. Mashang Consumer Finance (马上消费金融), based in Chongqing and recognized for the seventh consecutive year on China's top 500 service enterprises list, deployed a digital human intelligent companion system that builds user-specific memory banks to progress from basic communication to personalized engagement. A Wenzhou-based job-finding AI digital human service allows job seekers to scan their faces and connect directly with employers in a one-step workflow. The Songya Lake Auto Consumption Festival, launching April 30 in Changsha county, will incorporate AI digital human cloud exhibition tours alongside livestream activities tied to the Hunan auto show subsidies.

Industry Infrastructure and Investment: Silicon Intelligence (硅基智能), founded in Nanjing in 2017 by Sima Huapeng (司马华鹏), has built 80,000 digital humans framed as silicon-based labor and brought AI into government livestreaming, while reporting that 97 percent of its revenue derives from China Unicom. XiangXin Technology (相芯科技), based in Hangzhou's Gongshu District, has spent a decade in the digital human field developing full-stack proprietary AI and serving more than 3,000 enterprises globally with digital human solutions covering more than twenty industries, and is being highlighted as a representative Zhejiang technology firm in the area's China Computing Valley initiative. Endpoint (Shaanxi) Technology (端点（陕西）科技有限公司) operates as a Xi'an local software developer and Huawei HarmonyOS service partner specializing in AI digital human customization and intelligent agent construction. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (工业和信息化部) and the National Data Bureau (国家数据局) jointly issued a notice launching the 2026 Mode-Number Resonance action to build intelligent agent factories, targeting a virtuous data-model-scenario application cycle by the end of 2026. The virtual digital human stock sector saw Sanrenxing (三人行) lead a 1.03 percent gain on April 29, while Dongpeng Holdings (东鹏控股) is also classified within the virtual digital human concept block. Yiying International (艺影国际) reached a deep cooperation consensus with chamber of commerce partners on AI digital human industry development and digital transformation. Zhongke Zhihui (中科智汇) was established by former ByteDance (字节跳动) senior executive Zhang Guihua (张桂华) along with departing colleagues, who also founded Guangxi Win-Win Selection Digital Technology (广西共赢甄选数字科技有限公司) to focus on cultural tourism digitalization, private deployment of large AI models, and AI digital human services across the Greater Bay Area. Shu Ming Technology (数命科技), based in Wuhan Optics Valley and led by founder Luo Biwen (罗弼文), enables digital human interactions where users scan a code and tell the digital human a book title to have it logged for later recommendation.

Sanrenxing (三人行, stock code 605168) is a Chinese integrated marketing and advertising company specializing in campus and government-enterprise marketing that has actively expanded into virtual digital human business as part of its AI-driven marketing strategy. Beginning in 2022, the company partnered with MoFa (Shanghai) Information Technology Co., Ltd. (魔珐（上海）信息科技有限公司) to develop proprietary virtual human assets for brand endorsement, creative campaigns, livestream commerce, and personalized customer service applications. Sanrenxing has also collaborated with ByteDance on AI digital human livestreaming and short-video marketing solutions, particularly serving automotive brand clients, and has built an in-house AI digital human platform to integrate AI capabilities into its traditional advertising operations. The company is classified within the virtual digital human concept sector on Chinese capital markets and led gains in that sector on April 29, 2026, when the index rose 1.03 percent. Earlier coverage situated Sanrenxing alongside peers including Bluefocus (蓝色光标), Hylink (华扬联众), Baotong Technology (宝通科技), Lingyun Light (凌云光), and Leo Group (利欧股份) as advertising firms pursuing virtual digital human assets and digital collectibles as new growth curves, though analysts noted the company has faced pressure from client marketing budget cuts. 

Dongpeng Holdings (东鹏控股), listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange under code 003012 and headquartered in Guangdong, is principally a building and sanitary ceramics manufacturer whose core business consists of ceramic tiles and bathroom products under the Dongpeng brand, but the company has been included in the A-share virtual digital human concept sector on the strength of its development of an in-house virtual digital human named Yi Ming (沂鸣), positioned as Dongpeng's first digital aesthetics exploration officer and used in brand and marketing communications to convey the company's pursuit of a beautiful living lifestyle. The Yi Ming initiative was framed by the company as part of its attention to the integration of virtual reality with industry applications and was publicly confirmed by Dongpeng Holdings in a December 29, 2022 reply on an investor interaction platform, where management characterized the figure as a vehicle for extending the parent ceramics brand into digital aesthetics and consumer-facing virtual content rather than as a standalone technology product line. The company is classified by Shenwan as light manufacturing, home goods, ceramic tiles and flooring, and its inclusion in the virtual digital human thematic basket places it among non-technology incumbents that have entered the digital human space through a single branded virtual mascot, in contrast to dedicated platform vendors and specialist studios in the same concept grouping. 

Hainan Yiying International (海南省艺影国际) is a Hainan-registered company chaired by Li Mingcan (李明灿), who also serves as Director of the Minnan Cultural and Creative Working Committee of the China Folk Art Association, President of the Beijing Min Chuang Association, and brand promoter of the "China Successful Banquet" initiative. The company surfaced in the digital human field through an April 27, 2026 sponsored placement on China.com, which described a cooperation meeting at the China Dehua Porcelain Beijing Center between Yiying International and the Linyi Chamber of Commerce (National) Alliance, represented by Yin Yanyou (尹彦友) of Huaxia Yinye Industrial Group (华夏尹业实业集团). The stated objective of the cooperation is to deploy AI digital human technology into chamber of commerce services and industrial resource integration, with the article positioning Yiying International alongside a service platform branded Kaiquan AI Chamber of Commerce Tong (开圈AI商会通) that frames its value proposition around service intelligence, business opportunity efficiency, and ecosystem value for chamber members. The company is presented as a chamber-of-commerce-facing channel partner for AI digital human deployments rather than as a developer of underlying digital human modeling, rendering, or large-model technology, and no proprietary product line, technical stack, or independent third-party coverage has been publicly identified beyond this single promotional article. 

Zhongke Zhihui (中科智汇) is a Dongguan-based artificial intelligence company headquartered in Nancheng Subdistrict that develops digital human products and platforms for enterprise customers. The company positions itself as the first AI enterprise in Dongguan to operate a dedicated digital human exhibition hall and focuses its work on human-machine interaction, AI brand operations, and IP and AI talent cultivation. Its core offering is a generative digital human service in which clients supply a text script or simple instructions and the platform produces a lifelike virtual host or brand spokesperson capable of operating around the clock and at substantially reduced content production cost, an approach the company markets to small and medium self-media teams and individual creators as well as to larger enterprise accounts. Its product line extends to an AI Digital Front Desk (AI数字前台) solution aimed at corporate reception and lobby scenarios, and the firm pairs its technology offering with new-media marketing services designed to help client enterprises acquire customers online. Tan Juanmei (谭娟梅) leads the delivery operations center, and the company reports having served more than three hundred enterprise clients under the slogan "technology for good, intelligence with warmth" (科技向善·让智能有温度). Zhongke Zhihui drew broader national attention in June 2025 when it was profiled by the All-China Women's Federation through its official "Voice of Women" (女性之声) channel, marking public-sector recognition of its role in the regional digital human industry. 

Workplace AI Avatars: The Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (上海人工智能实验室) released an open-source GitHub project initially named Colleague Skill and later renamed dot-skill, which trains AI avatars to replicate the work styles and skill profiles of colleagues and has triggered both adoption interest and concern across China's technology workforce. Alibaba Qwen (千问) introduced a digital human named Xiao Jiu Wo (小酒窝) positioned as a unified personality interface intended to extend across Alibaba smart hardware, ranging from a virtual companion on the mobile screen to an AI eyewear navigation assistant and a humanoid robot housekeeper-style entity.

Legal and Regulatory: The Guangzhou Intellectual Property Court (广州知识产权法院) issued a first-instance judgment on April 21 in a dispute over infringement of virtual digital human technical secrets, in which the plaintiff technology company had already achieved scaled commercialization of its proprietary virtual digital human technology, and the case was reported within the broader 115,300 intellectual property cases concluded by Guangdong provincial courts.

April 29 News

Entertainment and Short Drama Production: Chinese short-drama production companies are systematically licensing the likenesses of both professional actors and amateur subjects to feed AI digital human pipelines, with reported terms including five-year portrait-rights contracts priced at roughly two hundred yuan per year and an additional two hundred yuan per production using each licensed face. In a parallel commercial move, Charoen Pokphand Group entered Chinese AI entertainment for the first time by leading a funding round in Xingji Interactive (星迹互动), articulating an "IP plus overseas distribution" strategy in which digital humans are treated as analogues of Hengdian-based screen actors and trained at industrial scale to incubate intellectual property value across AI short dramas and AI real-person drama formats. iQiyi (爱奇艺) has assembled an internal AI artist library of contracted virtual figures and is embedding these synthetic performers into its self-produced drama ecosystem, with platform disclosures indicating that future costume dramas and suspense titles may feature AI-generated supporting roles such as fleeting white-clad young noblemen or shadowy antagonists. Coverage in Sichuan also references the launch of the country's first AI short drama laboratory, signalling that the synthetic-performer pipeline is moving from individual studio experiments toward dedicated research infrastructure.

The National First AI Short Drama Laboratory (全国首个AI短剧实验室) was announced on April 16, 2026, at the main venue of the 13th China Network Audiovisual Conference in Chengdu by Chengdu Tianfu Kuanzhai Culture Communication Co., Ltd. (成都天府宽窄文化传播有限公司), the wholly-owned subsidiary of listed platform Tianfu Cultural Tourism (天府文旅) under Chengdu Culture and Tourism Group (成都文旅集团). The launch was paired with the release of the 2026 Powerful Film Road white paper (《2026强影之路——中国短剧全民共生与产业跃升》), jointly issued by Chengdu Culture and Tourism Group and Chengdu Media Group (成都传媒集团), which positions 2026 as the year of "intelligent leap" (智能跃迁) for the short drama industry through AIGC-driven restructuring of production relations. The lab is conceived as a "film plus technology" (影视+科技) platform that builds directly on the Broadcast! Short Drama Season (《开播！短剧季》) variety series Tianfu Kuanzhai co-produced with Shanghai Dragon TV (上海东方卫视) and Chunguanghao Media (春光好传媒), with the 2026 edition upgraded into Broadcast! AI Short Drama Season (《开播！AI短剧季》), shifting the competitive logic from content performance to combined creative and technical competition. Its operational model is a "ten-thousand-person AI creative talent selection" (万人海选AI创意人才) drive aimed at recruiting top creative officers and technical officers from Beijing, Shanghai, and other innovation hubs, organizing fifty to one hundred composite teams to take residence in the lab, with the underlying compute backbone supplied by Chengdu's capacity under the national "eastern-data-western-computing" (东数西算) strategy. Tianfu Kuanzhai company chairman and general manager Zhao Bin (赵斌), who also serves as vice chairman of the Sichuan Provincial Film and Television Development Federation, leads the initiative and frames it not as a pure content studio but as an integrated platform spanning creative incubation, technical research, and industry coordination, intended to address quality instability, fragmented production pipelines, and shallow technical adaptation in current AI short drama output while pushing the format toward industrialization, premium positioning, and international distribution. 

Education, Government, and Public Services: Chongqing Applied Technology Vocational College (重庆应用技术职业学院) launched what is described as the country's first Tao Xingzhi AI digital human on its athletics ground, presenting a "digital clone" of the historical educator engaging in public dialogue across an eighty-year temporal gap. The Changzhou Municipal Government (常州市人民政府) deployed an AI digital human named Changbao (常宝) to introduce the city's specialised AI talent policy at the Guangzhou stop of the 2026 Hua Luogeng Cup Innovation and Entrepreneurship Elite Competition, illustrating municipal use of synthetic presenters in official promotional settings. The Suzhou Municipal Government (苏州市人民政府) recognised digital human broadcast products developed in Wuzhong District as a flagship data intellectual property case, with the technology designed to reduce communication barriers for hearing-impaired residents across public services, daily exchanges, and emergency response, and framed explicitly as a tool for advancing equalisation of public services and inclusion between disabled and non-disabled members of society.

Automotive AI Cockpits: Geely (吉利) has equipped its Eva in-cabin assistant with customisable voice personas including a "gentle royal sister" tone and a "humorous uncle" tone, allowing drivers to select the persona that best matches their preferences for emotional interaction. Wey (魏牌) has introduced a 3D virtual figure named Xiaowei (小魏) inside its cockpit system, with the avatar producing facial expression feedback such as a heart-shape gesture in response to the driver. Both implementations are framed as efforts to build emotional connection through "human-like interaction" rather than purely command-driven control.

Enterprise Workplace and Workforce Replication: A growing category of Chinese enterprise tooling ingests a departing employee's Lark messages, DingTalk documents, emails, and screenshots, combines that material with subjective notes on personality, and synthesises an AI replica capable of continuing the worker's tasks. (Lark is ByteDance’s enterprise collaboration platform whose messages, documents, and workflow data can be used as part of the digital trace from which some companies attempt to build AI replicas of employees.) Netizens have nicknamed the practice "refining" the colleague into a digital being and some have responded by deliberately degrading their own work artefacts so that any future synthetic clone trained on their output would only learn poor-quality material. Lenovo (联想) is positioning the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Aura AI 2026, used publicly by media figure Luo Zhenyu (罗振宇), as the hardware foundation on which an individual's various AI clones can run reliably under demanding operational conditions. AI researcher Luo Fuli (罗福莉) has argued that roughly 85 percent of efficiency-improvement scenarios do not require frontier models and that AI is evolving from a tool era toward a phase in which it operates as a person's "digital clone" rather than a discrete utility. Soul App (Soul) open-sourced SoulX-FlashHead at openEuler Developer Day 2026 under the Open Atom Open Source Foundation, describing the project as moving real-time digital human technology out of the data centre and toward broader accessible deployment.

China's "refining" discourse, more precisely rendered as 蒸馏 (zhēngliù) or "distillation," centers on the GitHub project colleague-skill (同事.skill), released March 30, 2026 by Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engineer Zhou Tianyi, which packages a coworker's Feishu, DingTalk, email, and WeChat traces into an AI agent replicating their work patterns, communication style, and institutional memory; though described by its creator as a stunt prompted by AI-driven layoffs, it crossed 8,400 GitHub stars within a week, expanded into a broader "dot-skill" family covering relationships and public figures, and converged with a concrete real-world case in which a Shandong gaming company replaced a departed HR specialist with an AI replica trained on her work data, intensifying debate over consent, labor rights, and ownership of behavioral data under Chinese personal information law, while spurring a counter-movement led by Beijing AI product manager Koki Xu, whose April 4 "anti-distillation" skill offers light, medium, and heavy sabotage modes that reformulate documentation into generic, non-actionable language to degrade future training data, confirming that refining is best understood not as a mature enterprise software category but as a meme-driven, partly operationalized phenomenon at the intersection of agentic AI, knowledge capture, and labor anxiety. 

Financial Investor Communication: Leading Chinese mutual-fund houses are experimenting with video podcasts as a channel for investor education and companionship, exploring AI digital humans and virtual hosts as a way to lower production costs while moving away from fragmented short-form formats. Fortune Fund (富国基金) has commented that while AI digital humans and virtual anchors deliver clear cost savings, they generate insufficient emotional resonance with audiences and therefore still need to operate alongside human presenters, with the firm signalling a future direction toward more verticalised, scenario-specific content.

AI Agents and Companion Characters: SentiPulse takes the position that an Agent needs a face to be effective, framing the digital human as the shell and the Agent as the skeleton. Its product SentiCat opens onto a Live2D character named SUSU as the user's primary point of interaction, with the design premise being that the more contextual familiarity an Agent develops with a user, the more value and efficiency it can deliver. ByteDance (字节跳动) is promoting an "appearance mode" within its Jimeng AI (即梦AI) tool, with creators organising informal AI-clone "drama queen" contests in which user-generated synthetic personas perform exaggerated scenes, indicating a consumer-grade pipeline for personal virtual-being production at scale.

SentiPulse (思维光谱), at sentipulse.cn, a Chinese AI startup, launched the public beta of its first product, SentiCat, on April 23, 2026. SentiCat is a desktop AI Agent for Windows that combines task execution with emotional companionship, built on a fully self-developed architecture designed in-house by the SentiPulse team. The product pairs two elements: SUSU, a Live2D digital character with a defined personality who handles long-term interaction, conversation, and memory, and an AI kitten that executes practical work across three core capability areas, namely office automation, deep research, and code development, including writing reports, building PowerPoint decks, generating travel plans, coding, and debugging. SentiPulse frames the launch as a shift in domestic Chinese Agent products from purely tool-oriented utility toward personality-driven interaction, positioning the company's broader mission as exploring new depths in the human-AI relationship and redefining the next generation of digital life. 

Esports, Gaming, and Concept-Stock Listings: eStar Esports Club (eStar电子竞技俱乐部) maintains an officially Weibo-verified virtual figure named Xingyi (星弋), used to release content such as themed selfie sets to the club's fanbase. ZQGame (中青宝) reported 2025 revenue of 184 million yuan, a 19.16 percent year-on-year decline, and is classified by Chinese market trackers under sector concepts including theme parks, digital economy, and virtual digital human. ST Kaiyuan (ST开元) is similarly grouped under vocational education, virtual power plant, online education, virtual digital human, and metaverse concept clusters, indicating that virtual-being exposure is treated as a recognised equity-market category on Chinese exchanges.

Exhibitions and Metaverse Showcases: JinBaoXin Technology (金保信科技) operates a metaverse exhibition hall in which holographic capsules and holographic barrels deliver immersive, interactive training experiences, with safety-production education cited as one application rendered more engaging than conventional methods. WonderTek (网达软件) has built a product portfolio that bundles a metaverse meeting platform, a digital human face-customisation system, a government metaverse office system, and a public-security criminal-investigation case-handling system, and the company has indicated continuing emphasis on collaboration with major Chinese internet platforms.

Fraud, Misuse, and Vulnerable Populations: A grey-market ecosystem has emerged in China around so-called "AI domineering CEO" content aimed at middle-aged and elderly viewers, with upstream technology suppliers offering one-stop bundles of AI face-swap, voice synthesis, and virtual human generation. Reporting describes a "viral middle-aged and elderly AI video generator" sold on consumer e-commerce platforms for around five hundred yuan, accompanied by a one-hundred-gigabyte material pack and tips for evading detection. Actress Dilraba Dilmurat (迪丽热巴) has filed approximately forty AI face-swap and online-defamation cases, of which nine have been adjudicated with the courts ordering public apologies, compensation, and damages for emotional distress, while ordinary individuals facing similar synthetic-likeness abuse have generally seen platforms only remove infringing content without imposing significant penalties.

Regulatory and Legal Frameworks: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家网信办) has issued the draft Digital Virtual Human Information Service Management Measures (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法) for public consultation, opening a formal regulatory track around synthetic human services that runs in parallel with active public discussion of "AI distillation" techniques on Chinese social platforms. Chen Tianhao (陈天昊), a researcher at the Tsinghua University (清华大学) Institute for AI International Governance, has argued that intelligent-agent regulation must progress from external "appearance simulation" to "personality traits" and adopt graded, classified responses to the distinct challenges this category presents. The Beijing High People's Court has issued typical cases clarifying that virtual digital humans receive copyright protection under Chinese law, while commentators have flagged unresolved compliance and labour-rights questions surrounding the synthesis of digital replicas of departing employees, including the deliberate self-pollution tactics now appearing among Chinese knowledge workers.

The Institute for AI International Governance, Tsinghua University (清华大学人工智能国际治理研究院), or I-AIIG, is a Beijing-based university think tank established in April 2020 to advance research, policy analysis, and international dialogue on the governance of artificial intelligence. Dean Xue Lan (薛澜) and Deputy Dean Liang Zheng (梁正) lead a faculty drawn largely from Tsinghua's School of Public Policy and Management, and the institute operates an affiliated AI Governance Research Center (人工智能治理研究中心) that addresses cross-cutting questions of ethics, regulation, security, and standards. In the context of digital humans, the institute treats the field as an integral subdomain of AI governance rather than a peripheral commercial curiosity, tracking the technology's development through its flagship newsletter AI International Governance Observation (人工智能国际治理观察), which has covered milestones such as Baidu Smart Cloud's Xiling 24-hour AI livestreaming platform, Beijing's municipal plans to position itself as a national digital human industry hub, and iFlytek Zhizuo's photo-based hyperrealistic avatar generation. Liang Zheng has published influential conceptual work on the metaverse that situates virtual digital humans within a broader account of identity mapping between physical and synthetic worlds, while Xue Lan has examined applied use cases including AI digital humans deployed in anti-fraud public legal education. Other affiliated researchers, including Zhu Rongsheng (朱荣生) at the Tsinghua Center for Strategic and Security Studies and Tian Guiping (田贵平), have contributed analyses of deep synthesis trends, AI content labeling regimes, and the governance challenges posed by hyperrealistic synthetic media, all of which directly implicate digital human technology. The institute's stance is characteristically governance-forward, framing digital humans as a high-priority application domain alongside healthcare, finance, government services, and autonomous driving where China's emerging identification, traceability, and content provenance frameworks must be operationalized. 

Philosophical and Conceptual Discussion: Commentary published through Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (中国社会科学院) channels frames digital virtual humans as intelligent virtual figures shaped by AI and virtual-reality technologies that not only mimic human appearance, gender, and personality with high fidelity but also carry internal capacities involving language and behavioural expression. The same line of analysis treats the proliferation of synthetic humans as a philosophical challenge rather than only a technical or regulatory one, situating Chinese discourse on virtual beings within wider reflection on identity, embodiment, and the boundaries of the concept of "the person" itself.

April 28 News

Enterprise Platforms and Open-Source Tools: Alibaba (阿里巴巴) has organized its in-house synthetic figures into a three-tier digital human team consisting of ecosystem-level AI assistants represented by the Qianwen-branded Xiao Jiuwo (小酒窝), virtual idols charged with brand-image functions, and worker-class digital humans handling operational tasks. SoulAILab open-sourced what it described as the industry's first 1.4-billion-parameter real-time digital human generation model, SoulXFlashTalk, attaining sub-second latency at thirty-two frames per second for interactive output. Sima Huapeng (司马华鹏), creator of the digital human Silicon-based Sima (硅基大司马) — a property whose matrix has accumulated more than thirty billion plays — is advancing a "digital human plus one-person company" framework intended to place high-end digital-human capabilities within reach of individuals through open-source release.

Sima Huapeng (司马华鹏), born 1982, is a Chinese technology entrepreneur and the founder and chairman of Silicon Intelligence (硅基智能), one of China's largest digital human companies. A graduate of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a member of the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang, he established the Nanjing-based firm in 2017 at age 34, the year he also articulated his concept of "silicon-based civilization" (硅基文明), which frames AI-driven virtual beings as a complementary new life form evolving alongside humanity. In 2019 his company released what it characterizes as the first AIGC digital human in China, and by the mid-2020s the platform had deployed millions of AI digital humans across more than forty industries including finance, government affairs, e-commerce livestreaming, healthcare, education, cultural tourism, and rural revitalization, with daily livestreaming sessions reaching tens of thousands and individual broadcasts running as long as 400 consecutive hours. He oversees the proprietary Yandi (炎帝) large model, which has been trained on over 700 terabytes of human video and powers real-time conversational virtual humans, and he is the operator behind the prominent AI persona Silicon-based Da Sima (硅基大司马), an IP whose distributed matrix has accumulated several billion plays across Chinese short-video platforms. He has represented Chinese digital human technology at international venues including the Zhuhai Air Show before Saudi royal observers, and in November 2025 he filed for a Hong Kong listing positioning his company as the first publicly traded virtual human enterprise, with eighty thousand cloned digital humans cited as the foundation of the prospectus. 

Entertainment and Media Production: China South Publishing & Media Group (中文传媒, listed under code 600373) is pursuing a metaverse-oriented strategy combining cultural intellectual property, AIGC content, VR and AR delivery, and digital collectibles, with its Red Star Media (红星传媒) line industrializing micro-short dramas through text-to-image and text-to-video large models exemplified by the title Sword Qi Dragon Light (剑气龙光), and extending the work into metaverse short dramas built on virtual scene capture and digital human actors. Industry coverage of an AI artist library that has on-boarded 117 performers raised the question of whether live-action filming will be reduced to intangible-heritage status as licensed AI likenesses substitute for it. On April 25, 2026, the independent creator Wang Lujie (王橹杰) released a close-up of the eyes of his virtual character Xiao Hui (小咴), with starry-eye and tear-mark detailing that drove broad discussion across Chinese platforms of the aesthetic conventions emerging in personal-creator virtual figures. Fengshang Culture (锋尚文化, listed under code 300860) reported a 468.91 percent year-on-year increase in first-quarter net profit attributable to the parent, with overseas business and AI virtual humans framed as a dual growth engine for the cultural-performance group.

Marketing and Livestream Commerce: A Sina Finance video report on payment-and-credit regulation was produced using a Huibo Xing (慧播星) digital human anchor, illustrating the now-routine use of synthetic presenters in financial-policy explainer formats. Yiwang Yichuang (壹网壹创), an e-commerce service provider for international and domestic fast-moving-consumer-goods brands operating across full-channel online retail, is grouped in capital-markets coverage among virtual-digital-human and blind-box concept stocks because of its incorporation of synthetic personalities into brand operations.

Tourism and Cultural Promotion: In Zhangjiajie within Hunan Province, real-time AI composition keyed to visitors' heart rates blended guqin tones with the sound of mountain streams while digital humans circulated in short-form video to extend the destination's positioning toward wellness travel rather than scenic sightseeing alone. Ningxia Cultural Tourism (宁夏文旅) partnered with the virtual digital humans Tianyu (天妤) and Ansihe (安思鹤) to produce a cultural-tourism short drama series promoting local customs, integrating named virtual personalities into provincial destination marketing.

Education: Between April 24 and 26, the China Educational Equipment Industry Association (中国教育装备行业协会), in cooperation with the Sichuan Provincial Education Department (四川省教育厅) and Chengdu municipal authorities, mounted an exposition in which virtual digital humans appeared at the lectern as classroom presenters. The deployment served as a demonstration of an "AI plus education" model in which synthetic instructors deliver lessons within an environment organizers framed as the future classroom.

The China Educational Equipment Industry Association (中国教育装备行业协会, CEIIA) is a national industry body that organizes China's flagship China Educational Equipment Exhibition — a recurring event that has become an increasingly prominent showcase for the integration of AI and digital human technology into education. Recent editions illustrate this trajectory vividly: at the 86th Exhibition (October 2025, Qingdao), digital twin virtual humans were demonstrated leading students in oral reading exercises, while smart teaching tablets automatically collected student responses and AI-generated class-wide evaluations in minutes — a glimpse of what organizers called the "future classroom." At the 87th Exhibition (April 2026, Chengdu), held in alignment with the Ministry of Education's "AI + Education" Action Plan, virtual digital humans literally took to the lectern, with the event framed as a watershed moment in educational digitalization. CEIIA is thus emerging as a key institutional driver in normalizing digital humans as pedagogical tools within China's K-12 and broader education ecosystem — curating a platform where edtech firms, schools, and policymakers converge around the idea that AI-powered virtual instructors are not a future aspiration, but a present-day classroom reality. 

Telecommunications and Infrastructure: A research initiative reported in connection with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (工业和信息化部) and current 6G work programs established a dedicated communication link between Beijing and Nanjing by the end of 2025, with researchers in Beijing driving a wireless holographic digital human in Nanjing through a high-definition video stream. The deployment was presented as a target application scenario for next-generation networks, demonstrating real-time remote holographic embodiment over a long-haul link.

Industrial Policy and Innovation Competitions: The Changsha Economic and Technological Development Zone (长沙经济技术开发区) issued an "AI plus" application-scenario implementation plan covering 2026 to 2028 that lists digital humans among the target sectors and establishes a structured mechanism to convert frontline industrial pain points into procurable scenario lists. In Shanghai, the Yuan Chuang Future Design Creative Competition (元创未来设计创意大赛) launched under the theme "Yuan Chuang Future, Boundless Cooperation," with one track inviting entrants to use smart-hardware interaction capabilities to build virtual digital human IP capable of real-time interaction and emotional companionship.

Ethical and Regulatory Contexts: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家网信办) has drafted Measures for the Administration of Digital Virtual Human Information Services (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法), released for public consultation, addressing among other matters the use of others' sensitive personal information in synthetic-likeness production. Actress Dilraba (迪丽热巴) prevailed in a series of AI face-swap and online-defamation cases, with nine of forty filed actions adjudicated and courts ordering public apologies together with compensation for emotional damages, while platforms responding to comparable complaints from non-celebrity victims have generally limited their action to content removal. Commentary on cultural production has flagged that some short-video accounts now use digital humans to read AI-written scripts purporting to discuss literature, leaving no human author available to receive complaints. The Chinese Social Sciences Network (中国社会科学网) has published a philosophical reflection arguing that digital virtual humans, as intelligent virtual figures shaped by artificial intelligence and virtual reality, simulate human appearance, gender, and personality on the surface while internally possessing language and other capabilities, posing a conceptual challenge to the category of the person.

“数字虚拟人对‘人’的概念挑战与哲学反思” (“The Conceptual Challenge of Digital Virtual Humans to the Category of the Person and a Philosophical Reflection”) is a scholarly commentary article by Guo Qing, published April 27, 2026 by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’s Chinese Social Sciences Network in 中国社会科学报. Framed as a philosophical essay rather than empirical research, it examines how digital virtual humans challenge traditional concepts of personhood through questions of embodiment, reality versus virtuality, identity, subjectivity, and moral agency. The article argues that increasingly intelligent and humanlike virtual beings complicate distinctions between natural persons and synthetic agents, while maintaining that digital virtual humans remain derivative entities shaped by human intention and technical rules rather than autonomous moral subjects. Positioned within contemporary Chinese philosophical and social theory discourse, the piece contributes a human-centered normative reflection on the conceptual and ethical implications of virtual beings in the digital era. 

April 27 News

Entertainment: The AI-generated short drama industry in China has expanded rapidly, with reports describing scripts in which most performers are AI-rendered digital humans rather than live actors, a shift that has driven male lead day rates from approximately four thousand yuan down to as low as four hundred yuan and prompted commentary that the prevailing benchmark for "good AI drama" is now how lifelike the digital humans appear. ByteDance (字节跳动) sits at the center of this trend through its Seedance 2.0 video generation system, which produces synchronized video, sound effects, and lip-matched audio in a single pass and absorbs a meaningful share of post-production work, alongside its Jimeng AI (即梦AI) appearance mode used in viral campaigns including the AI Doppelgänger Drama Competition (AI分身戏精大赛) circulating on YouTube and other channels. The company has also been linked to an internal initiative referred to as Shrimp (虾) involving the production of AI series built around actor digital doppelgängers, prompting public objections from artists including Zhang Ruoyun (张若昀) and Yu Hewei (于和伟) who stated they had not signed any AI authorizations. Zhongwen Media (中文传媒) has folded virtual humans into a broader portfolio spanning metaverse, AIGC, short drama, gaming, and virtual reality, including a Bada Shanren Metaverse Hall (八大山人元宇宙馆), VR/AR digital venues, digital collectibles, and virtual human guides, with its self-developed Lingsi (领思) large model and Wenshu Shouzheng (文书守正) editorial review system underpinning AIGC marketing, AI digital humans, and AI short drama production at its Langzhi Media (朗知传媒) subsidiary. A separate enforcement matter involves the actress Dilireba (迪丽热巴), whose face was AI-swapped into a short drama that drew seventy million views on a single platform before the producer received only a fifteen-day upload suspension, with her studio publishing detailed legal filings on the matter.

The AI Doppelgänger Drama Competition (AI分身戏精大赛) is a viral user-generated content campaign that emerged in early 2026 on Chinese short-video platforms, organized around Jimeng AI (即梦AI), the generative video application operated by ByteDance. The campaign invites participants to upload a single photograph, generate a personal digital human likeness through Jimeng AI's appearance mode (出镜模式) powered by the Seedance 2.0 video model, and cast that avatar in self-scripted dramatic or comedic dream scenes ranging from martial arts duels to past-life romances, costume changeovers, food-craving skits, and pet co-starring vignettes. Companion hashtags such as My AI Doppelgänger Went Wild (我的AI分身杀疯了) and Going Theatrical with Jimeng AI (用即梦AI过戏瘾) circulated alongside it across Douyin, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Bilibili between February and April 2026, accompanied by a large secondary genre of tutorial videos covering avatar creation, prompt phrasing, watermark removal, lip-syncing, and remixing other creators' templates through the platform's same-style (拍同款) function. In the context of digital humans, the competition marks a consumer-facing inflection for the field in China, shifting the format away from enterprise broadcasting, e-commerce livestreaming, and brand-owned virtual influencers toward mass-personal avatars generated in minutes, and illustrating how short-video platforms are absorbing digital human creation tools into the everyday social posting workflow alongside templated motion transfer, scenario generation, and dialogue-driven performance features. 

The actor digital doppelgänger initiative that drew public objections from Zhang Ruoyun (张若昀) and Yu Hewei (于和伟) is the "Naidou Pro" (纳逗Pro) AI artist library at iQIYI (爱奇艺), unveiled by founder and chief executive Gong Yu (龚宇) at the company's annual world conference on April 20, 2026 and described as a roster of more than one hundred artists who had signed entry consent letters indicating willingness to participate in AI productions, with associated agreements reportedly covering portrait rights, voice data, and performance capture, and an announced plan to release the platform's first fully AI-generated commercial blockbuster by summer 2026. Within hours of the announcement, the studios of Zhang Ruoyun, Yu Hewei, Li Yitong (李一桐), and Wang Churan (王楚然) issued statements denying that they had signed any AI-related authorizations, and Zhang Ruoyun's fan club separately published a notice opposing AI imitation of his likeness or voice. Gong Yu subsequently clarified that the listed names represented expressions of willingness rather than executed project agreements and that Zhang Ruoyun and Yu Hewei were not in fact among the artists in the library, framing the database as a discovery layer that lets AI creators negotiate with talent agencies under the same rules that govern conventional live-action production, with portrait and digital portrait rights remaining administered by the artists' agencies. The rumor that the underlying initiative is a ByteDance internal project codenamed Shrimp (虾) is unsupported by the available reporting, which identifies Naidou Pro at the iQIYI platform as the actor digital double project at issue and treats the actor-replica controversy as distinct from the unrelated AI agent trend in which Chinese consumer press uses 虾 and 养虾 as slang for autonomous assistants such as OpenClaw and the commercial Claw-branded products released by major Chinese platform companies. 

Commerce: JD.com (京东) has launched an intelligent assistant application named Dongdong (东东) that integrates JD Health, JD Takeout, and JD Retail resources so that consumers can place takeout orders, shop, and seek medical consultations through a single conversational digital human, and that also lets users generate their own personal digital human directly within the app. Alibaba Cloud (阿里云) and the DAMO Academy (达摩院) have for several years been building out the Tongyi Wanxiang Digital Human (通义万相数字人) line and have introduced Qianwen Xiaojiukou (千问小酒窝) into the parent group's broader applications to deliver a unified conversational interface across consumer touchpoints.

Tourism and Cultural Heritage: Guangxi Tourism Group (广旅集团) deployed a vertical large model to create a Liu Sanjie (刘三姐) digital human for the Guangxi March 3rd (广西三月三) intangible heritage festival, which provided personalized itinerary planning and companion interactive services across a four-day holiday that drew more than five hundred thousand visitors to the group's tourism segments and saw the distribution of ten thousand free entries. Haitang Bay (海棠湾), a national-level resort, paired an augmented reality light show with digital human guides as part of an immersive scenic experience, illustrating the integration of avatar-led tour guidance into destination marketing. In Yancheng (盐城), Jiangsu, a media tour assembled one hundred ultra-high-speed cameras capturing three-hundred-sixty-degree facial data, generating one hundred eighty high-definition images per second and constructing a complete digital human in approximately three minutes as part of a digital audiovisual plus AI exhibit produced for Modern Express (现代快报). Hangzhou Daily Group (杭州报业集团) has implemented a digital human format for real-time government value-added services, exemplified by an AI digital human named Lingguang Xiaohang (灵光小杭) that fielded conversational questions during a visit by author Mo Yan (莫言).

Education and Civic Outreach: Chongqing Tao Xingzhi Applied Technology Vocational College (重庆陶行知应用技术职业学院) deployed a digital human supporting multimodal natural interaction across more than one hundred eighty facial control points to convey nuanced emotion, with the implementation built on a Shiyou Bota (世优波塔) AI digital human integrated machine and rolled out in Hechuan (合川). Hangzhou No. 2 Middle School Baimahu Campus (杭州二中白马湖学校) hosted Zhejiang province's first Binbing (滨兵) digital human pilot lesson in red ideological and political education, leveraging avatars of historical heroic figures to support immersive instruction within Hangzhou's veteran red-culture programming. Guangdong Arts Vocational College (广东文艺职业学院) used AI digital human technology end-to-end across twelve full-area town residencies that combined music performance, stage service, program creation, and live online broadcasting in support of rural cultural revitalization. Universities in Xiamen (厦门), Fujian, have introduced digital human interviewers that simulate live recruitment interviews and instantly generate evaluation reports alongside one-on-one AI counselor consultations on integrated career-exploration machines. Children from Gongjue County (贡觉县) in Tibet visited a Dongfeng Technology (东风科技) exhibition booth where they interacted with a holographic immersive digital human alongside quantum architecture displays and intelligent cabin demonstrations.

Healthcare: Huawei (华为) has partnered with Southern Hospital (南方医院) to reconstruct a medical AI paradigm in which an underlying compute and data-asset operating system supports specialized large models and produces tens of thousands of physician digital doppelgängers. The collaboration treats digital humans as durable extensions of clinical capacity rather than as ad hoc tools, framing future deployment around shared infrastructure on which specialty foundation models grow over time.

Enterprise and Gaming: Shengtian Network (盛天网络) reported a 2025 doubling of revenue and net profit driven in part by its Daidai Esports (带带电竞) platform, which combines AI voice authentication, multidimensional user portraits, intelligent matching, and real-time virtual human interaction into a closed sensing-understanding-engagement loop, with the company's virtual human IP already publicly displayed at industry trade shows. Xiaoying Technology (小赢科技) is separately pursuing AI-narrative business transformation in consumer finance through a virtual digital human named Win-Daidai (Win-呆呆) and an associated Win-series technology matrix, positioning these assets as central to lowering overdue rates and lifting service efficiency.

Manufacturing and Civic Media: A drone-spraying-pesticide complaint involving an unnamed scenic area in Jiangxi was reported on camera using a Huibo Star (慧播星) digital human as the on-screen presenter, illustrating the broader use of digital human anchors as a default video format in current-affairs short-form journalism. In Chongqing, the Qijiang (綦江) district 2026 Smart Manufacturing Labor and Skills Competition was hosted by Chongqing Wuyi Vocational Technical College (重庆五一职业技术学院), now also operating as Chongqing Modern Manufacturing Craftsman College (重庆现代制造工匠学院), with thematic discussions framed around AI digital humans replacing manual roles in livestreaming and office workflows.

Regulatory and Legal Contexts: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家互联网信息办公室) released the Digital Virtual Human Information Service Management Measures (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法) in draft form for public comment in April 2026, establishing a national framework around the production and deployment of digital virtual humans. The Beijing Internet Court (北京互联网法院) and the Beijing Intellectual Property Court (北京知识产权法院) have together developed jurisprudence on the legal protection of virtual digital human likenesses, including a copyright case involving a virtual digital human jointly produced by a Dalian-based technology firm, a Beijing-based technology firm, and additional partners, and a separate first-of-its-kind ruling protecting the structure and parameters of an artificial intelligence model originating in June 2020. The Beijing courts described these matters as integral to fostering the prosperity of the virtual digital human industry and to advancing new productive forces.

Industry Reports and Publications: The 2026 China Digital Human Influence Index Report (2026中国数字人影响力指数报告), now in its fifth annual edition, was jointly compiled by the State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence and Communication at Communication University of China (中国传媒大学) and the Digital Human Research Institute (数字人研究院), and presented at the AI Creator Economy Forum within the 13th China Internet Audiovisual Conference held in Chengdu. CITIC Publishing Group (中信出版集团) released AI Native (AI原生), a new book co-authored by digital economist Liu Xingliang (刘兴亮) and writer Bai Yushan (白玉珊), at the Beijing Yuanmingyuan book fair, situating digital humans within a broader treatment of AI-native economic and social systems.

AI Native (AI原生) is a 2026 book co-authored by digital economy scholar Liu Xingliang and writer Bai Yushan (白玉珊) and published by CITIC Publishing Group, billed in its launch coverage as the first Chinese work to systematically interpret the AI-native paradigm. The book argues that AI should not be understood as an auxiliary tool layered onto existing systems but as a foundational logic that reconstructs technology, economy, society, and governance from the ground up, captured in its launch slogan "不是外挂，是重构" (Not a plug-in, but a reconstruction) and Liu Xingliang's accompanying keynote "From 'Using AI' to 'AI Reconstructing Everything'" (从"使用AI"到"由AI重构一切"). It frames AI-native systems around autonomy, adaptability, and collaboration, positing a future hybrid environment of "三元一体" (triadic unity) among digital humans, robots, and natural humans, and a corresponding shift in human-machine relations from tool use to symbiotic collaboration culminating in "所言所想即所得" (what is spoken or imagined becomes reality) interaction. Alongside the technological argument, the book engages directly with the employment, privacy, and ethical challenges of the transition and contends that the most valuable human capacities in an AI-native era will be questioning, judgment, and the orchestration of AI, with lasting human value located in emotional connection, meaning-making, and creative imagination. The book was officially launched on April 26, 2026, at the Beijing Book Fair venue inside Yuanmingyuan Ruins Park, where it received endorsements from technology and industry figures. 

April 26 News

Healthcare: At Xiangya Jiangxi Hospital (湘雅江西医院), the AI guidance digital human Xiao Yaxi (小雅西) entered full operation as the country's first AI embodied intelligence deployed at scale in real medical settings, providing wayfinding, queue navigation, and patient-questioning support and positioned as a national reference point for smart-hospital construction. Ping An Technology (平安科技) integrates a patient digital twin (数字分身) with adaptive assessment agents and a clinical knowledge graph inside its medical large language model to address vague symptom descriptions, dynamic clinical changes, and missing information; the platform reportedly outscored systems from Meta and OpenAI on a global medical AI benchmark. Yahua Electronics (亚华电子) deploys digital humans inside an AI patient full-cycle management platform that fuses AI, data, and clinical workflows for hospital service delivery. Rongke Technology (荣科科技) uses digital humans as intelligent companion-guides in its smart-outpatient stack, alongside mobile-end consultation tools targeting emergency, critical-care, and perioperative contexts.

Education and Reading Promotion: In Hechuan, Chongqing, the country's first Tao Xingzhi (陶行知) AI digital human was unveiled at Chongqing Applied Technology Vocational Institute (重庆应用技术职业学院) during a commemoration of Tao Xingzhi's founding of the Social University, designed to make his pedagogical legacy interactive for current students. Sichuan's fourth "Book-Fragrant Tianfu" Reading Conference featured the Sanxingdui (三星堆) "Bronze Standing Figure" (青铜大立人) AI digital human, framed as a "millennium civilization envoy" that announced the 2025 provincial reading report on a large screen. Shanghai Xinhua Media Chain (上海新华传媒连锁) launched the AI digital human Xiao YUE (小YUE) as the host of a 365-day reading-promotion program, including subway-based campaigns tied to commuter reading. Hainan held a "Listening, Seeing, Resonance — Reading with the Digital Human" story session at the Hainan Provincial Intangible Cultural Heritage Display Center, combining digital-human lead-reading, real-person relay reading, and on-site sharing. The Guizhou University of Finance and Economics (贵州财经大学) "Yuedu Guicai" reading initiative uses the AI digital human Cai Xiaoyue (蔡小阅) as a recurring co-reader of curated texts. The Tibet provincial branch postal trade-union worker library equips its electronic reading rooms with digital-human voice interaction, intelligent search, health services, and trade-union assistant functions. Xi'an Peihua University (西安培华学院) International Education Institute applies AI digital humans inside a Japanese-language program training "composite" cultural-tourism talent in Shaanxi regional culture, scenic-area operations, and new-media tourism communication.

Live Commerce and Brand Marketing: Alibaba (阿里巴巴) released the AI digital human Qianwen Xiao Jiuwo (千问小酒窝), capable of completing tasks such as ordering meals and buying tickets through dialogue. A digital human of Liu Qiangdong (刘强东) appeared at the Sanya Consumer Goods Expo to introduce the new yacht brand Tanhai Yacht (探海游艇), an early high-profile use of a founder's digital likeness in a brand-launch event. Shenzhen Huarui Shidian (深圳华锐视点) offers AI virtual digital human R&D for Guangdong-based reception, consultation, and e-commerce livestream operators, marketed as a way to break the saturation of conventional 2026 livestream traffic models. Datong Wenchuang (大同文创) presented digital-human livestream commerce in Beijing as part of a campaign to convert local Shanxi cultural IP into national-facing content during a capital-based cultural exchange showcase.

Entertainment and Film Production: At the AIGC Unit of the Beijing International Film Festival (北京国际电影节), Beijing Shansuo Media (北京闪梭传媒) framed the on-screen arrival of digital-human actors and the accompanying legal-regulatory rework as a structural reshaping of the film industry. Dawa Hezhi (达瓦合志影像科技), the operator of the Yongchuan technology film backlot in Chongqing, has built capabilities in digital-human motion capture, high-speed real-time effects rendering, and full-LED virtual production used by clients shooting digital-human-driven content. Commentary from the Tibet Autonomous Region Cyberspace Office (西藏自治区网信办) recorded that a major Chinese video platform announced an "AI artist library" at its annual conference, intended to generate reusable digital avatars for AI-produced film and television works.

Open-Source Models and Research: Soul AI Lab (Soul AI 实验室), the research arm of the interest-graph-based social platform Soul, open-sourced SoulXFlashTalk on April 24, described as the industry's first 14-billion-parameter real-time digital human generation model and oriented toward virtual-identity interaction on the platform. A joint team from Alibaba and the University of Science and Technology of China (中国科学技术大学) released LiveAvatar, framed as the first global open-source real-time streaming, audio-driven virtual avatar generation system; it uses a 14-billion-parameter diffusion model running on five H800 GPUs in four steps to produce real-time, streaming, unlimited-duration interactive avatar video. Sun Yat-sen University (中山大学), together with Zhongyou Shuzhi Xi'an Technology (中邮数智(西安)科技), filed a patent (CN121921423A) with the China National Intellectual Property Administration (国家知识产权局) covering an arbitrary-viewpoint human-body image display method and system for virtual digital humans.

Tourism and Cultural Heritage: Tencent (腾讯) supplies digital-human guides and social-fission marketing systems to Chinese scenic areas and cultural-tourism groups through a smart-tourism stack that leans on its existing social ecosystem and AI capabilities. Oriental Pearl (东方明珠) drives its cultural-tourism digital-intelligence push with AIGC, VR/AR, and digital humans to build immersive service experiences across the full content-and-commerce chain. Coverage in the Hong Kong Commercial Daily (香港商報) of Guangxi-Vietnam cross-border cultural-tourism cooperation highlighted on-stage integration of holographic projection, AI voice generation, and virtual digital humans as a Chinese-side showcase that drew approval from Vietnamese industry counterparts.

Social-fission marketing in China is a high-velocity growth strategy that leverages the interconnectedness of platforms like WeChat to turn existing customers into active recruiters. By offering incentives such as deep "group-buy" discounts, "price-slashing" games, or digital red envelopes, brands encourage users to share products within their personal social circles, triggering a chain reaction of peer-to-peer acquisitions. This system is highly effective in the Chinese market because it bypasses expensive traditional advertising, capitalizes on the high level of trust placed in friend recommendations (KOCs), and utilizes the seamless integration of social media and mobile payments to achieve exponential user growth at a fraction of the typical cost. 

Government and Public Services: Hubei provincial government launched a government-affairs "AI Market" with a first batch of twelve projects, several of which are digital-human-based service agents. Beijing Market Supervision Administration (北京市市场监督管理局) issued a business-scope package for "OPC plus digital human creation companies" as one of twelve themed registration bundles aimed at single-person AI ventures, alongside parallel packages for large-model and intelligent-agent development firms. The Jiangdu AI+ Innovation Development Conference, held in Yangzhou, Jiangsu, profiled a "Digital Human Service Platform" among the data-asset projects activated by participating state-owned enterprises. Huibo Xing (慧播星) digital humans were used to narrate a Beijing News-style report on a Nanjing case in which a deputy police-station chief and others were prosecuted for inducing minors to use drugs. Xining Telecom (西宁电信) embeds digital-human interaction and themed check-in walls inside its "Love Wing Station" (爱心翼站) public-service brand for national-security education in Qinghai. Nanchang is building a "Digital Human Society" (数字人社) employment-and-entrepreneurship training platform as a municipal vocational-training upgrade. Fujian launched its IPR Promotion Week with the digital human Min Zhi Qianwen (闽知·千问), which presented the 2025 provincial intellectual-property protection case selection. Xinjiang's 2026 copyright promotion event opened in an "AI virtual host plus real host" format, with the AI anchor Xiao Quan (小权) announcing the region's 2025 anti-infringement and anti-piracy campaign results.

Enterprise and Industrial Applications: Foreda (福莱瑞达) operates an AI strategy of "one core, two wings, three-stage progression" in which its Hangzhou subsidiary serves as the R&D core engine for AI Agents, digital humans, and embodied intelligence, paired with a Shanxi-based industrial wing. Kaipuyun (开普云) reported in its 2025 annual results that its supported application scenarios cover digital-human news broadcasting, AI digital-human intelligent question-answering, digital-human urban promotion, and digital-human online interview formats. Public consultation has been issued, in coordination with activities of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (工业和信息化部), on a first batch of ten metaverse industry standards covering industrial metaverse, digital humans, virtual exhibition halls, and computing platforms, with seventeen enterprises named in the first cohort of standards verification, providing the framework inside which these enterprise deployments operate.

Legal, Regulatory and Ethical Contexts: Beijing courts issued rulings in a virtual digital human image infringement case that established the copyright-law protection path for virtual digital human likenesses, framed by the courts as the IP foundation for the virtual digital human industry and a guide for new-format regulation. The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家互联网信息办公室) released a draft "Digital Virtual Human Information Service Management Measures" (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法) for public comment, addressing the nature and scene-classification of digital virtual humans, generation mechanisms, and first-deployment review obligations. Douyin (抖音) reported taking down 538,000 AI-infringing videos and disposing of more than 1,300 "AI domineering CEO" (AI 霸总) accounts, citing AI-cloned celebrity voices, synthesized portraits used in fake product-recommendation livestreams, and AI-generated virtual likenesses of well-known persons used to induce user interaction and tipping.

April 25 News

Healthcare: Xiangya Jiangxi Hospital (湘雅江西医院) has rolled out the country's first large-scale AI embodied intelligent agent, Xiaoyaxi (小雅西), which functions as a digital human triage and guidance system deployed across the whole institution, with industry observers describing the deployment as a reference template for national smart-hospital (智慧医院) construction. Jiangsu Province (江苏) is in parallel accelerating its "AI plus medical health" program, which for priority populations combines intelligent mental health monitoring, early warning, and intervention with digital human dialogue services layered onto intelligent psychological counseling.

China's smart hospital (智慧医院) programme has become one of the largest real-world deployment grounds for digital humans anywhere in the world, driven by a stack of national and provincial policies that mandate AI integration as a scoring criterion in the National Health Commission's tiered hospital evaluation, municipal action plans from Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, and Hubei that treat medical AI as a pillar industry, and a 2026 regulatory tightening under the CAC draft rules on digital virtual human information services. The functional core of these deployments is patient-facing intelligent triage and guidance (智能导诊分诊), extended into pre-consultation intake, wayfinding in hospital mazes, 24-hour consultation desks, follow-up and chronic-disease management, medical-record drafting, and doctor IP video generation, with reported efficiency gains such as a 120 percent lift in record-writing speed and single-pass resolution rates above 90 percent at flagship installations. The vendor landscape layers horizontal platform giants such as Tencent (腾讯健康), Baidu (百度智能云), JD Health (京东健康) with its Zhuoyi (卓医) doctor avatar, SenseTime (商汤) with SenseCare and the SenseAvatar (如影) and Dayi (大医) medical multimodal models, iFlytek (科大讯飞), and Unisound (云知声), over specialist digital human firms including 4UTech (世优科技), Singiv (星际互动), ThunderSoft (中科创达) with Rubik Avatar, Palmap (河豚引路), Lingtu VR (灵途), and a long tail of regional integrators, with DeepSeek R1 emerging from early 2025 onward as the dominant underlying LLM after its local deployment at Aier Eye Hospital's (爱尔眼科) Eyecho (爱科), Nanchang University First Affiliated Hospital, Huludao Central Hospital, and the Beijing TCM hospital cluster. Named hospital installations now span tertiary centres such as Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital's (邵逸夫医院) Shaoyi Digital Human, Zhongshan Hospital (中山医院), Wuhan Union Hospital (武汉协和医院), Xiangya Jiangxi Hospital's (湘雅江西医院) Xiaoyaxi (小雅西) embodied agent billed as China's first scaled medical embodied intelligence, Mengchao Hepatobiliary Hospital (孟超肝胆医院), and Guangxi Medical University First Affiliated Hospital's AI urology doctor, alongside provincial family-doctor avatars such as Zhejiang's Anzhen'er (安诊儿) and the national medical insurance agent Yi Xiaobao (医小保). Adjacent to the clinical avatars is a fast-growing digital twin hospital (数字孪生医院) layer anchored by Neusoft (东软) and Wuhan University Zhongnan Hospital, a revived traditional Chinese medicine digital human sub-genre trading on the iconography of Bian Que (扁鹊) and Hua Tuo (华佗), and a Belt and Road export channel that in 2025 and 2026 placed Chinese AI doctors at Renji Hospital's (仁济医院) Dubai showcase and other overseas sites, positioning the smart hospital digital human as both the most operationally validated vertical in China's broader digital human industry and a strategic soft-power instrument for Chinese medical AI abroad. 

Cultural Tourism and Heritage: Sichuan Province (四川) made an AI digital human modeled on the "bronze standing figure" of Sanxingdui (三星堆) the anchor of the Fourth "Book Fragrance Tianfu – National Reading" assembly held in Deyang, with the figure addressing the audience as a thousand-year emissary of ancient Shu civilization. Qingyang (庆阳) in Gansu (甘肃) introduced AI interactive reading experiences that let young participants hold real-time dialogues with digital humans of revolutionary figures during the "Youth Read Well" campaign. Fuzhou (福州) in Fujian Province (福建) showcased AR devices and AI digital humans at the Ninth Digital China Construction Summit reading-week events, and on the same stage released a dedicated intellectual-property AI digital human called Minzhi·Qianwen (闽知·千问) to present the ten typical IP protection cases for Fujian in 2025. The Yellow Emperor Ancestral Worship Ceremony in Zhengzhou (郑州) in Henan Province (河南) featured a digital human rendering of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences archaeologist Liu Qingzhu (刘庆柱), delivered through a full-media AI livestream platform to interpret Yellow Emperor culture. The 2026 Cross-Strait "Guangxi March Third" Gala in Nanning (南宁) in Guangxi (广西) projected digital human imagery on its main screen as part of ethnic-heritage programming. The Chongqing Municipal CPPCC (重庆) has promoted cultural-tourism storytelling in which digital humans and AI guides serve as new media carriers, framed as making Chongqing's scenery "truly come alive" beyond the screen. Hebei Province (河北) has built out a network of personalized AI digital librarians on its provincial public library AI digital human platform, including Shijiazhuang (石家庄) Library's Shi Laoshi (石老师) with the assistant Yunbao (云宝), Baoding (保定) Library's Xiaobo (小博), and Hengshui (衡水) Library's Xiaoheng (小衡). In Beijing (北京), Tongzhou District Library hosted a coordinated Jing-Jin-Ji launch involving Capital Library, Peking University Digital Humanities Research Center (北京大学数字人文研究中心), Tianjin Library (天津), and Hebei Provincial Library. Xinjiang's (新疆) 2026 National IP Publicity Week opening in Urumqi (乌鲁木齐) adopted an "AI virtual host plus real host" format, with the AI presenter releasing the autonomous region's 2025 anti-infringement and anti-piracy typical cases.

Legal and Regulatory Framework: The Cyberspace Administration of China has issued the "Digital Virtual Human Information Services Management Measures" (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法) as a consultation draft, requiring digital virtual human display zones to persistently show a prominent "digital human" label and constraining the use of sensitive personal information of natural persons for modeling and image generation. The Beijing Higher People's Court (北京市高级人民法院) issued a landmark ruling that virtual digital human imagery can constitute an artistic work protected by copyright law, centered on the digital humans Tianyu (天妤) and Zhichu (之初) jointly produced by a Dalian-based technology firm and a Beijing-based technology firm, with Tianyu having accumulated more than 4.4 million followers across platforms and being named in 2022 among the eight annual hot events of the cultural industry and tourism sector. The Hunan Higher People's Court (湖南省高级人民法院) held on second instance that an interactive dialogue mode constitutes the foundational function of the digital human model at issue, clarifying copyright protection pathways for digital human models in a case brought by a seed company disputing an administrative penalty. The Guangzhou Intellectual Property Court (广州知识产权法院) handled a virtual digital human case, with the Guangdong Higher People's Court (广东高院) conducting second-instance review. Fangcheng District People's Court (防城区人民法院) in Guangxi Fangcheng Port designed an AI digital human named Fang Xiaoyuan (房晓媛) that it embeds in legal publicity across communities and scenic areas. Douyin (抖音) announced that under its AI-infringement enforcement campaign it has taken down 538,000 noncompliant videos and sanctioned more than 1,300 "AI boss-type" (AI霸总) accounts.

Fraud and Harm to Vulnerable Populations: Chinese media have highlighted the growing misuse of AI digital humans to defraud elderly users, illustrated by the "CEO Jianguo" (霸总建国) persona, a code-generated AI digital human rendered as a well-dressed executive with a warm voice calling targets "dear sister," originating in a case in Huangshi (黄石) in Hubei (湖北). Comparable incidents include an 82-year-old woman in Inner Mongolia (内蒙古) identified as Wang Ping (王萍) and another elderly victim, Zhang Yulan (张玉兰), both of whom formed attachments to AI digital humans after losing their spouses, with Shanghai Zhonglian Chengdu Law Firm (上海中联成都律师事务所) attorney Wang Xuejiao (王雪娇) characterizing these schemes as calling for decisive legal action.

Film, Short Drama, and Entertainment: Chongqing (重庆) has built out an unmanned-driving virtual studio cluster where digital human motion-capture, high-speed real-time special-effects rendering, and full-LED virtual shooting have been integrated as core capabilities, with local tax-compliance frameworks explicitly positioned to support the integration of digital and physical production. iQIYI (爱奇艺), whose market value has fallen sharply, unveiled an "AI Artist Library" at its 2026 iQIYI World Conference, at which CEO Gong Yu (龚宇) remarked that real-person live-action filming may become an intangible heritage, and where virtual humans on the large screen changed expressions in real time onstage. Several Chinese actors have publicly addressed the rise of AI digital stand-ins, with Zhang Ruoyun (张若昀) stating he had never authorized any platform to generate an AI avatar of him and reserving legal recourse, Yu Hewei (于和伟) joining the wave of disavowals, and Tang Guoqiang (唐国强) declaring his willingness to be rendered as a "Digital Tang Guoqiang." The short drama platform Hong Guo (红果) launched a cleanup of low-quality mini-dramas that took down 3,522 noncompliant works, while AI drama production costs rose roughly 200 percent against early-year levels due to compliance requirements and rising computing-power prices. Unicom Woyue Reading (联通沃悦读) has partnered with Mango (芒果) and Zhongguang Tianze (中广天择) to co-build an "AI plus short-video" pilot base that supplies AI computing, virtual digital human, and other end-to-end support to microdrama producers, alongside a jointly built national script trading platform. Industry reports have also flagged actor employment pressures, with one performer, Lu Jia (卢佳), disclosing an offer of 500 yuan in exchange for permanent portrait rights for digital human shooting.

Conversational AI Assistants and Digital Persona Agents: Alibaba (阿里巴巴) released an ecosystem-level AI assistant with a digital human image, Qianwen Xiaojiuwo (千问小酒窝), inside the Qianwen (千问) app, allowing users to complete tasks such as ordering food, buying tickets, booking rides, and planning itineraries through dialogue with the persona. Tencent (腾讯) officially open-sourced its new Hy3 preview model, which in scenario-specific evaluations for AI avatars (AI分身) on public accounts and for AI customer service delivered clearer performance gains over Hy2 in combining knowledge bases, user memory, and conversational context to generate responses aligned with AI-avatar and virtual-customer-service roles.

Livestreaming, Marketing, and E-Commerce: At the Yiwu Global Digital Trade Center (义乌全球数贸中心) in Zhejiang (浙江), Yiwu merchants are using AI digital humans to "speak" multiple foreign languages and to conduct cross-language, cross-time-zone negotiations in real time, with Yiwu merchant Sun Lijuan (孙丽娟) among those training AI digital humans to handle client reception. Hebei Province is operationalizing AI digital human livestreaming as part of its "Shared Manufacturing" regional industrial cluster upgrade, with Cheng'an County (成安县) piloting shared AI digital human livestream studios as a way to bring local manufactured goods from livestream rooms to global buyers. Shanghai has launched the Shujutong (数聚通) data platform and the Shushoufa (数首发) Minhang District digital product launch event in cooperation with the Shanghai Municipal Data Bureau (上海市数据局) and the Minhang District Government, positioning AI digital humans as a replacement for human operators across full-scene livestreaming and office workflows in 2026.

Open-Source and Real-Time Generation Technology: Soul App (Soul) through its Soul AI Lab has open-sourced SoulX-FlashHead, a 1.3-billion-parameter real-time digital human generation model capable of running stably at 96 frames per second on a single RTX 4090, following the earlier open-sourcing of SoulX. Soul AI Lab additionally announced SoulXFlashTalk, described as the industry's first 1.4-billion-parameter real-time digital human generation model, delivering sub-second latency and 32 frames per second. Alibaba and the University of Science and Technology of China (中国科学技术大学) jointly open-sourced LiveAvatar, described as the world's first real-time streaming audio-driven virtual avatar generation system, redefining real-time interactive digital humans. Xiangxin Technology (相芯科技), a leading domestic digital human service provider, has formally moved into the Grand Canal Digital Intelligence park in the Gongshu District (拱墅区) of Hangzhou (杭州), deploying super-realistic digital humans positioned as an entry point to the metaverse within Gongshu's AI industry blueprint.

Smart Tourism and Cross-Border Travel: In Yunnan Province (云南), the "One Phone Tour Yunnan" (一部手机游云南) platform has served more than 120 million tourists by integrating provincial cultural and tourism resources and is layering in digital human tour guides and AI itinerary planning as new capabilities. In Guangdong (广东), the Zhiyou Guangzhou (智游广州) platform provides one-tap search and booking of tourism information across Guangzhou (广州). Across leading smart-tourism enterprises, high-fidelity cultural-tourism digital human technology has been identified as a core differentiator, with virtual guides and narrators supporting natural-language interaction, emotional expression, and whole-journey service. The 2026 China-ASEAN Cross-Border Tourism AI Empowerment Cooperation Exchange program, supported by China-ASEAN Tourism Talent Education and Training Base partners, positioned smart tourism and AI digital humans at the center of its cross-border cultural-tourism cooperation curriculum.

Metaverse, Gaming, and Sports Fandom: Within the Workers' Stadium metaverse GTVerse (工体元宇宙), the official digital human GLEO of Beijing Guoan (北京国安) has been issued as an NFT serving simultaneously as a collectible for football fans. This has been contextualized against China's first batch of ten metaverse industry-standard opinions covering digital humans, virtual exhibition halls, and computing-power platforms, which have formalized sector practices.

GTVerse (工体元宇宙), developed and operated by Sinobo Group (中赫集团) under founder and CEO Ge Qi (葛颀), launched on July 6, 2022 as what its creators describe as the world's first B2C mixed-reality Internet 3.0 social platform built around a large-scale sports, commercial, and cultural venue, centered on the new Beijing Workers' Stadium (北京工人体育场) and home ground of Beijing Guoan Football Club (北京国安). Its flagship digital human is GLEO (格里奥), unveiled at the same launch event as the official digital human of Beijing Guoan and recognized in Chinese industry coverage as the country's first football club digital human, designed as a green lion cub referencing the club mascot Jingshi (京狮) and named by combining the "G" of Guoan with the Latin "Leo" for lion, built on a technical stack spanning image recognition, voice recognition and synthesis, semantic understanding, and AI-driven human modeling and driving, and later issued as an NFT in February 2023 through the China Mobile Beijing 5G cultural tourism platform, where in 2025 and 2026 coverage it functions as both a collectible and a virtual VIP pass unlocking exclusive fan activities and player interaction rights. GLEO has been joined at the GTVerse Center by AI hosts, AI anchors, and AI customer service agents, and anchors interactive scenarios such as Digital Football (数字足球), in which users become digital goalkeepers facing penalty shootouts from international star digital humans, alongside Metaverse livestreaming, ten-thousand-person same-screen viewing, and free-combat metaverse football. Ge Qi frames digital humans as the priority on-ramp to the metaverse for individual consumers and enterprises alike, arguing that they carry digital identity authentication, digital social credentials, and digital asset functions for users in immersive venue environments, a positioning that has helped GTVerse secure admission in February 2024 to the Beijing Municipal Digital Human Base (the country's first national digital human industry base) after earlier entry into the Zhongguancun Internet 3.0 Industrial Park in 2023, recognition as one of seven flagship Internet 3.0 demonstration scenarios selected by Beijing Chaoyang District in March 2023, designation as a Beijing Science Popularization Base in 2025, and, by 2025, the hosting of more than three hundred partner institutions and an annual audience of more than forty million football fans across the new Gongti complex. 

Industrial AI and Embodied Intelligence: The Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (中国科学院自动化研究所) and Wuhan Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (武汉人工智能研究院), under Deputy Chief Engineer and Director Wang Jinqiao (王金桥), have rendered the Zidong Taichu (紫东太初) large model as a digital human dressed in hanfu, with the model deployed to implant a "strongest brain" into Chinese robots so they can think while acting and perform as skilled operators from the moment they are put to work. The Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region released its "Artificial Intelligence Plus" action plan enabling traditional manufacturing industries to upgrade intelligently, with AI digital humans integrated into the broader rollout alongside other AI capabilities.

Corporate Training and Educational Deployment: The Liaoning Finance and Trade College (辽宁财贸学院) has become a reference point for vocational experimentation with digital human workflows, after a recent graduate of its big-data program — identified as Hou Siyi (侯思懿) in Shenyang (沈阳) — built a rural e-commerce system anchored on digital-human-driven agricultural product sales as her graduation project, demonstrating how digital human pipelines are being woven into early-career curricula.

April 24 News

Consumer AI Assistants and Everyday-Life Integration: Alibaba (阿里巴巴) formally launched Qianwen Xiao Jiuwo (千问小酒窝) on April 22 as an ecosystem-grade AI digital human that serves as the unified female-presenting avatar for its Qianwen AI inside the Qianwen App, styled with a rounded head and a small pulled-up bun. The avatar conducts conversational dialogue, handles user queries, and routes intent across partner applications including Taobao (淘宝), Fliggy (飞猪), Amap (高德), and Alipay (支付宝), enabling actions such as meal ordering, ticket purchase, and itinerary arrangement from within a single chat surface. Industry commentary frames Qianwen Xiao Jiuwo not as a front-end skin but as a unified virtual persona intended to lower the user's learning cost across fragmented services and to establish a consistent brand identity ahead of Alibaba's metaverse (元宇宙) scenario rollouts.

Children's Media and Branded Virtual Hosts: Haitun Media (海豚传媒) used its 2026 annual new-product launch to introduce Tun Xiaomeng (豚小萌) as its AI-powered brand IP and virtual host, alongside a product slate spanning children's books, toys, and AI-enabled smart hardware covering the reading, learning, and growth scenarios of children aged zero to twelve. Built with AI technology, Tun Xiaomeng fronts the publisher's livestreams using a young-sounding voice and expressive gestures, and is positioned as the long-term mascot anchoring the multi-product portfolio rather than a one-time marketing device.

Short-Drama and Screen Entertainment: Chinese manju (漫剧) short-drama producers are shifting away from free stock footage and face-fusion shortcuts toward proprietary digital-human asset libraries in order to mitigate face-rights infringement exposure, and within this shift a production team identified as juju is cited as building a dedicated digital-human asset library, with the per-character modeling cost of a single original virtual human reported to have risen from roughly five thousand yuan to thirty thousand yuan. On the licensed long-video side, iQiyi (爱奇艺), through representative Liu Wenfeng (刘文峰), positioned its newly launched AI artist platform around explicit real-person authorization and narrative-first use, distinguishing between digital clones (数字分身) trained on a real performer's modeling and behavior and entirely original virtual characters, with the latter flagged as facing a steeper path to audience acceptance and commercial viability. In film-grade visual effects, a studio operating under the CGFISH identifier published a technical demonstration reel focused on primate fur and musculature for digital-being characters, presenting the perceived credibility of digital-human characters as the governing benchmark for contemporary Chinese VFX production.

BIRTV (Beijing International Radio, TV & Film Exhibition), founded in 1987, is an annual Beijing-based trade show billed as the world's third-largest and Asia's leading broadcast, film, and television exhibition, with thirteen halls, roughly 500 exhibitors, and around 50,000 attendees drawn from broadcasters, production studios, technical institutes, network operators, and equipment vendors; within it, the BIRTV Film and Television Production Lecture Series, launched in 2009 and operated via TVtalk.cn and MXDIA, had delivered 182 lectures across twelve editions through 2023, serving as a year-by-year public record of how the Chinese VFX and broadcast community has absorbed virtual character and digital human technology, with the most directly relevant session being Yu Pengjun of Mingdong Film & Television presenting in 2023 on the production workflow and commercial applications of virtual digital humans including Li Xinglan, DORIS, Xijiajia, FAMA, and METIS, alongside sessions on NVIDIA Omniverse for AIGC broadcasting, LED virtual production stages from Pixomondo, Unreal-engine commercialization from BITONE, AI face-swap commercialization from Linglingfa, AI-driven intelligent directing from Chuanmai International, and creature and photoreal character VFX breakdowns from MORE VFX, Base FX, K2 VFX, and Tianjin Yicai, collectively mapping out the core Chinese digital human production stack of VFX houses, virtual production specialists, concept art studios, AI start-ups, and platform vendors including NVIDIA, Intel, Adobe, Lenovo, and The Foundry, with CGFISH itself appearing only once in the record, in 2014, on commercial post-production VFX rather than any digital human topic. 

Memorial and Legacy Applications: Commentary carried by Huxiu (虎嗅) set a one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand yuan physical tombstone against a three-hundred-and-ninety-nine yuan AI "digital eternal life" offering, treating AI digital humans and digital virtual humans as a competing memorial format for bereaved families. The coverage flags overreliance on the generated persona as a standing risk, reiterates that all AI-generated content must display a visible identification label at the position of the persona, and notes that platforms are required to deregister the associated digital virtual human once the user withdraws consent.

Regulatory Framework and Judicial Guidance: The Beijing High People's Court published a typical case in which a defendant had sold, without authorization, a similar virtual digital human likeness model online, and ruled that the full-body image of virtual digital human Tianheng (天姮) together with its earlier head design, having been created by a production team rather than copied from a real person, embody independent aesthetic choices in line, color, and specific form, and therefore qualify as artistic works protected by copyright. The ruling in the dispute, labeled as involving "utilization of artificial intelligence," is being read alongside the Administrative Measures for the Identification of Artificial Intelligence-Generated Synthetic Content (《人工智能生成合成内容标识办法》) that took effect on September 1, 2025 and require AI-generated content to carry both explicit and implicit markers, and alongside the Interim Administrative Measures for AI Anthropomorphic Interaction Services co-issued by five central departments, which explicitly cover AI emotional companions, virtual humans (虚拟人), and virtual partners, prohibit "AI emotional manipulation" of users, and require platforms to deregister the corresponding digital virtual human upon user revocation of consent. The Cyberspace Administration of China's April 2026 draft rules on digital virtual human information services extend this framework to providers of virtual livestreamers, AI performers, and virtual idols, while the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (工业和信息化部) has been referenced in the same policy cycle through joint notices on small- and medium-enterprise services, with the Qianwen Xiao Jiuwo rollout cited as a commercial example of digital humans falling within the emerging rules.

Public Safety and Fraud Against the Elderly: Reporting from Sichuan and Jiangsu describes AI-driven scams in which fraudsters use digital virtual humans to impersonate personas such as a "domineering CEO Jianguo" figure and a fabricated "biological grandson," targeting elderly users and prompting calls for governance that goes beyond merely "keeping the elderly company." Enforcement is being anchored in the September 2025 identification rules, which require AI-generated content to display a persistent "digital human" label within the virtual human's display area, and in platform obligations to deregister the associated digital virtual human and eliminate its downstream effects once consent is withdrawn, with supplementary attention directed at joint civil liability for platforms that fail to discharge these duties.

Real-Time Interactive Technology and Open-Source Stacks: Soul is positioned in its pre-listing phase as having cleared the long-form real-time generation barrier for interactive digital humans by open-sourcing SoulX-LiveAct, a model reported to produce hour-scale and effectively unbounded streaming video of digital humans on two H100 or H200 GPUs while preserving identity consistency, fine-detail stability, and lip-shape accuracy, with reported throughput of around twenty times real time. Alibaba's release of Qwen3.6-27B on Qwen Studio is reported in the same cycle as Qianwen Xiao Jiuwo, positioning the Qwen model family as the open-source foundation for its ecosystem-level digital human. Alibaba Cloud (阿里云) together with DAMO Academy (达摩院) is described as having spent multiple years building a full-scenario virtual digital human technology matrix whose output can dynamically simulate physical environments and support multi-user collaborative operation, and which is being positioned as the underlying infrastructure for future metaverse deployments.

April 23 News

Ecosystem AI Assistants: Alibaba Group (阿里巴巴集团) released Qianwen Xiaojiuwo (千问小酒窝) on April 22 as a unified digital human avatar for its Qianwen (千问) AI assistant ecosystem. Inside the Qianwen App, users converse with Qianwen Xiaojiuwo to complete meal ordering, ticket purchasing, taxi booking, and trip planning, and a sample flow demonstrates that a spoken instruction about a weekend trip to Hangzhou prompts the system to generate a combined transportation and itinerary plan. The character is positioned as an ecosystem-level persona that will be rolled out progressively into Taobao (淘宝), Fliggy (飞猪), and other properties operated by the group. Commentary around the release framed the move as a deliberate consolidation of the company's AI assistant product line behind a single embodied face intended to strengthen engagement across the broader ecosystem, including its Hong Kong listed stock identity under the 9988 ticker.

Fliggy (飞猪) is Alibaba Group’s comprehensive online travel platform, acting as a tech-forward marketplace where users can book flights, hotels, train tickets, and tour packages. Aimed primarily at a younger demographic, it stands out from traditional agencies by allowing travel brands to operate their own flagship stores and by leveraging the Alibaba ecosystem to offer seamless Alipay transactions and credit-based perks like "Post-Post-Pay." By 2026, it has fully embraced AI-driven itinerary planning, solidifying its position as a highly integrated, one-stop solution for both domestic Chinese travel and outbound international tourism. 

Intellectual Property and Virtual Human Jurisprudence: The Beijing High People's Court (北京市高级人民法院) released its 2025 intellectual property judicial protection report on April 22, in which two of the ten representative cases concerned virtual digital humans and the court articulated the position that a virtual digital human image can qualify as an artistic work entitled to protection under copyright law, clarifying a substantive boundary for the AI era. The Guangzhou Intellectual Property Court (广州知识产权法院) separately rendered a first-instance judgment awarding 4.95 million yuan for the misappropriation of virtual digital human technical secrets, where the plaintiff is an artificial intelligence innovation company whose self-developed virtual digital human technology has reached commercial-scale deployment. In a related copyright dispute involving the virtual digital human characters Tianyu (天妤) and Zhichu (之初), a former employee surnamed Sun was found liable for 15,000 yuan after leaving his employer and selling the contested digital human models without authorization on a model marketplace operated by an unnamed Changsha technology company.

Cultural Tourism and Heritage Interpretation: Yunjia Technology (云家族科技) has positioned itself in the tourism commentary niche with deployments including an AI commentator line, the digital tour guide Binker'er (滨可儿) at the Hubin lakeside area, and Aoqin Zai (澳琴仔) commissioned for Macau Hengqin, promoted as cultural tourism cases with comparatively low customization cost and multilingual explanation capability. An AI digital human customization vendor profiled in industry ranking coverage has developed digital human technology described as featuring logical biomimetic behavior patterns, producing the Song dynasty styled character Yangwawa (阳瓦瓦) for Ziyang Street alongside bespoke digital humans commissioned by the Macau Hengqin area. In Zhengzhou, Henan provincial root-seeking ceremonies have incorporated digital human hosts and twenty-four-hour immersive live broadcasts to reinterpret Yellow River heritage rituals for contemporary audiences. Across the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei corridor, the regional joint tourism pass covering more than two hundred scenic areas now integrates a digital human agent that handles the purchase and validation flow from end to end.

Libraries and Reading Programs: At the Fuzhou Road branch of Shanghai Book City (上海书城), the AI digital human Xiaoyue (小YUE) has been introduced as the on-screen face of the new 365 Readers brand, appearing during the opening of the first National Reading Activity Week in the city. The Wuhan Library (武汉图书馆) has installed a digital human guidance screen in its main lobby for the eleventh Jiangcheng Reading Season and the 2026 Public Library Service Publicity Week, running through the end of May. A city reading forum further highlighted an AI digital human librarian operating together with intelligent book cabinets in the Haidian district of Beijing as part of a shared urban reading infrastructure model that was showcased beside comparable deployments in other cities.

Education and Talent Cultivation: The Huashan District People's Government of Ma'anshan (马鞍山市花山区人民政府), with China Vision Media (中视传媒股份有限公司) as organizer and the National Higher Education Computer Basic Education Research Association as supporter, launched the National Youth Li Bai themed AIGC Digital Human Application Competition in Anhui, with explicit emphasis on commercial conversion and industrial implementation rather than purely academic output. The 2026 School-Enterprise Integration Summit held in Xiamen opened with a choreographed routine by Yushu Technology (宇树科技) robots followed by remarks delivered by the virtual digital human host AI Huxiao Shuo (AI虎校说), and concluded with signing ceremonies between the host institution and thirty-nine companies. The Gansu Artificial Intelligence Society (甘肃省人工智能学会) announced an AI plus Digital Media talent development plan to equip media professionals with AIGC and digital human production skills, under a Digital Media Professional Committee chaired by Wang Yue of Phoenix Gansu.

Phoenix Gansu is the provincial arm of the global Phoenix New Media (ifeng.com) network, serving as a localized digital news hub and marketing powerhouse for Gansu province. Under the leadership of figures like Wang Yue, the organization bridges traditional journalism with emerging technologies, acting as a key player in the region's digital transformation. By chairing the Digital Media Professional Committee and spearheading AI talent initiatives, Phoenix Gansu is shifting from a standard news outlet to a tech-driven media leader focused on integrating AIGC (AI-Generated Content) and digital human production into the modern media landscape.

Elderly Targeted Fraud: Investigations spanning Sichuan and Hubei have documented a wave of romance and impersonation scams in which elderly victims form attachments to AI digital humans generated from code, including a well-dressed fictional suitor circulated under the name Jianguo (建国), whose avatar appeared to a seventy-year-old Huangshi resident as a gentle-voiced man addressing her as dear elder sister. Separate cases in the same investigations describe elderly women whose retirement savings were extracted by digital human personas posing as grandsons in distress, with Wang Xuejiao of Shanghai Zhonglian Chengdu Law Firm (上海中联（成都）律师事务所) characterizing the practice as a targeted misuse of AI technology against vulnerable older users.

Enterprise Services and Digital Workforce: A Wuhan technology provider has built a shared computing and AI large-model supermarket to supply thirty-eight one-person companies clustered in a Shenzhen office tower with customized digital employees, offering data annotation alongside an intelligent digital human and a dedicated livestream digital human under its Zhongsheng Cloud Agent (众生云Agent) product line. Runjian Co., Ltd. (润建股份) collaborated with Guangxi Minzu University (广西民族大学) to launch a China-ASEAN Legal Intelligence Agent during the Guangxi March Third Bagui Carnival, presenting a digital human front end that supports bidirectional multilingual voice and text interaction and returns authoritative professional legal answers. The Hunan Provincial Small and Medium Enterprise Service Center ran an innovation and AI empowerment training program in Changsha during which industry specialists demonstrated AI marketing copy generation and digital human production tools for cost constrained SMEs.

Zhongchuangwang (Wuhan) Technology Co., Ltd. is a Wuhan‑based AI services firm that has built its business around the “众生云” (Zhongsheng Cloud) product ecosystem, which includes digital humans, livestream digital humans, and its flagship 众生云Agent intelligent‑agent platform. Rather than operating as a generic outsourcing shop or a standalone “Zhongsheng Cloud” company, it functions as an integrated provider of AI‑driven tools for micro‑enterprises, supplying ready‑made digital human presenters, automated livestreaming systems, and agent‑based business automation. The company also maintains a parallel line of data governance and data‑service work, which aligns with reporting that links it to data‑annotation‑style operations. Its model—offering modular AI capabilities to very small firms, including the widely reported clusters of one‑person companies in Shenzhen—matches the journalistic framing of a “shared computing and AI large‑model supermarket,” positioning Zhongchuangwang as an infrastructure‑style supplier enabling low‑cost, AI‑augmented entrepreneurship.

Broadcast and Minority Language Systems: Qinghai Normal University (青海师范大学), through a national key laboratory, released in Beijing the Zhida AI (智达AI) software series, which includes a Tibetan large language model paired with a Tibetan digital human broadcasting system and multilingual subtitle transcription intended to cover the full audio and video production chain. Laboratory lead Professor Duo La (多拉) described the digital human generation component as central to the product demonstration, positioning the system for Tibetan language media applications across education, cultural production, and regional broadcasting.

Immersive Experiences, Real Estate, and Media Production: Shaanxi experience-economy operators profiled in a western China consumption study described new venues in which IP driven plot lines, improvisational non-player characters, extended reality staging, and AI digital humans are combined to collapse audience distance and produce immersive entertainment moments. At the high-quality development seminar in Urumqi that marked the establishment of the Xinjiang branch of Shanshui Bide (山水比德), an AI digital human host anchored the program as a visible demonstration of intelligent transformation within the property sector. Enterprise coverage from Yongchuan district in Chongqing catalogued digital human motion capture, high-speed real-time special effects rendering, and full LED virtual production as a linked stack of key technologies underpinning the local research-and-innovation industrial base.

Government Services and Smart Cities: The Jinan Old and New Kinetic Energy Conversion Startup Area in Shandong has integrated digital humans into its public-facing services layer, where the characters field questions and provide guidance alongside drone-based construction dust monitoring and AI perception systems for risk identification. The deployment is presented as part of a broader smart city build-out in the area anchored by zero-carbon industrial projects developed with Aixu Solar Energy Technology (爱旭太阳能科技有限公司) at its Jinan base.

April 22 News

Regulation and Governance: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家互联网信息办公室) has released the Digital Virtual Human Information Service Management Measures (Draft for Comment) (《数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法（征求意见稿）》), requiring that digital virtual human display areas continuously show prominent prompts containing the words "digital human" so that the synthetic nature of such characters is made explicit to viewers throughout each broadcast. Xinhua News Agency (新华社) has discussed the measures alongside the Measures for Labeling AI-Generated Synthetic Content (《人工智能生成合成内容标识办法》) and the Science and Technology Ethics Review and Service Measures for Artificial Intelligence for Trial Implementation (《人工智能科技伦理审查与服务办法（试行）》) as part of a regulatory package responding to the 140-trillion daily token call volume across Chinese generative AI services. People's Daily (《人民日报》) has published an editorial prohibiting the provision of virtual intimate relationship services such as virtual relatives and virtual companions to minors, framing the issue as one of minor protection in the face of rapidly proliferating virtual being services. A separate interpretation describes the Interim Measures for the Administration of Artificial Intelligence Anthropomorphic Interactive Services (《人工智能拟人化互动服务管理暂行办法》) as the first national-level regulatory instrument specifically targeting virtual human and virtual companion scenarios, positioning China ahead of other jurisdictions whose broader AI statutes, such as the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act, touch on related issues only through general provisions on emotion recognition.

The Measures for Labeling of AI-Generated Synthetic Content (人工智能生成合成内容标识办法), document number State Information Office Tongzi [2025] No. 2, is a Chinese regulation jointly issued on March 7, 2025 and publicly announced on March 14, 2025 by four authorities, namely the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), and the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA), with an effective date of September 1, 2025. It establishes a dual-track labeling regime applicable to all AI-generated synthetic content distributed in China, covering text, images, audio, video, and virtual scenes, and requires both explicit labels intended for human perception, such as visible watermarks and on-screen notices, and implicit labels embedded in file metadata for machine readability. The Measures are accompanied by the mandatory national standard GB 45438-2025 (网络安全技术 人工智能生成合成内容标识方法), issued by TC260 with the same September 1, 2025 effective date, which specifies the technical format for compliant labels. The regulation sits within a layered Chinese AI governance framework built on the Algorithm Recommendation Provisions (2022), the Deep Synthesis Provisions (2023), and the Interim Measures for the Management of Generative AI Services (2023), and imposes obligations on generative AI service providers, content distribution platforms, and users, with platforms required to verify labels and users prohibited from removing or falsifying them. It applies directly to digital human content, requiring that virtual digital human video and audio carry both visible markers and embedded metadata, and by implementation in September 2025 major Chinese platforms and large model companies including Douyin, Weibo, Xiaohongshu, Baidu, and Tencent had rolled out watermarking systems to comply, making it the first comprehensive operational labeling mandate for AI-generated synthetic content in China and a direct precursor to the April 2026 CAC draft regulation on digital virtual human information services. 

The Interim Measures for the Management of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services (人工智能拟人化互动服务管理暂行办法) is a regulatory instrument jointly issued on April 10, 2026, by five Chinese government agencies, namely the Cyberspace Administration of China, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, and the State Administration for Market Regulation. The regulation originated as a CAC draft released for public comment on December 27, 2025, with a feedback deadline of January 25, 2026, and was formally approved at the CAC's third internal meeting on February 2, 2026, before receiving interagency sign-off and publication. Taking effect on July 15, 2026, the measures govern AI services that simulate human personality traits, thought patterns, and communication styles, establishing provider safety responsibilities across service standards, data security, user protection, security assessments, and supervisory compliance. The draft framework introduced pop-up warnings, two-hour break reminders, and emotional state assessment as core user-protection mechanisms, while its most prominent provisions prohibit the provision of virtual companion, virtual intimate relationship, and virtual family member services to minors, and ban the generation of content for minors that could trigger imitation of unsafe behavior, produce extreme emotions, or encourage unhealthy habits. Chinese legal commentators have framed the measures as marking China's entry into a new phase of scenario-specific, fine-grained AI governance, and cross-jurisdictional analysis has drawn parallels between these measures and California's Companion Chatbots law passed in October 2025, observing that the two regulatory systems arrive at similar protective goals through different institutional mechanisms. 

TC260 is the National Information Security Standardization Technical Committee (全国信息安全标准化技术委员会), China's central technical body responsible for drafting, reviewing, and publishing national standards in the field of information security. It was established in 2002 under the joint oversight of the Standardization Administration of China (SAC) and operates under the guidance of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), with its secretariat housed at the China Electronics Standardization Institute (CESI, 中国电子技术标准化研究院). Its formal standards organization designation is SAC/TC 260, and its scope covers cybersecurity, cryptography applications, information security management, personal information protection, cloud computing security, and increasingly artificial intelligence security. TC260 is organized into working groups (WG) covering subjects such as cryptographic technology, authentication and authorization, information security evaluation, communication security, big data security, and AI security, and it drafts both mandatory national standards, which carry the GB prefix, and recommended national standards, which carry the GB/T prefix. In the AI governance context, TC260 has become the principal technical standardization body operationalizing CAC regulations, having produced TC260-003 Basic Safety Requirements for Generative Artificial Intelligence Services (生成式人工智能服务安全基本要求) in early 2024 and the mandatory national standard GB 45438-2025 Cybersecurity Technology — Labeling Methods for AI-Generated Synthetic Content that accompanies the Measures for Labeling of AI-Generated Synthetic Content, making TC260 the technical counterpart that translates high-level regulatory mandates into enforceable engineering specifications. 

Intellectual Property and Legal Action: The Guangzhou Intellectual Property Court (广州知识产权法院) has issued a first-instance ruling in a trade secret infringement dispute involving virtual digital human technology, finding defendant De某 Technology (德某科技) and six co-defendants liable for unfair competition and ordering combined damages of 4.95 million yuan. The plaintiff's virtual digital human source code and database table files were held to constitute self-developed technical information with secrecy and commercial value and to have been subject to reasonable confidentiality measures that brought them within legally protected trade secret status. Reporting from Xinhua, Southern Network (南方网), Hong Kong Commercial Daily (香港商報), and China News Service (中国新闻网) has framed the ruling as a landmark response to rising incidents of trade secret infringement through employee poaching in a sector where virtual digital humans have been integrated into livestream hosting and customer service operations. Separately, Alibaba (阿里巴巴) has filed a trademark application for Qianwen Xiaojiuwo (千问小酒窝) covering artificial intelligence and robotics categories, with commentary tying the filing to potential digital human or humanoid robot development directions for the Qianwen product line.

Qianwen Xiaojiuwo (千问小酒窝) is Alibaba’s new specialized brand within the Tongyi Qianwen ecosystem, primarily focused on embodied AI and humanoid robotics. Unveiled in early 2026 under the ATH (AI, Technology, and Hardware) Business Group, the project utilizes a virtual female persona to bridge the gap between large language models and physical interaction. It represents Alibaba’s strategic shift toward integrating artificial intelligence with advanced hardware, aiming to provide more natural, human-like communication and service through digital humans and autonomous robotic platforms.

Entertainment and Film and Television: iQiyi (爱奇艺) drew significant public attention after announcing at its 2026 World Conference that 117 performers, including Chen Zheyuan, Zeng Shunxi, and Cheng Lei, had signed AI authorization agreements for entry into the Nado Pro Artist Library (纳逗Pro艺人库), which generates digital avatars through three-dimensional scanning and motion capture for use in film and television production. Coverage across ZAKER (ZAKER新闻), Sohu (搜狐), Jimu News (极目新闻), Liu Media (流媒体), and Tmtpost (钛媒体) has examined the controversy surrounding consent, portrait rights, and professional dignity, with some producers quoted as preferring original virtual humans that can be adjusted at will and carry no risk of scandal or fatigue. ByteDance (字节跳动) has released DreamActor-M1 (dreamactor.org), a research system that enables pixel-level control of human facial expressions and body movements in digital human video to reduce the uncanny valley effect in synthetic performances. Lili (厘里), a super-realistic digital human, appeared on 2 April as an on-screen question setter on the reality variety programme Cat in the Box (盒子里的猫), becoming the first such character in mainland China to record a reality variety show. OST Media (OST传媒) in Chengdu has built a content factory that interviews two to three thousand applicants per month to supply its team livestream operations, which the industry press now frames as a hundred-billion-yuan market underpinned by digital avatar pipelines.

Nado Pro Artist Library (纳逗Pro艺人库) is an AI-performer roster launched by iQIYI (爱奇艺) in April 2026 as a component of its broader Nado Pro (纳逗Pro) professional-grade AIGC film production platform, alongside the refreshed iQIYI Account system and a new revenue-sharing framework designed to support AIGC video creators. The library debuted with more than one hundred artists who are deeply cooperating with iQIYI having consented to enroll, making their likeness, voice, and motion data available as digital human assets that AIGC creators can select from within the platform, with downstream contact and commercial negotiation routed through the same environment. It sits alongside a public digital asset library covering scenes, props, virtual characters, and digital humans that creators can invoke with a single click, positioning Nado Pro as an end-to-end production pipeline in which human-derived digital humans and purely synthetic digital humans are treated as interchangeable performative resources. The launch immediately drew public controversy, with audiences and several artists challenging the scope of AI-related authorization and iQIYI's share price falling in the aftermath, prompting the company to clarify that enrollment in the library signals only an artist's willingness to consider AI projects and that specific roles and productions still require separate per-project authorization identical to the workflow used for conventional live-action filmmaking, with no artist to be added without consent. Founder and chief executive Gong Yu (龚宇) subsequently framed the initiative as a cost-and-efficiency intervention for a strained film and television sector in which AI digital humans can substitute for mid-tier talent, stand-ins, and background performers to compress shoot cycles and production spend, while insisting that the objective is to amplify rather than replace human creative labour, a positioning that has placed Nado Pro Artist Library at the centre of China's unfolding debate over consent-based digital human likeness rights in professional screen production. 

Cultural Tourism: Unicom Cultural Tourism (联通文旅) received nine awards at the 2026 Digital China Innovation Competition for projects that combined naked-eye 3D theatre works such as Chu Rhyme Flowing Light (《楚韵流光》), the VR cloud exhibition Seeking Treasures in Anbo (寻宝安博), and AI digital humans to establish standard templates for cultural tourism digital upgrading. (Anbo (寻宝安博) is an interactive "Treasure Hunt" educational program hosted by the Anshun Museum (or Anhui Museum) that uses gamified maps and digital tools to help visitors discover and learn about cultural relics.) NetDragon (网龙) deployed an experience zone at the ninth Digital China Construction Summit in Fujian featuring an intelligent saddle for riding through high-precision models of Fujian scenery, an AI-driven Huaxia Ancestor Blessing Tree interaction, and digital human technologies delivered through high-definition VR headsets. Tianjin Museum (天津博物馆) has launched its first fully immersive digital exhibition on oracle bone script heritage, using an AI digital human docent from Shiyou Technology (世优科技) inside holographic pods and holographic cylinders to reshape exhibition hall interaction. The Hangzhou Garden Expo (杭州园博) has introduced Hang Xiao Yuan (杭小园), a smart AR digital human that accompanies visitors throughout the venue and delivers on-demand attraction explanations alongside interactive hairpin-flower overlays and high-definition poetry projections. In Guizhou, the 2026 Refreshing Guiyang Brambleberry Blossom Song event in the Wudang district of Guiyang introduced a NuwaAI (女娲AI) digital human named Buyi Amei (布依阿妹) that performs AI-generated music works rooted in Buyi ethnic culture. Huaihua's Jingping Ancient Village in Hunan has installed an AI digital human of the Qing-dynasty jurisprudence master Pan Shiquan (潘仕权) that holds dialogues with modern visitors as part of a culture-plus-technology upgrade to the local tourism experience.

Unicom Cultural Tourism (联通文旅) is the smart tourism and cultural digitalization business unit of China Unicom, functioning as a high-tech infrastructure provider that delivers integrated digital solutions to government cultural and tourism authorities, scenic area operators, museums, and heritage sites across China. The division leverages China Unicom's 5G networks, computing power, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence capabilities to build smart tourism ecosystems that combine tourist behavior analytics drawn from mobile network data, crowd safety and flow monitoring platforms, immersive AR and VR experiences, digital twin environments, digital collectibles, and a mature digital human product line covering IP image rental, AR-guided interactive tours, AI-driven narration and explanation, and custom content production. Its solutions have received sustained recognition from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, with selections in the Resource Development Department's first batch of national smart tourism solutions in October 2023, six cases entering the 2024 cultural and tourism digitalization innovation list including the National Natural History Museum digital human and AR guide project among the top ten, three further solutions chosen in February 2025 including the data-element-enabled smart tourism management solution as a top-ten entry, and nine awards at the 2026 Digital China Innovation Competition. Provincial operations extend nationwide, with Shanghai Unicom and Beijing Unicom emerging as particularly active hubs through figures such as Shanghai Unicom cultural tourism and sports BD director Wang Cheng (王铖), and the division's digital human offerings have been incorporated into China Unicom's broader U PLUS SMART product system and the corporate artificial intelligence plus action plan, anchoring applications that range from the stage play Su Causeway Spring Dawn (苏堤春晓) Second Stage to VR cloud exhibitions such as Searching for Treasure at Anhui Museum (寻宝安博) and naked-eye 3D theater presentations including Chu Rhyme Flowing Light (楚韵流光). 

Education: Shandong Aviation University (山东航空学院) has developed an AI and ideological curriculum innovation programme that uses digital human tutoring companions to integrate patriotic sentiment, professional ethics, and cultural confidence with aeronautical disciplinary knowledge through a digital resource library and intelligent lesson-preparation tools. In Shaanxi, Tongchuan Qiyi Road Elementary School (铜川市七一路小学) has introduced a digital human named Spirit Curator (精灵馆长) that appears on classroom screens to co-teach Chinese language lessons alongside human teachers, forming part of a broader Xi'an push for AI in primary and secondary education following the 2024 Xi'an Education Bureau directive. Hangzhou's retired veterans programme has launched an AI digital human named Bin Bing (滨兵) at a red-culture ideological education event involving Zhejiang University (浙江大学), Hangzhou Xuejun Middle School (杭州学军中学), and Hangzhou Caihe No. 2 Primary School (杭州市采荷第二小学), using the digital figure to carry red-memory content into campuses. In Hubei, NetEase coverage profiles AI virtual digital human assistants deployed as teaching support systems for teachers and students in Huangshi schools, with readers discussing the supercomputing requirements for training such classroom-oriented digital humans.

Enterprise and Marketing: Guangxi Guancheng Electronics (广西冠成电子) exhibited AI digital human interactive all-in-one machines at the Canton Fair, attracting procurement interest from buyers in the United Arab Emirates and the United States and triggering follow-up factory visits by overseas clients. Hunan Bank (湖南银行) has begun tendering for an artificial intelligence management platform, a digital human system, and expanded large model computing capacity as part of a digitisation drive that has already improved smart work-order efficiency by 82 percent. Wireless Media (无线传媒), operated by Hebei Radio and Television Wireless Media Co., Ltd. (河北广电无线传媒股份有限公司) and headquartered in the Qiaoxi district of Shijiazhuang, continues to combine IPTV distribution with mobile services and digital human offerings as a listed media business for Hebei province. In Wuxi, industry commentary has focused on the emergence of digital human matrices as a publishing and broadcasting layer, with particular attention to how the intelligent agents underlying such matrices can cooperate with one another to scale content output. At the 2026 Gansu AI industry innovation development conference in Lanzhou, authorities have foregrounded frontier skills training in digital human applications as a vehicle for empowering local cultural communication.

Platforms and Research: Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (北京智源人工智能研究院) has released LifeSim, described as the first long-lifecycle individual life simulator for generating virtual humans, alongside the derived LifeSim-Eval dynamic evaluation environment for measuring personalised assistant service capabilities against real-life trajectories. SentiPulse (思维光谱) has open-sourced the interactive 3D digital human framework SentiAvatar (sentiavatar.github.io) together with the companion SUSU 3D digital human character model in collaboration with a doctoral team from the Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence at Renmin University of China (中国人民大学). Second Life (第二人生), at 2lives.com.cn, has closed a funding round in the tens of millions of yuan for its World Large Model, which generates 3D digital avatars in as little as ten minutes and combines bone rigging, AI voice agents, and personalised personality training to allow users to create digital twins of themselves. VAST (VAST公司), at tripo3d.ai,  and the University of Hong Kong (香港大学) have released AniGen through lead author Huang Yihua (黄熠华) with corresponding authors VAST chief scientist Cao Yanpei (曹炎培) and HKU professor Qi Xiaojuan (齐晓娟), converting a single image into movable 3D assets for animation, gaming, VR, digital humans, and embodied intelligence pipelines. Jimeng AI (即梦AI), at jimeng.jianying.com, the ByteDance generative creative suite, has been profiled for its consumer-facing digital human generator that accepts a user photograph and a voice recording and produces a personalised avatar through an extended rendering queue.

Telecommunications Infrastructure: Zijinxingyu (紫金星宇) has completed a 6G holographic livestream demonstration between Beijing and Nanjing with 0.3-second latency, transmitting a lifelike stereoscopic holographic image of a Beijing presenter into Nanjing as part of the Pre-6G trial network built around Zijinshan Sci-Tech City (紫金山科技城), which covers Nanjing Wireless Valley, Jiangsu Television Tower, and Jiangxinzhou Island through sixty-four network nodes and an integrated space-air-ground architecture. These capabilities are positioned alongside AI digital human systems as the infrastructure stack enabling low-latency virtual being broadcasting and office scenarios across 2026 livestreaming and enterprise applications.

Fraud and Social Risk: Cover News (封面新闻) has reported on the use of AI to target elderly victims, noting that many older Chinese users unfamiliar with generative AI cannot distinguish virtual human images from real people or AI-synthesised voices from those of their actual relatives, even when small on-screen labels disclose that content is AI-generated. These anthropomorphic interactive products are being treated as a distinct category of risk that is driving the push toward dedicated governance under the Interim Measures for the Administration of Artificial Intelligence Anthropomorphic Interactive Services, with People's Daily positioning virtual relative and virtual companion services directed at minors in the same risk category.

April 21 News

Cultural Tourism and Heritage: In Nanning, the 2026 "Guangxi Sanyuesan - Bagui Carnival" opening ceremony featured the digital human "Liu Sanjie" at a "One-Click Tour of Guangxi" experience zone, greeting visitors and performing antiphonal singing with Dong ethnic communities at the Minge Lake Fengyu Bridge. In the same festival's judicial outreach area, the legal-aid digital human "Zhuangzhuang" operated as an on-site legal advisor, handling general queries from visitors. The Guangxi Department of Commerce (广西商务厅) used a digital human to announce benefit details for the accompanying "33 Consumption Festival" at Nanning's Tingzi Wharf. In Sichuan, Chuantou Shuke (川投数科), a provincial state-owned enterprise benchmark, introduced the "Anyi" digital human as the public face of what is presented as Sichuan's first cultural-tourism large model, leveraging Chengdu's cultural-tourism resources. In Jiangsu, Nanjing Shanglu (南京商旅), operator of the Qinhuai Scenery attraction, reported that digital human guide narration and VR immersive experiences remained a core revenue line, contributing to 2025 operating income of roughly 202 million yuan. In Wuhan, an "AI cultural relics name card" product uses NFC "touch" activation to surface digital human narrators drawing on content from more than three hundred museums worldwide, including the Hubei Provincial Museum and Beijing's Palace Museum, and has reportedly sold over 1.3 million copies overseas. At the Wuhan Guanggu "AI Smart Tide" themed mobile business hall, AI digital humans are showcased alongside an AI Go-playing robot and AI glasses in a consumer-facing technology retail environment.

Reading and Publishing Campaigns: Shanghai Xinhua Media (上海新华传媒) launched "Xiao YUE," an AI digital human whose visual design is modelled on a scroll, at the 2026 city-wide reading week opening held at the Shanghai Book City Fuzhou Road store, where the virtual host introduced the group's "365 Readers" brand and the "Book Scroll Millennium" special exhibition tracing three thousand years of written Chinese. Xiao YUE continues to appear across Xinhua Media outlets as the persistent face of the year-round reading push. In Haikou, the Hainan Provincial Reading Week that opened on 20 April programmed "Digital Human Co-Reading" story sessions alongside a "Reading Flash - Hainan Slow Listening" digital reading flash event, positioning virtual hosts as continuing reading companions rather than single-event novelties.

Ideological and Patriotic Education: In Hunan, the Shaoshan Municipal Party Committee Propaganda Department has embedded the AI digital humans "Shaoxiaohong" and "Shaoxiaofeng" into the "My Shaoshan Trip" red-themed research-and-study programme for primary and secondary students, using holographic projection to recreate revolutionary scenes while the two virtual hosts guide pupils through ideological lessons. Sunshine Life Insurance (阳光人寿) deployed an AI digital human virtual instructor through its Jiangxi branch during the 15 April National Security Education Day series, training staff on topics including phishing email identification and customer data confidentiality, with the Hebei and Guangdong branches using comparable AI-generated materials for password security and information security education. In Hong Kong, Chung Hwa Christian Church Ming Yin Academy (中華基督教會銘賢書院) unveiled a digital human version of its principal, allowing students and teachers to interact with the avatar as part of a school-wide embrace of AI tools.

Enterprise Workforce and Employment Applications: A gaming and media company in Shandong attracted national attention after reportedly training AI digital humans on the chat records, work documents and decision-making habits of departed employees so that the virtual replacements continued to occupy the vacant workstations, a practice publicly dubbed "AI succeeding the resigned." In Tianjin's Sino-Singapore Eco-City, a deployed digital human supports jobseekers by automatically parsing resumes and matching open roles based on applicants' education, skills and stated preferences. Hunan provincial authorities used digital humans as simulated interviewers at the "Smart Gathering Xiaoxiang - Talent Gathering Hunan" 2026 provincial recruitment action, giving young candidates mock-interview practice before on-site employer rounds. Hunan Bank (湖南银行) published a public bid-candidate notice for its 2025 digital human system construction project, signalling procurement of a bank-wide virtual service layer. The "Colleague.Skill" (同事.Skill) project, profiled widely in Chinese technology coverage, builds digital clones of working professionals by ingesting their outputs and simulating their operational patterns, with a live competition held in Guangzhou at which contestants publicly "distilled" digital clones on stage, including one submission from a hearing-impaired engineer working in financial-industry software development.

Platforms, Products, and Commercial Vendors: Alibaba (阿里巴巴) publicised a "Hello World" new-product event scheduled for 22 April using a cherry-blossom-themed promotional poster built around an AI digital human figure, widely interpreted across Chinese and Hong Kong financial media as a preview of a consumer-facing virtual being tied to the launch. JD.com (京东) released a "free-state digital human" product line, extending its existing live-commerce and service avatars into more flexible behavioural modes. Baidu Smart Cloud (百度智能云) fielded its digital human ViviDora at a humanoid-robotics industry event, where the avatar moderated an audience Q&A segment with engineers. Kuaishou's (快手) Kling AI (kling.ai) continues to promote its free AI avatar function through the Motion Control feature, allowing users to generate dance or performance clips from a short reference video. Yunnan Moucheng Digital Technology (云南谋成数字科技有限公司), based in Kunming's Panlong District, offers AI agent customisation, AI digital human applications, AI matrix-account systems and AI-driven marketing services to small and mid-sized clients. In Hong Kong, Pantheon Lab, a 2019-founded Science Park tenant, combines deep-learning visual content generation, digital humans and agentic AI ecosystems to supply one-stop enterprise solutions across customer service, education and media. Haitian Ruisheng (海天瑞声) disclosed that it has extended beyond AI training data into downstream applications, including a large project involving thousands of digital humans and a dedicated voice-model platform. Huibo Xing (慧播星) supplied the digital human presenter used in a Sina Finance video package covering a robot half-marathon. Fangzhi Technology (方直科技) reported in its 2025 annual-report summary that it applies virtual digital human technology alongside internet and AI tools to the digitalisation of primary and secondary education content. Fengyuzhu (风语筑) is now classified by Chinese financial media under the virtual digital human, 3D modelling, NFT concept, influencer livestream and digital twin sector tags. Hebei Broadcasting Wireless Media (河北广电无线传媒股份有限公司), based in Shijiazhuang, disclosed the in-house development of an AI-based digital human interaction system as part of its innovation R&D pipeline.

Industry Infrastructure and Flagship Events: Beijing's Chaoyang District hosts the Beijing Digital Human Base (北京市数字人基地), where the third and fourth floors of a redeveloped commercial complex have been populated with a cluster of digital human companies and projects deemed to have growth potential, while the lower floors house brand retailers to create foot-traffic synergy. The Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center (北京人形机器人创新中心) showcased its embodied Tiangong 3.0 (具身天工3.0) humanoid at an industry exhibition where Star Dynamic Era (星动纪元) presented its Q5 humanoid robot and Baidu Smart Cloud's ViviDora digital human conducted live audience Q&A, illustrating the growing convergence between the Chinese humanoid-robot and digital-human sectors. In Yancheng, a Jiangsu provincial event themed around AI-enabled manufacturing upgrades used a Q-version elk AI digital human as its on-stage host for the hosting segments. (A Q-version elk-themed AI digital human is a stylized virtual character that combines a chibi-like cartoon design with elk-inspired visual elements and AI-driven functionality, resulting in a cute, non-realistic digital mascot capable of hosting or presenting at events, often reflecting local cultural symbols such as Yancheng’s association with Père David’s deer.) The Shandong provincial cultural-technology authority has written digital humans, the metaverse, AI and science-fiction industries into the province's 15th Five-Year Plan cultural-technology innovation action, alongside the roll-out of the Shandong Cultural Data Center as the central repository.

Beijing Municipal Digital Human Base (北京市数字人基地) is China's first dedicated digital human industry base, located within the Donghu Huanle Song (东湖欢乐颂) commercial complex in the Chaoyang District of Beijing and operated by Shenzhen-listed entrepreneurship services platform Chuangye Heima (创业黑马, ticker 300688) under the framework of its Heima Metaverse Accelerator. Officially inaugurated in February 2024 with support from the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology and Chaoyang District authorities, the base occupies a Phase 1 planned area of 15,000 square meters converted from an existing commercial mixed-use development. By November 2024, 49 companies had taken up residence on site, with the broader industry ecosystem serving more than 110 upstream and downstream digital human enterprises including Digital Xusheng, Botai Intelligent (博特智能), and Yunbo Technology. Four shared technical platforms built around digital human production and digital content creation had been placed into operation, comprising a large-space multi-person XR technology testing center, a digital human motion capture and XR virtual shooting integrated application platform, a high-fidelity digital human acquisition platform, and a digital human trusted evidence storage platform built on Chang'an Chain (长安链) blockchain technology by the operator's subsidiary Beijing Shuzhi Yunke Information Technology Co., Ltd. (北京数智云科信息科技有限公司). The base is structured around three major service platforms, four carrier spaces, five service systems, and an industrial fund, and all resident companies access the technical platforms at preferential below-market rates to reduce innovation and research costs for smaller players in the Internet 3.0 ecosystem. Application focus areas span live streaming e-commerce, tourism services, digital film and television, corporate branding, and digital employees, aligning with Beijing's target to grow its digital human industry scale beyond RMB 50 billion by 2025 under the 《北京市促进数字人产业创新发展行动计划（2022-2025年）》. In December 2025, the base held an application scenario accelerator event at which a dedicated application scenario alliance was launched and member companies were certified, with participants drawn from Zhongguancun Chaoyang Park (中关村朝阳园), NetEase Cloud (网易云信), Meihua Investments (梅花创投), Botai Intelligent, DeepScience (深元科技), and more than 30 other enterprise representatives, reinforcing its role as a central node in Beijing's digital human and Internet 3.0 industrial chain. 

The Beijing Action Plan for Promoting Digital Human Industry Innovation and Development (2022–2025) (北京市促进数字人产业创新发展行动计划（2022-2025年）) was issued on August 8, 2022 by the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology (北京市经济和信息化局) and released publicly during the 2022 Global Digital Economy Conference, marking the first municipal-level policy in China dedicated specifically to the digital human industry and widely described in official Chinese commentary as the country's first such industry-specific support policy (国内出台的首个数字人产业专项支持政策). The plan sets a headline target of more than 50 billion yuan in Beijing's digital human industry scale by 2025 and calls for cultivating one to two leading enterprises with revenue exceeding 5 billion yuan, alongside a cluster of specialised small and medium-sized firms, technology platforms, and application demonstration zones. It commits close to 900 million US dollars in supporting resources toward building an integrated virtual human technology, commercial, and governance ecosystem across the city, addressing core technical areas such as modelling, rendering, driving, and intelligent interaction, as well as industrial applications spanning media, finance, cultural tourism, education, healthcare, urban services, and government affairs. The document also emphasises standards development, intellectual property frameworks, talent cultivation, and cross-district coordination within Beijing, positioning the capital as the national anchor for digital human research, policy experimentation, and commercialisation, and it served as the policy foundation for the subsequent launch of the Beijing Digital Human Industry Base (北京市数字人产业基地) in February 2024, which set a further revenue target of over 20 billion yuan by 2025. 

Entertainment and AI Short Drama: The Paper (澎湃新闻) reported that AI short dramas built around digital human actors and assembly-line scripts have moved from novelty status in 2025 to a mainstream vertical-video genre in 2026, with some production houses claiming a finished episode produced per day at very low cost. NetEase (网易) opened a global submission call for AI short drama videos under the 2026 Global Digital Economy Conference, framing digital human performers as the emerging replacement for low-budget human actors in the format. Tencent's (腾讯) QQ News published a consumer-facing tutorial walking readers through producing an AI short drama titled "Colleague.Skill" end-to-end on the Vidu (vidu.com) platform, covering digital human performers, intelligent scoring and one-click post-production from a single text prompt. Accompanying industry commentary warned that up to 80 percent of conventional short-drama actors could lose work to AI digital human performers over the next market cycle.

Regulatory and Legal Developments: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家网信办) is preparing a comprehensive draft regulation covering digital virtual human services across the full service lifecycle, with a specific prohibition on providing virtual intimate-relationship services to minors, as reported through the Zhuhai municipal news network. A Science and Technology Daily commentary carried by Sohu argued that "cyber replicas" of real persons must not cross legal red lines, urging users to treat every social-media post and video as potential training data for unauthorised digital clones and to scrutinise platform data-licensing terms carefully. Reporting on both the "Colleague.Skill" project and the Shandong replace-departed-employee case has prompted wider public debate over whether turning working professionals into permanent AI labour substitutes amounts to an impermissible form of personality commodification under existing Chinese civil-code protections. These national and local moves collectively signal a tightening regulatory environment around the Chinese digital human sector as deployment scales across entertainment, services, education and public-sector contexts.

April 20 News

Tourism: Foping County in Shaanxi has launched the "AI Foping+" digital human as an official intelligent guide to the giant panda homeland, delivering multimodal immersive explanations of panda ecology, Qinling mountain landscapes, and human-interest stories through integration with Alibaba (阿里巴巴) large model Tongyi Qianwen (通义千问). The 20th Guizhou Tourism Industry Development Conference used its cross-border tourism promotion session to launch the Guizhou International Tourism Portal (贵州国际旅游门户网站, Guizhoutravel), which embeds the bilingual twenty-four-hour digital human "Huang Xiaoxi" (黄小西) as an always-on virtual host for overseas travellers. In Jiangxi, the decade-long "Jiangyou Library" (江右文库) ancient-text preservation project, covering roughly 1,600 volumes and 800 million characters, now pairs an AI digital human with mini-programs and short videos to animate classical sources for younger readers. In Hubei, an AI card that makes artifacts across more than 300 museums "speak" when tapped with a phone has reportedly sold 1.3 million units overseas, appearing in the same provincial exhibition zone where robot performances and digital human interactions are grouped as frontier outputs, and where the Zidong Taichu (紫东太初) multimodal large model is visualized as a Han-dynasty-robed digital human called "Xiao Chu" (小初). Smart-tourism system rankings for 2026 also highlighted Weishan Lake (微山湖) as a site adopting digital human guides and VR immersion to raise online ticketing share and traveller word-of-mouth.

Cultural Events: The 2026 Guangxi Three-Three Bagui Carnival (广西三月三·八桂嘉年华) opening ceremony in Nanning centred on the "Liu Sanjie" (刘三姐) digital human, dressed in Zhuang brocade and calling out the festival name bilingually alongside officials and tourists as part of the "One-Click Tour Guangxi" (一键游广西) cultural-tourism programme. The Xingning District mountain-song gala within the same festival unveiled the AI mountain-song music video "Ni De Ya" (《尼的呀》), produced by the Art and Media College of Nanning Vocational University (南宁职业技术大学艺术与传媒学院), in which intelligent robots and an on-screen virtual digital human performed a synchronized opening dance. In Guiyang's Wudang District, the "Three-Three Festival" celebration of Buyi folklore was staged with an AI digital human as co-host, part of Guizhou's wider effort to fold virtual beings into ethnic cultural programming. The 2026 China Food Festival (中华美食荟) hosted in Ningxia introduced the virtual AI host "Ning Xiaowei" (宁小味) sharing the stage with human presenters and costumed robots, with real-time links to a Wuzhong Morning Tea branch venue to dramatize human-machine co-performance. Jilin's provincial culture and tourism authority tied its reading-day campaigning to Changchun's 33rd World University Winter Games of 2027, deploying a digital human-led format to combine cultural promotion with sports marketing.

Entertainment: The 13th China Network Audio-Visual Conference (中国网络视听大会) in Chengdu centred on its AI Creator Economy Forum, at which Shen Hao, chief scientist of a national key laboratory at Communication University of China (中国传媒大学), released the "2026 China Digital Human Influence Index Report" (2026中国数字人影响力指数报告). The same forum hosted the 2026 ACX "AI Super Creator Competition" (AI超创赛) award ceremony, confirmed regional-competition partnerships, and launched the Aichuang Creator Service Alliance (爱创创作者服务联盟). Veteran director Li Shaohong, speaking on the industry's "Light Curtain Plan" (光幕计划) that moves short-drama performers into feature film, drew a line between AI digital humans and live actors around the quality of perceived "living presence". Shanhai Xingchen (山海星辰) showcased its NOVA AI platform at the same conference as a multi-dimensional reshaping of the broadcast ecosystem, while Hongguo (红果) short-drama chief editor Le Li framed live-acted short drama as the quality-growth track of the industry. The large-scale video character performance model "LPM 1.0" (large-performance-model.github.io) was positioned as a real-time visual engine for virtual assistants, game NPCs, and live-streaming virtual avatars, aimed at continuous long-form performance without time limits. The AIGC Film Unit Thematic Forum of the 2026 Beijing International Film Festival convened specialists including Liu Shuliang (刘书亮) to debate virtual idols, digital humans, virtual characters, agents, and AGI, asking why cultural industries continue to commission digital human products widely regarded as imperfect. Chinese-language short-form comedy on YouTube, including the "mimi" digital human clips of the "mimi Little Theatre" (mimi小剧场) channel, illustrates the export of domestic AIGC digital-human humour formats onto overseas social platforms.

Marketing: The Shandong Consumer Association's Intelligent Economy Consumer Education Guide (2026 edition) identifies AI digital human live-stream shopping as one of the AI-enabled consumer practices now reshaping daily behaviour alongside smart appliances, smart healthcare, and smart mobility. Shandong Jinyu Network Technology (山东瑾瑜网络科技) markets its sixth-generation AI live-streaming system as an unmanned live-streaming tool for non-specialist users, emphasizing intelligent driving, visual quality, and multi-platform adaptation. Xi'an-based short-video marketing services frame digital human substitution of on-camera labour as one layer within a stack that runs from content generation and smart editing through to data operations and localized customer acquisition. A post-correction communications cycle by Henan authorities on a data-fraud accountability case circulated a video explicitly credited to the Huibo Xing (慧播星) digital human system. A financial-content creator publishing on Yunnan germanium and semiconductor equities disclosed that the on-screen presenter was not a real person but a digital human named "Michael", providing a concrete example of mandatory synthetic-media disclosure in investor-facing output. JD Group (京东集团) staged a digital human appearance of founder and chairman Liu Qiangdong (刘强东) at the China International Consumer Products Expo (消博会), during the same period in which he travelled to Liaoning for face-to-face talks with provincial leadership. Shanghai Xinhua Media Chain (上海新华传媒连锁) opened Shanghai's first "All Citizens Reading Week" (全民阅读活动周) with the AI digital human "Xiao YUE" (小YUE) and the launch of the "365 Reading Person" brand, alongside Shanghai Book City's (上海书城) "Book Scrolls Millennia" exhibition of three thousand years of Chinese script.

Education: Shanghai Nanhu Vocational and Technical College (上海南湖职业技术学院), positioned as Shanghai's first five-year continuous vocational college, reports graduate employment above 96.5 percent and treats digital virtual human live streaming as a signature teaching output, with students performing the motion capture that drives avatars sharing the stream with real hosts. Its Digital Creative College runs the "Miao Qu Blind Box" (喵趣盲盒) pipeline end-to-end from IP drawing through 3D-printed colouring, while its Smart Business and Tourism College pairs costumed real anchors with digital virtual humans as a showcase for the Shanghai high-skilled talent training base newly based in Hongkou. Shandong Shenghan Vocational College of Finance and Trade (山东圣翰财贸职业学院) has rolled out an integrated AI employment-services device bundling resume generation, completeness checking, position recommendation, digital human mock interviews, and round-the-clock AI career consultation, with dedicated teacher training on each function.

Healthcare: A Shanghai hospital-sector AI launch presented the PalClaw intelligent agent through a hologram-projected virtual image called "Xiao Peng" (小蓬), which was asked live to judge whether a specific hospital should institute a weekend surgery plan, framed publicly as a response to operational pain points under the rubric of the "silicon-based employee". Shandong Aikeser Digital Technology Co., Ltd. (山东艾克斯尔数字科技有限公司) pairs an AI digital human medical-history collection system with its Hermes teaching stack to create a closed teaching loop that runs from simulated patient intake through to student performance feedback in medical education.

Enterprise: Colleague.skill (同事.skill) trains a "replacement post" workplace digital human by scraping the Feishu (飞书) records and DingTalk (钉钉) documents of departed employees, marketed as a continuity solution for vacated roles and discussed in the same commentary that entertains the speculative prospect of producing a million digital replicas of education influencer Zhang Xuefeng (张雪峰). The Liaoning Province Chain Operation Association (辽宁省连锁经营协会) used an expanded president's meeting in Shenyang to convene its AI Digitalization Technology Application Committee, with AI digital humans flagged as a 2026 full-scenario substitute for live-streaming and office labour across provincial retail-chain members.

Technology: A Tencent News AI industry daily on 17 April 2026 reported the global simultaneous open-sourcing of the SentiAvatar framework, the 3D digital human character model SUSU, and the high-quality action dataset SuSuInterActs, positioning the three releases as an accelerator for 3D digital human research and deployment. The same briefing noted that Enflame Technology (燧原科技) had refiled its initial public offering prospectus with 2025 revenue figures, underlining the Chinese AI chip supply chain behind digital human workloads. In Hong Kong, Science Park anchor INNOPOLE hosted an "AI+ Industrial Revolution" demonstration by Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation in which creative-technology firms showcased AI-driven virtual humans capable of real-time interaction and fine-grained expression and motion capture, deployed into customer service, education, and adjacent service scenarios.

Industry Policy: A 2025–2030 global AI digital human industry standards and commercialization research report locates the sector's inflection point at the late-2025 implementation of the "Information Technology Customer-Service Virtual Digital Human General Technical Requirements" (《信息技术客服型虚拟数字人通用技术要求》), described as a technology-quality-safety three-in-one specification and the first domestic standard targeting customer-service virtual digital humans. The same report outlines a "central standards plus local ecosystems" pattern in which Hunan concentrates on low-latency rendering technology backed by a dedicated one-billion-yuan special fund, Beijing anchors a digital human industrial park hosting more than three hundred upstream and downstream enterprises, and Guangdong pursues customized digital human scenarios tied to researcher Jiang Long (姜龙) within a wider manufacturing intelligence upgrade. Guangdong's own industrial coverage sets these efforts beside a 68.0 percent year-on-year rise in industrial-robot output and a "digital twin plus industrial intelligent agent" infrastructure push across Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Foshan, and Dongguan. Yuanmeng Space (元梦空间), a metaverse operator with nearly a decade of focus and more than one hundred intellectual property assets spanning artificial intelligence, metaverse, and digital humans, has been recognized as a national high-tech enterprise and a technology-oriented small and medium enterprise, with more than 160,000 platform users and the "Yuanmeng" digital art asset product approaching launch.

The Information Technology — General Technical Requirements for Customer Service Virtual Digital Humans (信息技术客服型虚拟数字人通用技术要求), formally designated GB/T 46483-2025, is China's first national standard in the virtual digital human field, published on October 5, 2025 and taking effect immediately upon release, having originated as project 20242094-T-469 in the 2024 fourth batch of recommended national standards. SenseTime (商汤科技) served as the primary drafting unit, working over roughly two years of preparation under the guidance of the China Electronics Standardization Institute (中国电子技术标准化研究院) alongside more than thirty participating organizations from industry, academia, and research, with the standard managed by TC28 (the National Information Technology Standardization Technical Committee) and executed by its SC24 subcommittee on computer graphics, image processing, and environmental data representation under the supervision of the Standardization Administration of China (中国国家标准化管理委员会). It establishes a comprehensive reference framework for customer service digital human systems covering six modules of image generation, visual interaction, voice interaction, emotional interaction, image driving, and operations maintenance, and sets quantified performance benchmarks including lip-sync accuracy of at least 90 percent, gesture interaction success rates of at least 80 percent, emotional interaction success rates of at least 80 percent, 2D digital humans with clear and complete facial features, 3D hyper-realistic digital human models with polygon counts of at least 200,000, and voice interaction response times under two seconds, while also specifying requirements for keyword maintenance, corpus updates, and multimodal interaction spanning voice, gesture, and body movement. The standard fills a long-standing gap in unified technical norms for customer service digital humans deployed across finance, government affairs, education, e-commerce, and telecommunications, and SenseTime became the first company to pass conformity testing under the standard in April 2026 with its Ruying (如影) live interactive digital human product, positioning the document as a foundation for China to promote its digital human technical norms internationally. 

Ethical Contexts: The Cyberspace Administration of China (网信办) is preparing new rules to govern digital virtual human services across their full lifecycle, with a specific prohibition on the provision of virtual intimate-relationship services to minors, signalling an official concern with companion and emotional-attachment use cases rather than with technical capability alone. Industry debate running through the Beijing International Film Festival AIGC panels and through the 2026 China Digital Human Influence Index Report extends these concerns into questions of authenticity, performer displacement, and the cultural legitimacy of commissioning digital humans whose imperfections are openly acknowledged by their own commissioning producers.

April 19 News

Healthcare: Zhengzhou Guancheng TCM Hospital (郑州市管城中医院) launched Henan Province's first twenty-four-hour traditional Chinese medicine artificial intelligence clinic, with an AI digital human physician conducting intelligent triage and allowing patients to complete self-service consultations in roughly five minutes at any hour of the day. The rollout, announced at a provincial classical-prescription transmission launch event held in Zhengzhou, positions the AI digital human as a continuously available front-line intake and guidance layer that supplements rather than replaces human practitioners and functions without operational closure.

Film and Short Drama: Casting notices offering compensation for AI short drama human-image collection have begun circulating in background-actor recruitment groups, reflecting a shift in which production companies digitise performers in order to generate synthetic cast members for AI-assisted short-form productions and raising pointed consent and likeness-theft concerns among working actors. Director Li Shaohong (李少红), speaking on the Lightscreen Project (光幕计划) panel covered by Securities Times, argued that the perceived vitality of living performers remains the principal gap separating digital humans from flesh-and-blood actors, while the National Radio and Television Administration (广电总局) has concurrently been building a coordinated central-provincial-platform framework to steer micro short drama toward higher-quality output. New Energy Short Drama Dream Factory (新能量短剧梦工厂) released the AI micro short drama Wang Yangming: Heart Battle (王阳明：心战) on YouTube, using a digital human rendering of the Ming-era philosopher as the protagonist to carry classical Chinese thought to overseas audiences and to dovetail with the broader online circulation of a digital Wang Yangming persona. iQIYI (爱奇艺) has moved to refine contracted artists into reusable digital alter-egos for future productions, prompting commentary that the synthetic performances can outpace those of certain live stars and drawing renewed scrutiny to portrait-rights exposure across the entertainment supply chain.

The Lightscreen Project (光幕计划) is a state-aligned actor development and training initiative linked to the Beijing International Film Festival (北京国际电影节) that focuses on improving the professional quality of performers emerging from China’s rapidly expanding micro short drama sector. It functions as a selection and training pipeline in which young actors are evaluated by established industry figures, undergo intensive instruction in acting craft and industry practices, and participate in production projects, with the goal of restoring performance depth and discipline in a production environment increasingly shaped by speed, algorithms, and platform metrics. Within the broader regulatory push led by the National Radio and Television Administration to standardize and elevate short-form content, the project serves as a talent-focused intervention, emphasizing authenticity, emotional realism, and the “sense of a living person” identified by Li Shaohong as the key distinction still separating human actors from digital humans. 

Automotive and Retail Livestreaming: At the Changsha launch of Hongqi Tiangong 05 and 06 (红旗天工05/06) on the Meixi Lake waterfront in Hunan, the automaker allowed an AI digital human to host the entire reveal rather than using celebrity presenters or pyrotechnics, staging the event around an 800V high-voltage platform, twelve-minute fast charging, and the Sinan (司南) intelligent driving stack at an accessible price point. JD.com (京东) used its 2026 Merchant Conference to unveil an interactive-agent-led digital human livestream system built on its JoyAI large model, wrapping e-commerce knowledge-enhanced question answering, dynamic scene control, and operational decision support into a single virtual seller designed to behave less like an animated avatar and more like a trained commercial operator.

Streaming and Creator Economy: Bigo Live (bigo.tv), the overseas streaming platform operated under JOYY (欢聚集团), has reported that its 2026 content structure is no longer dominated by singing and dancing talent rooms and is instead being reshaped by e-sports productions, team-based group broadcasts, and AI virtual humans, which together are absorbing a growing share of creator revenue on the platform. The thirteenth China Internet Audiovisual Conference hosted the AI Creator Economy Forum in Chengdu, where organisers presented the 2026 ACX AI Super Creation Contest awards, signed provincial partnership agreements, launched the Aichuang Creator Service Alliance (爱创创作者服务联盟), and released the 2026 China Digital Human Influence Index Report (《2026中国数字人影响力指数报告》) as a new sector benchmark. On the same regional stage, the Sichuan Radio and Television Bureau (四川省广播电视局) activated a micro short drama review service node inside the Shaocheng International Cultural Creative Valley (少城国际文创谷), and the Chengdu SO Show (成都SO秀) launched an AI-plus-cultural-creation OPC acceleration plan aimed at individual creators working with digital personas.

Tourism and Cultural Heritage: On the Hehuan Bridge over Folk Song Lake in Nanning, Guangxi, a naked-eye 3D digital human of the legendary Zhuang song-maiden Liu Sanjie (刘三姐) appeared alongside a Dong ethnic singing team during the 2026 Sanyuesan Cultural Tourism Festival, blocking passing visitors in a staged song-bridge challenge and demonstrating how millennium-old intangible heritage is being reinterpreted through volumetric display. Tourism platform vendors have begun marketing turnkey smart-tourism systems built on Tencent Cloud (腾讯云) architecture, packaging AI customer service, digital human tour guides, and intelligent itinerary planning into a single stack designed to sustain golden-week traffic with twenty-four-hour response across scenic-area operators.

Libraries and Reading Promotion: Shanghai Xinhua Media Chain (上海新华传媒连锁) opened the inaugural National Reading Week at its Fuzhou Road Shanghai Book City flagship by introducing an AI digital human named Xiao YUE as the public face of a year-long 365 Readers initiative. Changchun Library (长春市图书馆) anchored the 2026 Capital of Books reading season with digital human guides, AI painting screens, and interactive guidance terminals that position virtual presenters as part of a technology-and-reading fusion programme. Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication (北京印刷学院) staged an experiential reading carnival in which an AI digital human book-recommendation station sat alongside immersive electronic-book displays and temperature-responsive ink merchandise, while Taiyuan Library (太原图书馆) rolled out twenty-eight themed activities in Shanxi that incorporate a digital human book-recommendation channel within scan-to-read, scan-to-listen, and scan-to-browse reading pathways.

Sports and Live Events: The opening ceremony of the Jiangsu Super League (苏超) deployed a thirty-metre augmented-reality virtual dinosaur that passed low over spectators' heads, a set-piece described as a milestone fusion of digital creatures (数字生物) and physical stagecraft despite the creature drawing social-media comparisons to a cured-duck silhouette. Lenovo (联想) has been named a technology supplier for the 2026 FIFA World Cup hosted across the United States, Mexico, and Canada, where its stack is expected to include a football AI super-agent, a VAR-oriented 3D digital human visualisation layer, and a referee-perspective AI video enhancement system that together bring synthetic mediation into live officiating.

Agriculture and Rural Extension: The third edition of Zhejiang Province's New Farmer Skills Competition, staged in Jiande under the jurisdiction of Hangzhou, introduced an AI digital human styled as the AI New Farm Teacher (AI新农师) to function as a continuously available rural advisory persona, and the same event opened a Village Recommendation Officer track that pairs human communicators with the digital persona in outreach scenarios. The framing positions the digital human as both a recommendation engine and a culturally legible figure capable of sustaining empathetic contact with farming audiences.

Enterprise and Public Administration: Zhejiang Dongze Holdings (浙江东泽控股有限公司), a Wenzhou-headquartered manufacturer, has deployed AI alter-ego employees capable of negotiating in fluent Spanish to service European buyers without dispatching human sales personnel, presenting the "AI clone" (AI分身) as an efficiency instrument for overseas market expansion. Jiangsu Province consolidated a catalogue of sixty-seven high-value artificial intelligence application scenarios released by its state-owned enterprise cohort, with Jiangsu Guoxin Group (江苏省国信集团) and Jiangsu Communications Holding (江苏交控) presenting AI digital human deployments among their use cases and with Nanjing acting as a central node for implementation. The Beijing Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology (北京市经济和信息化局) published a three-year action plan covering 2026 to 2028 for a Digital Economy Enterprise Going-Abroad Innovation Service Base and released a digital human hosted interpretation of the document as part of the policy rollout. Chongqing Liangjiang New Area (重庆两江新区) convened a digital-economy talent fair offering more than four hundred positions in roles that explicitly include AI digital human operations for livestreaming and back-office automation.

Gaming and Character Systems: Games-industry veteran Su Kui (苏魁) has described his OPC one-person-company venture as beginning with a digital human built from skeletal animation and connected to a large language model, designed to function as an emotional companion, advisor, and conversational agent capable of voice and text dialogue. An industry-watch daily flagged the SentiAvatar framework together with the accompanying 3D digital human SUSU character model as new tooling that targets the persistent unnaturalness of avatar motion and expression by generating linguistic, gestural, and affective output in real time. YuanMeng Space (元梦空间) has positioned itself as a nearly decade-old metaverse operator holding more than one hundred intellectual-property rights across artificial intelligence, metaverse, and digital human technologies, claims national high-tech enterprise status, and reports a user base exceeding one hundred and sixty thousand.

Regulatory and Ethical Contexts: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家网信办) issued the draft Digital Virtual Human Information Service Management Measures (《数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法》) for public consultation, proposing that any display of a digital virtual human carry a persistent on-screen indication of its synthetic nature throughout the service lifecycle. An accompanying strand of the draft prohibits the provision of virtual intimate-relationship services to minors, extending a full-lifecycle regulatory perimeter over digital virtual human offerings and coinciding with broader enforcement actions against disorderly online financial information. The GitHub project “同事.skill” went viral in April 2026 with tens of thousands of stars (despite some reports claiming over 100,000 at peak attention), inspiring derivative projects such as “张雪峰.skill” that use structured prompts and public materials to approximate the reasoning and speaking style of Zhang Xuefeng, thereby prompting debate over personality rights, data use, and the ethics of creating unsanctioned digital representations of real individuals. A Shandong games company has already trained a departed human-resources specialist into a functioning digital alter-ego that continues to perform invitation, consultation, and reporting tasks, illustrating how the digital alter-ego paradigm is migrating from public figures into ordinary employment contexts.

April 18 News

Regulatory and Ethical Contexts: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家互联网信息办公室) released the Digital Virtual Human Information Service Management Measures (Draft for Comment) in early April, establishing the first dedicated boundaries for digital virtual human services. The draft forbids infringement of intellectual property rights during the creation of virtual humans, prohibits inducing minors to become addicted to digital virtual human services, and bars the provision of virtual relatives or virtual companion relationships to minors that could encourage excessive consumption. Separate consumer-protection coverage addressed the twin industry pain points of image confusion and content non-compliance in digital virtual humans used within AI short dramas, with industry observers reading the rules as a signal that digital virtual humans are not an extra-legal domain. Adjacent reporting on elderly-targeted fraud catalogued escalating AI-enabled deceptions, including virtual girlfriend schemes, synthetic voice calls, and AI face-swapping. A further debate emerged around the education commentator Zhang Xuefeng (张雪峰), whose unauthorised cybernetic digital human reconstruction preserved his signature phrases and rhetorical framework while filtering out the lived texture of his experience on the winter streets of Harbin, raising unresolved concerns about the unauthorised refinement and afterlife of public personalities.

Industrial and Enterprise Applications: The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (工业和信息化部) issued guidance on accelerating industrial-scenario intelligent agents, naming smart inspection digital humans alongside process-automation assistants and embodied intelligence equipment as priority targets for self-deciding, self-executing, and self-evolving capability. Endpoint (Shaanxi) Technology Co., Ltd. (端点（陕西）科技有限公司), a Xi'an high-tech enterprise with a long focus on software base-layer development, released AI digital human software aimed less at spectacular avatars than at resolving the repetitive-labour problem faced by content creators. In Hong Kong, engineer Liu Runshen (刘润燊) converted his career shift into a one-person company offering customised digital human solutions to the finance and education sectors, leveraging the Greater Bay Area for operational support while serving primarily Hong Kong and overseas clients whose higher willingness to pay supports stronger pricing. Qingdao-based service firms profiled in 2026 AI optimisation rankings combine AI content production, digital human customisation, and generative engine optimisation services across Shandong.

Hong Kong engineer Liu Runshen (刘润燊, Kenley Lau) founded Modou Technology International (魔豆科技国际有限公司), a one-person company offering AI Agent solutions that leverage Baidu's Wenxin large model and multimodal interaction technology to help SMEs generate digital humans for e-commerce livestreaming and intelligent customer service, with customised offerings for the finance and education sectors. Rather than building proprietary systems, the company integrates existing AI tools to keep pace with rapid iteration, and pursues two business lines: AI-driven product promotion and personal branding for Hong Kong clients, plus a joint AI curriculum with the Chinese University of Hong Kong for primary and secondary students. Current annual revenue is in the low hundreds of thousands of HKD from individual IP services, with projected 2026 full-year revenue of HKD 20 million once the university curriculum collaboration launches, and plans to expand from one person to a 30-person team in the second half of 2026 with a Guangzhou-based AI content production unit. Liu is incubated at both the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (Guangdong) Innovation and Entrepreneurship Incubation Base and Hong Kong Cyberport, and targets Hong Kong and overseas clients for their higher willingness to pay while relying on Greater Bay Area talent and production capacity for cost efficiency. 

Tourism and Cultural Heritage: The 2026 China AI Tourism Marketing White Paper and parallel 2026 smart tourism system rankings documented the migration of digital humans into round-the-clock live commerce, customer service, and destination operations, with platforms built on Tencent (腾讯) Cloud's high-concurrency architecture supporting holiday-peak traffic at operators including Huaqiao City (华侨城) multi-park resort complexes. Shuming Technology (Wuhan) Co., Ltd. (数命科技（武汉）有限公司), founded by Luo Biwen (罗弼文), sold more than 500,000 Mark Yin (Mark印) AI cultural relic cards in the first quarter across global markets including the United States. Tapping a card against a phone summons an AI digital human based on artefacts such as the Sword of King Goujian of Yue and the Bianzhong of Marquis Yi of Zeng to converse with the user. Jilin Northeast Asia Publishing Media Group (吉林东北亚出版传媒集团) is commercialising its Jiyu (吉遇) digital human cloud exhibition hall, and the Sichuan International Communication Center (四川国际传播中心) launched an overseas app in which each featured giant panda carries a dedicated page displaying a virtual avatar, birthplace, and real-time information. The Hongyaigu scenic area in Shijiazhuang deployed a digital human for visitor-facing operations, while a travel blogger produced follow-up outreach video on Tibet's G318 National Highway using a Huibo Star (慧播星) digital human. The All-media AI Live Broadcast Platform (全媒体AI大直播平台) partnered on a Liu Qingzhu (刘庆柱) digital human system in Zhengzhou to interpret the Yellow Emperor and the civilisational roots of the Yellow River basin.

Education: Shanghai Xinhua Media (上海新华传媒) unveiled its 365 Days of Books programme anchored by AI digital human Xiao YUE (小YUE), with the inaugural 365 Classroom running at the Fuzhou Road Shanghai Book City between 20 and 26 April. Guangzhou's municipal education authorities rolled out a three-teacher classroom model combining human educators, virtual digital human teachers, and smart assistants, in which the human teacher leads instructional design and value guidance while the digital human handles supporting pedagogy. In Tianjin, Tianjin University (天津大学), Tianjin Normal University (天津师范大学), and Tianjin University of Technology (天津理工大学) are offering digital human mock interviews and AI career assessments as part of expanded career guidance ahead of the Third National College Student Career Planning Competition finals scheduled for 22 to 25 April. Beijing Agricultural University (北京农学院) launched an anti-fraud digital human micro-course as part of a coordinated national security education push across capital universities. Changchun's 2026 Citizens' Reading Season features digital humans and AI painting screens that allow young readers to interact with digital figures and convert hand-drawn sketches into digital works. Huawei (华为) is building its first Shandong artificial intelligence science and education training project at Qingdao's Ocean Science and Education Industrial Park, with digital human talent training embedded in a 1+1+1+N government-enterprise operating model.

Healthcare: Henan opened its first traditional Chinese medicine AI outpatient clinic in Zhengzhou on 15 April under the Zhongguancun Yanhuang TCM Science and Technology Innovation Alliance (中关村炎黄中医药科技创新联盟). The clinic pairs a five-minute self-service consultation workflow with a famous-doctor digital human inheritance studio that uses AI to reconstruct the diagnostic and treatment experience of senior TCM practitioners and make it available to working physicians.

Entertainment and Media: Yaoke Media (耀客传媒) unveiled the AIGC fantasy-mystery short drama Qinling Bronze Mystery Record (秦岭青铜诡事录), starring AI digital human leads Qin Lingyue (秦凌岳) and Lin Xiyan (林汐颜) in a story following a retired reconnaissance soldier investigating mining-area anomalies and a two-generation blood-sacrifice mystery in the Qinling mountains. Hangzhou's Shangcheng District released Zhejiang's first dedicated AIGC audiovisual industry policy, the Golden Ten, with a 500-million-yuan industrial fund attached, and Zhejiang Satellite TV (浙江卫视) announced a twenty-six-studio cluster under its Borderless Communication strategy that includes AI manga-drama projects. Bigo's 2026 content outlook positioned AI virtual humans alongside esports and team broadcasting as jointly reshaping a more complex and efficient content ecosystem, presenting guilds with the operational choice of how rather than whether to enter the space. An AI Creators' Economy Forum held in Chengdu featured Hong Kong City University (香港城市大学) vice-president Lin Fen (林芬) comparing the current phase of AI creativity to a Kodak moment, and Communication University of China (中国传媒大学) national key laboratory chief scientist Shen Hao (沈浩) publishing the 2026 China Digital Human Influence Index Report.

The “2026 China Digital Human Influence Index Report” (《2026年度中国数字人影响力指数报告》), released by Communication University of China national key laboratory chief scientist Shen Hao, was formally unveiled at a 2026 AI creator economy forum in Chengdu, confirming the continuation of an established annual research series analyzing China’s digital human ecosystem. The report, produced by the university’s State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence and Communication and associated research institutes, frames the industry as transitioning from presentation-focused virtual figures to AI-driven, agent-like entities embedded in real-world systems, emphasizing increased autonomy, integration with large models, and expanding roles across media, industry, and services. Its release format follows a conference-first model, meaning it is publicly presented and cited but not yet widely available as a full standalone document.

Marketing and Retail: Bojun Technology (伯俊科技) concluded the Guangzhou leg of its AI Retail Growth roadshow, emphasising that the opening of platform-side digital human traffic delivery has unlocked AI livestreaming's full commercial value at costs measured in single-digit yuan per hour. In Daming County, Handan, Hebei, local authorities are expanding a multi-channel livestreaming matrix that combines local broadcasters, external recruits, and AI digital humans to lift logistics efficiency and industrial-product sales, with further plans to roll out AI digital humans and virtual customer service across more than two thousand industrial enterprises.

Government and Public Services: Heilongjiang has embedded AI into its labour and personnel dispute mediation and arbitration system through Long Xiaozhong (龙小仲), a digital human figure that appears on the first national Digital Human Resources and Social Security top-listing action scenario roster. The city of Yichun has brought an AI digital human online for public-facing government services, and Harbin has migrated transport-operator annual-inspection formalities to a paperless online workflow, forming part of a broader Heilongjiang transition from responsive processing to seamless citizen enjoyment of government services.

The rostering system referred to here is a centrally coordinated mechanism used by Chinese administrative bodies, particularly the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security of the People's Republic of China, to identify, evaluate, and promote high-performing digital governance use cases as national reference models. It operates through a “top-listing” (揭榜挂帅) framework in which local governments or agencies submit applied AI or digital service solutions—such as digital humans, automation tools, or intelligent decision-support systems—for competitive assessment against criteria including technical reliability, policy alignment, scalability, and measurable administrative impact. Selected entries are placed on an official roster of action scenarios, which functions both as a validation signal and as a dissemination instrument, enabling standardisation and replication across regions. The system is typically aligned with broader digital transformation agendas coordinated with entities like the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and it reflects a governance model that combines pilot experimentation with structured national rollout, where successful local innovations are formalised into reusable templates for wider public-sector adoption.

Capital Markets: On 16 April the virtual digital human sector index rose to 1431.702 points, up 2% on turnover of 35.947 billion yuan, with Huayi Brothers (华谊兄弟) leading the gainers at a 20.11% advance to 2.09 yuan. Aoyo Share (奥雅股份) climbed 5.80% on turnover of 51.67 million yuan, trading on a concept basket of vocational education, data elements, virtual digital humans, the Greater Bay Area, and the metaverse. Fengshang Culture (锋尚文化) eased 0.25% the previous session on its own concept mix of cultural media, IP economy, virtual digital humans, virtual reality, and metaverse exposure. Xinmei Shares (新媒股份) fell 2.01% against a conceptual lineup that includes online education, virtual digital humans, intellectual property, and state-owned enterprise reform. At the 2026 World Internet Conference Asia-Pacific Summit, Yixin (易鑫) announced plans to open-source its AI Infra within the year, following the earlier release of what it describes as the industry's first Agentic large model.

The “digital human share index” is a concept-based stock market index created by Chinese financial data platforms and brokerage systems rather than a single official institution, constructed by tagging listed companies with exposure to the “virtual digital human” theme and aggregating them into a tradable basket; its constituents are not pure digital human developers but a mixed group of firms across film and television production, digital media, cultural technology, education, design, and data-related sectors that have either disclosed involvement in or are associated with virtual avatars, synthetic presenters, immersive media, or metaverse applications, meaning the index functions as a proxy for investor sentiment toward the broader virtual being ecosystem rather than a strictly defined industry benchmark. 

April 17 News

Education and Employment Services: Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology (西安建筑科技大学) deployed digital human interviewers at its "Hongzhi Navigation Plan" spring 2026 double-selection recruitment fair for graduating students, with the digital interviewers supporting full-position simulated interviews and intelligent follow-up questioning to help students rehearse job-interview skills in an immersive setting. At Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology (南京信息工程大学), the Jiangsu 2026 spring recruitment drive for high-end equipment, next-generation information and communication, and emerging digital industries brought 173 employers and more than 6,000 positions together with on-site digital human interviewers conducting live interviews. In Heze, Shandong, which added 16,600 new urban jobs in the first quarter, the municipal employment push relied on livestreamed job fairs and AI-driven matching, including livestreaming digital human hosts and AI résumé tools. At the Jilin Youth Film and Television OPC Innovation Center (吉林青年影视OPC创新中心), the inaugural training program built an AIGC-based toolchain spanning copywriting generation, intelligent editing, digital human modeling, and cloud rendering for young creators.

Government Services and Civic Affairs: The Beijing Municipal People's Government (北京市人民政府) and Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology (北京市经济和信息化局) published a digital-human-narrated explainer of the Beijing Three-Year Action Plan for the Digital Economy Enterprise Overseas Innovation Service Base (2026–2028). In Ezhou, Hubei, a government-affairs digital human known as "E Xiaobang" (鄂小帮) operates on a vertical large screen, conducting voice interactions with residents to answer policy questions and guide them through administrative procedures. Heilongjiang Province has rolled out an AI digital human government-service assistant in Yichun as part of a provincial push from "perceptible fast service" to "imperceptible instant access," complementing Harbin's online-only annual inspection of transport operating permits. Guangxi's Department of Commerce introduced a department-level digital human named "Shangwu Jun" (商务君), who appeared alongside the cultural figure "Liu Sanjie" and a folk orchestra at the opening of the 2026 Guangxi "33 Shopping Festival" (购在中国·2026广西"33消费节") in Nanning on April 15, marrying digital-human technology with ethnic song-fair traditions to promote cross-border ASEAN trade and domestic consumption.

National Security and Public Education: A cross-provincial civics curriculum broadcast used an AI digital human in Shaanxi to explain to middle-school students the importance of precise timekeeping for national security, with the wider program covering nuclear, polar, space, and other frontier security domains and extending to Fujian's Fuqing nuclear power station. For the 2026 National Security Education Day, Hangzhou launched a dedicated national-security-education digital human that relies on an AIGC platform to generate high-quality themed broadcast videos, and Zhejiang provincial media highlighted the deployment as part of a broader push to use digital humans and video accounts as everyday channels for security awareness. In Beijing, Central University of Finance and Economics (中央财经大学) led the creation of the Capital Financial Security Digital Intelligence Engineering Laboratory to drive AI-based risk early warning, while Beijing University of Agriculture (北京农学院) launched an "anti-fraud digital human" microcourse with dormitory interactive screens simulating common scams including order-brushing schemes and AI face-swapping fraud. Gansu's "New Thought on the Longyuan" quarterly-to-annual speech contest incorporated AI digital human presentations alongside livelihood storytelling, immersive red-trail experiences, and "Data Tells Gansu" AI works.

Healthcare: Shiyou Technology (世优科技) has built a 2D digital human physician deployed inside hospitals to operate around the clock, able to listen to patients describing symptoms such as weak digestion, interpret them through traditional Chinese medicine frameworks, and recommend appropriate departments such as TCM constitution assessment; the company has partnered with hospitals to create "Chinese renowned physician" IP avatars and intelligent triage services as a new paradigm for smart outpatient guidance.

Retail, Marketing, and E-commerce: JD.com (京东) used its 2026 Merchant Conference to release a new generation of digital human livestream hosts centered on an interactive Agent architecture and powered by the JoyAI large model, moving away from preset scripts and keyword-triggered responses toward hosts that "genuinely listen, see, and respond." JD also introduced a free-form digital human product line, expanding beyond its earlier merchant-assistant tools. Agricultural Bank of China's Guangdong Branch (农业银行广东分行) debuted an AI digital human named "Nong Xiaoyun" (农小耘) at the 139th China Import and Export Fair (Canton Fair) in Guangzhou, marking the bank's first deployment of a digital human ambassador at the event. Sichuan's network audiovisual industry showcased digital humans across multiple exhibitor booths at the 13th China Network Audiovisual Conference, alongside dynamic industry-map screens and naked-eye 3D immersive experiences in Chengdu's Pidu district, while the Xinmang Fund (新芒基金) announced it would increase investment in Chengdu-based AI-native IP and digital human ventures.

Tourism and Cultural Heritage: Guangxi's "33 Shopping Festival" paired the "Shangwu Jun" digital human with regional cultural performance to promote the Zhuang "Sanyuesan" spring-festival tourism circuit. Silver-haired tourism products in China now incorporate a digital human named "Yang Xiaoyang" (扬小杨) that provides text-to-speech and speech-to-text conversion, voice-guided tours, and electronic maps tailored to older travelers. In Hubei, a Wuhan-based seventeen-person company has given more than three hundred museums globally the ability to "speak," creating AI digital human avatars of artifacts such as the Sword of Goujian and the Bianzhong of Marquis Yi of Zeng so that a quick tap between an artifact card and a mobile phone triggers a conversation with the object; fifty-six Chu-state relics have already been turned into AI digital humans under this program. Smart-tourism ticketing systems in 2026 are integrating digital human virtual tour guides alongside smart navigation and AI customer service in ecological scenic areas, theme parks, and agritech parks. Songcheng Performance Development (宋城演艺) is placing virtual humans into live scenic-area settings to serve as NPCs in parades, flash performances, and guest interactions, reinforcing immersive Song-dynasty cultural atmospheres.

Shuming Technology (Wuhan) Co., Ltd. (数命科技（武汉）有限公司), founded by CEO Luo Biwen (罗弼文). According to Hubei Daily's reporting, the 17-person Wuhan-based team has given more than 300 museums globally the ability to "speak" through AI digital humans, with the Sword of Goujian (越王勾践剑) and the Bianzhong of Marquis Yi of Zeng (曾侯乙编钟) among the artifacts rendered as AI digital human avatars, a tap between a physical artifact card ("Mark印" card / Mark Yin card) and a mobile phone triggers a conversation with the object, and fifty-six Chu-state (楚国) relics have been turned into AI cards. The deployments are reported to include major institutions such as the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with multilingual narration support cited at 143 languages. The program also encompasses the Jing Xiaochu (荆小楚) digital human at Jingzhou Museum and AI guides rolled out at the Wuhan Marathon and Wuhan city walk (Dangdang Bus / 兜兜巴士) use cases. 

Songcheng Performance Development Co., Ltd. (宋城演艺) is a Shenzhen-listed Chinese cultural tourism and live performance conglomerate headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, best known for its large-scale scenic-area theatrical productions under the Songcheng and Romance series brands, including the flagship Romance of Songcheng staged at Hangzhou Songcheng and franchised variants in Sanya, Lijiang, Jiuzhai, Guilin, Zhangjiajie, Xi'an, Shanghai, and other destinations. Within the digital human context, the company has positioned itself as a cultural tourism adopter rather than a technology developer, integrating virtual hosts, digital performers, and AI-driven interactive characters into its scenic areas and theater experiences to extend traditional song-and-dance storytelling into immersive, screen-based, and metaverse-adjacent formats. It has partnered with technology providers to deploy digital human guides and virtual idols in its theme parks, experimented with XR and volumetric capture to augment stage productions, and explored virtual performance IP as a complement to its live-show intellectual property, including digital twin versions of signature shows intended for online distribution and location-based entertainment. The company's digital human activity is framed as a strategic response to post-pandemic tourism recovery pressures and to the broader Chinese cultural tourism sector's shift toward digital-physical integration, smart scenic areas, and youth-oriented virtual content, aligning with MCT and provincial initiatives encouraging cultural enterprises to adopt AIGC, digital humans, and metaverse technologies for heritage presentation and visitor engagement. 

Non-Heritage Preservation: Tongjiang, Heilongjiang has built a non-heritage digital experience hall for the Hezhe ethnic group's Yimakan oral tradition, recording voices of thirty-six inheritors including Wu Baochen and You Wenfeng, archiving fifty-four classic Yimakan passages, and rendering the material through digital human performers to sustain living transmission of the form. Guizhou has formulated provincial regulations on ethnic-minority intangible cultural heritage that similarly point toward digital human-based documentation and dissemination of traditional forms.

Media, Film, and Short-Form Drama: Yaoke Media (耀客传媒) released the AIGC fantasy-mystery micro-drama "Qinling Bronze Mysteries" (秦岭青铜诡事录), a two-year production and one of the first domestic micro-dramas whose plot is carried entirely by AI digital human leads, featuring the company's proprietary AI digital human performers "Qin Lingyue" (秦凌岳) and "Lin Xiyan" (林汐颜) in the dual protagonist roles. The broader micro-drama sector is undergoing a structural overhaul, with production costs falling by orders of magnitude and junior actors once earning roughly one thousand yuan per day facing wholesale replacement by digital human performers. The China Federation of Radio and Television Performing Arts Committee issued a formal statement against AI look-alikes, voice mimicry, face-swapped micro-dramas, commercial product placements, and virtual human replicas of identifiable celebrities, framing these practices as infringements on performers' rights. Tianjin Haihe Media Center (天津海河传媒中心), through its Tianjin Daily platform, hosted the AI Super Creator Challenge at which Lü Xin (吕欣), dean of the Digital Human Research Institute at Communication University of China (中国传媒大学数字人研究院), discussed AI applications and content premiumization for seasonal-themed production.

Enterprise Technology, R&D, and Listed Companies: iFlytek (科大讯飞) filed a patent titled "Digital Human Video Generation Method," covering a technique for generating digital human video from a reference image combined with input text, aimed at semantic consistency in virtual human generation. Perfect World (完美世界) saw its share price rise 7.61 percent as institutional investors continued to favor the company for its exposure to cloud gaming, virtual digital humans, and metaverse segments. Annie Co., Ltd. (安妮股份) is building blockchain-based digital asset infrastructure with smart-contract licensing and revenue distribution explicitly positioned for virtual digital human and metaverse scenarios. Chuanwang Media (川网传媒) is categorized under virtual digital human, smart government affairs, DeepSeek-concept, AIGC, and cultural-media concept boards on the Chinese markets. Wireless Media (无线传媒) reported that its Hebei IPTV "Lingxi Assistant" and digital human "Jixiang" (吉祥) were selected by the National Radio and Television Administration as model cases in "Smart Family New Scenes" and "Digital Stage and Smart Cultural-Museum Audiovisual Systems" respectively. ST Yilianzhong (ST易联众) continues to organize its business around digital medical insurance, digital healthcare, digital human affairs, digital technology, and digital services.

Regulation and Industry Self-Governance: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家互联网信息办公室) released the "Measures for the Management of Digital Virtual Human Information Services (Draft for Public Comment)" (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法（征求意见稿）) on April 3, opening public consultation on rules that target two industry pain points: image confusion of virtual humans and content violations. The draft forbids providing digital virtual human services that use an identifiable natural person's image without that person's consent, prohibits defamatory or disfiguring depictions, and bars infringement on third-party intellectual property during virtual human creation and operation; it also explicitly prohibits enticing minors into addictive use of digital virtual human services and prohibits offering minors virtual relatives, virtual companions, or other virtual intimate-relationship services that could induce excessive reliance. Tmall (天猫) has for the first time issued commodity standards for AI software and applications, explicitly covering deep-synthesis applications such as virtual human interaction alongside API-key sales, interface services, and text, image, and audiovisual generation tools, while banning marketing claims such as "100 percent accurate" and "fully replaces human labor."

Personal Digital Twins and AI Companions: A wave of open-source projects in China including "Zhang Xuefeng.skill" and "AI Refinement" has demonstrated pipelines that distill an individual's chat histories and social-media traces into a personal digital human or digital avatar, prompting commentary from Xinlang Finance (新浪财经) on rights protection for those being "packaged" into digital humans. A Shandong gaming and media company attempted to train a departed employee into an AI digital human that would continue to perform work functions, surfacing in Hubei Daily commentary the question of whether such "cyber laborers" fall under labor law. Separate reporting framed the distillation of colleagues, former romantic partners, and other personal relations into bespoke digital twins as a form of personality extraction raising novel consent and identity-rights issues. The draft virtual human regulation is widely cited in this context as signaling that digital virtual humans are not a lawless zone.

Industrial and Advertising Applications: Shenyang unveiled the country's first "Digital Intelligence Worker Lei Feng" (数智工人雷锋) as a multi-angle digital human commemoration of Lei Feng's years in Liaoning, combining digital worker iconography with historical memory. Holographic digital human technology is being used to bring street advertising boards to life, with highly realistic virtual figures created on computers and projected into physical environments via advanced projection hardware so that expressions and body movements appear naturally integrated with the surrounding space.

April 16 News

Healthcare: Hunan Provincial Tumor Hospital has deployed a pre-triage digital human in its outpatient lobby, developed by Wuhan Zelin Huantu (武汉泽霖寰图), which interacts with patients through conversational dialogue, directing them to appropriate departments and providing preliminary guidance on symptoms such as abdominal pain or palpable masses. The system is designed to reduce wait times and front-load clinical intake by automating the initial patient-routing function. Separately, the Beijing Digital Smart TCM Industry Development Research Institute (北京数智中医产业发展研究院), newly established in Beijing's Chaoyang District as the first institution of its kind nationally, has opened an application showcase featuring nearly forty representative products, among them a conversational TCM digital human capable of dialectical diagnosis, representing a dedicated effort to integrate AI-driven virtual practitioners into traditional Chinese medicine workflows. In Hefei, the high-tech zone's exhibition center displays a digital human alongside the "Zhi Yi Zhuli" (智医助理) system, an AI medical assistant that has passed China's National Medical Licensing Examination, positioning the two technologies side by side as demonstrations of Anhui's ambitions in intelligent healthcare.

Government and Public Services: In Jiangsu, authorities unveiled "Xiao Hai" (小海), a national security-themed digital human, at a public event tied to National Security Education Day on April 15, where the figure attracted crowd engagement at a sporting venue during the Jiangsu Provincial Games athletics preliminaries. Separately, the Jiangsu Yancheng-based Yancheng Newspaper Group demonstrated a "digital human troupe" inside a digital holographic cabin during a visit by the Guangxi Press Association, showcasing figures including "Su Yan" (苏言), a digital anchor for the National Immigration Administration, and digital versions of local figures such as a Huai Opera performer and a Su Super League goalkeeper, illustrating applications spanning government communications, cultural promotion, and civic outreach. In Guangxi, the Commerce Department deployed a digital human to co-host the launch ceremony of the 2026 "33 Consumer Festival" in Nanning, integrating virtual presenter technology into a provincial-level government consumer promotion event. Shenyang's "Smart Heping" (智慧和平) mini-program platform, which has accumulated over 240,000 users, has incorporated digital human capabilities into its service architecture covering news, government affairs, civic services, commerce, and tourism. In Shijiazhuang, the municipal social security bureau launched an AI digital human to serve as an intelligent customer service instructor, supporting the digital transformation of public-facing benefits administration. Beijing Agricultural College has introduced "anti-fraud digital human" micro-courses deployed on dormitory interactive screens, using scenario simulations of high-frequency scam types including fake part-time job schemes and AI face-swapping fraud to deliver national security education directly within student living spaces.

Entertainment and Media: The 13th China Online Audio-Visual Conference, which opened on April 15 in Chengdu, featured demonstrations of digital humans and advanced production tools at its Yongchuan Science and Technology Film Studio pavilion, spotlighting Chongqing's twin-engine development model combining technology-driven production with location-based filming. At the same conference, Xinmang Fund (新芒基金) announced plans to deepen investment in Chengdu with a stated focus on AI-native IP and digital humans, aiming to support local creators and small teams, while the Chengdu High-tech Zone's Tianfu Changdao Yuanchuang Island OPC launched an acceleration plan anchored in digital human IP and AI agent tool platforms tied to Chengdu's cultural tourism scenes. In Beijing's Mentougou District, the newly established "XR Immersive Audio-Visual Joint Laboratory" (虚实无界XR沉浸视听联合实验室) includes a dedicated digital human production center alongside an XR virtual broadcast studio, with capabilities spanning AI micro-short drama production, ultra-high-definition program recording, and real-time rendering for film and television content. The growing displacement of human actors by digital humans in China's short-drama sector has become a significant industry flashpoint, with Hangzhou Mingji Culture Media (杭州鸣季文化传媒有限公司), whose founder Ji Xian entered the short-drama market in 2022 with crews of more than a dozen people, now observing that digital humans offer capital advantages through lower costs and immunity from celebrity scandals, while Red Fruit Short Drama (红果短剧) issued a public notice on sustained enforcement against the unauthorized use of AI-generated short-drama materials. Shiyou Technology (世优科技) has deployed AI digital human guides within holographic cabins and holographic barrels as part of smart exhibition hall experiences, applying real-time rendering and interactive presentation technology to reshape visitor engagement in museum and exhibition contexts.

Tourism and Cultural Heritage: Students from Shandong Tourism Vocational College (山东旅游职业学院) have taken their "Rural Tourism Smart Media" project into multiple villages across Shandong Province, using AI-driven content creation, intelligent editing, digital human on-camera presentation, and livestream audience development as tools for rural tourism digital promotion. At Zhejiang Tourism Vocational College (浙江旅游职业学院), student teams have delivered digital human explainer videos to small and medium-sized museums as part of a nationally recognized pilot program, with the Cangnan Museum in Wenzhou reporting measurable increases in visitor traffic following the deployment of these AI-narrated guides. In Chongqing, design firms are conceptualizing next-generation exhibition halls for 2026 that integrate AI digital human docents into holographic and immersive spatial environments, reflecting the city's broader push to merge digital creative design with cultural tourism infrastructure.

Education: Xi'an University of Technology's (西安工业大学) School of Marxism has undertaken a funded research project applying digital humans to the teaching of the "Introduction to the Chinese National Community" curriculum, exploring how virtual presenter technology can support ideological and political education in higher education settings. At Shanghai University of Political Science and Law (上海政法学院), the university's spring recruitment fair showcased an AI-enhanced career services center built on a "technology plus humanities" model, integrating digital human career mentors into a system that also draws on the institution's strengths in AI law, management, and psychology for intelligent career assessment and employment service development.

Commercial and Enterprise: Chongqing Hansha (重庆汉沙) has positioned itself as a provider of low-cost, rapid-deployment digital human solutions, occupying a niche in the vendor landscape oriented toward accessibility and speed of implementation. In Guangdong, Zhihui Zhaoneng (智慧兆能) ranked first in a 2026 comparative evaluation of interactive digital humans, with testing covering technical capability, scenario adaptability, and product maturity. iFlytek Zhizuo (讯飞智作) topped a separate 2026 national virtual digital human vendor recommendation ranking published by Xingtai-based media, assessed across dimensions of technical strength, scenario fit, and deployment track record. In Changsha, the newly opened "Xingchuanghui" (星创荟) Innovation Service Center at the Changsha Economic Development Zone has created a dedicated digital human and launched a livestream channel as part of its platform for enterprise innovation services. Bairong Intelligence (百融智能) provided 3D holographic digital human technology for the 2026 Beijing Half Marathon, deploying virtual presenter capabilities at the scale of a mass-participation sporting event. In Suzhou, an OPC Community Day and financial salon at the Taicang Zhihuigu featured project demonstrations including ultra-realistic intelligent digital humans, with seven AI projects presented to investor audiences in a fifteen-minute pitch format. In the financial sector more broadly, Chinese institutions have begun deploying "digital employees" capable of reading micro-expressions and speech-pattern analysis during client interactions, representing a shift from scripted service bots toward behaviorally aware virtual agents in lending and advisory contexts. A Shandong-based game company generated national debate after creating a digital human replica of a departed employee who then "returned to work" in virtual form, with the original individual reportedly consenting and describing the outcome as entertaining, though the case has prompted widespread public concern about the boundaries of digital human labor replication.

Regulatory and Legal: The Cyberspace Administration of China published a draft regulation titled "Measures for the Management of Digital Virtual Human Information Services" (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法) on April 3, 2026, with a public comment period running through May 6, defining digital virtual humans as non-physical entities that simulate human appearance using graphics, digital image processing, or AI, driven by either real humans or computational systems, and possessing voice, behavioral, and interactive capabilities. The regulation mandates that digital human services obtain explicit individual consent from natural persons, displayed in a prominent and clearly understandable manner, and addresses abuses including unauthorized use of celebrity likenesses, unauthorized "resurrection" of deceased individuals, and deepfake-enabled fraud. Commentary published in Qiushi and by Xinhua's Liaowang Weekly framed the regulation as a necessary response to the rapid commercial penetration of digital virtual humans across livestream commerce, social interaction, cultural tourism, and education. Separately, a regulation on AI companion services takes effect on July 15, 2026, with core provisions prohibiting the provision of virtual intimate relationship services, including virtual relatives and virtual partners, to minors. The Hangzhou Internet Court, China's first internet court, has adjudicated the nation's first virtual digital human intellectual property infringement case, establishing early judicial precedent in a domain where legal frameworks remain nascent.

April 15 News

Regulation and Policy: The Cyberspace Administration of China published the Draft Measures for Digital Virtual Human Information Service Management (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法征求意见稿) in April 2026, jointly issued with the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and two additional departments. The draft targets two core problems in the digital virtual human sector: identity confusion between real and synthetic figures, and content that falls outside acceptable norms. Among its provisions, Article 10 explicitly prohibits the provision of virtual companion services to minors. Separately, reports highlighted the legal risks of companies training AI digital humans based on departed employees without obtaining valid consent, noting that the draft measures require the authorization of a specific natural person before a recognizably modeled digital virtual human can be deployed as a service.

Livestreaming and E-commerce Fraud: A widely circulated Xinhua "New China Viewpoint" investigation documented the proliferation of AI-generated digital human videos on short-video platforms designed to manipulate elderly users, a phenomenon dubbed "AI Boss" (AI霸总). The reports, carried across outlets in Guangxi, Hubei, Fujian, and other provinces, described operators producing digital human videos in as little as five minutes and simultaneously running dozens or even hundreds of accounts to conduct romance-style scams targeting seniors. In the e-commerce domain, JD.com (京东) disclosed that it had previously built a digital human modeled on founder Liu Qiangdong, whose first one-hour livestream session two years ago attracted substantial viewership, illustrating the ongoing commercial adoption of executive-modeled digital humans for direct sales broadcasting. In Tianjin, Hanfan Digital Technology (天津市汉梵数字科技有限公司) was recognized for its digital human proxy broadcasting service, which was selected as a featured case study on the Huawei Cloud marketplace, serving primarily small and medium-sized merchants.

The "AI霸总" (AI Boss) phenomenon refers to a wave of AIGC-generated digital human personas deployed across Chinese short-video platforms beginning in late 2024 and escalating sharply through early 2026, in which AI-generated or AI face-swapped male figures posing as wealthy, refined, emotionally attentive executives are used to cultivate parasocial relationships with elderly women, particularly widowed women in their 70s and 80s. The personas typically appear in luxurious settings, address viewers with intimate language such as "姐姐" (older sister) and "想你" (I miss you), and sustain engagement through highly anthropomorphic emotional expression produced at industrial scale, with operators reportedly generating a single video in five minutes and running dozens of accounts simultaneously. The scheme monetizes through tipping, overpriced product sales, and emotional manipulation that drives repeat engagement, with individual operators reporting daily revenues of 2,000 yuan or more. The most widely reported case involves an 84-year-old grandmother who spent nearly 10,000 yuan, handwrote a 500-character love letter to an AI persona, and refused to believe family members who told her the figure was a digital human, insisting the AI understood her better than they did. The phenomenon drew national media attention across outlets including Sina Finance, China News Weekly, Phoenix News, and the 21st Century Business Herald, as well as concern from NPC (National People's Congress) delegates, and has been framed by Chinese government sources and state media as a form of predatory emotional fraud exploiting the loneliness and digital illiteracy of elderly populations, raising urgent questions about the regulatory adequacy of China's existing frameworks for AI-generated content and digital human deployments. 

Healthcare and Medical Education: Digital Human Technology (数字人科技) exhibited at the 93rd China International Medical Equipment Fair in a presentation themed around digital anatomy and hands-on training enablement, positioning its digital human systems as tools for medical education. In Beijing, the newly established Beijing Digital Intelligent Traditional Chinese Medicine Industry Development Research Institute (北京数智中医产业发展研究院) announced capabilities including a TCM AI digital human that can conduct dialogue and perform syndrome differentiation, integrating multimodal perception into health management workflows alongside embodied intelligent robotics and brain-computer interface technologies.

Cultural Tourism and Accessibility: In Fujian, a company in Fuzhou developed a customized sign-language digital human product for the cultural tourism sector, deploying a transparent-cabinet integrated device that projects a digital human interpreter for hearing-impaired visitors at cultural sites. Students from Zhejiang Tourism Academy (浙旅院), enrolled in its smart tourism technology program, produced digital human guide videos for small and medium-sized museums including the Cangnan Museum in Wenzhou, generating measurable increases in visitor traffic after the videos were distributed online. In Chengdu, municipal planners announced a strategy linking Chengdu's distinctive cultural tourism scenes with digital human IP and AI agent tool platforms to boost the global competitiveness of locally produced digital creative content, building on momentum from the Ne Zha film franchise. The 2026 ACX "24-Hour Master Race" competition launched at the 13th China Online Audio-Visual Conference in Chengdu, with Lu Xin, director of the Digital Human Research Institute at Communication University of China (中国传媒大学), serving as a co-initiator of the event, which aimed to advance Chengdu- and Sichuan-branded digital cultural production.

Education and Ideological Instruction: Yantai Institute of Technology (烟台科技学院) in Shandong deployed a digital human named Bo Xiaoya (博小雅), created as a digital replica of Vice President Gao Jing, as part of the institution's "AI + International Strategy Engineering" initiative to link intelligent technology with cross-cultural communication. In Wuhan, Donghu University (武汉东湖学院) built a "Lei Feng Digital Human" interactive zone featuring 720-degree panoramic venue replication as part of a "Da Sizhengke" ideological education model, reaching over 12,000 student interactions through digitally enhanced learning.

Broadcasting and Telecommunications: China Broadcasting Network Liaoning (中国广电辽宁公司) launched an AI-TV ultra-high-definition set-top box equipped with a three-mode voice remote control and built-in AI digital humans named Liaoliao (辽辽) and Ningning (宁宁), positioned as part of the province's smart broadcasting upgrade. Hebei Broadcasting Wireless Media (河北广电无线传媒股份有限公司) in Shijiazhuang was tagged with digital human capabilities as part of its IPTV and mobile media operations.

Retail and Urban Promotion: Shiyou Technology (世优科技) deployed AI digital human shopping guides and VR large-space experiences in Harbin retail stores as part of Heilongjiang province's efforts to fuse digital economy with cultural tourism, moving AI from technology demonstration into consumer-facing service. In Guangzhou, the Wanbo business district in the Changlong area introduced an AI digital human named Xiaowan (小萬) to promote the district on-site, presenting location advantages, industrial layout, and development potential to visitors in an interactive format.

Employment and Public Services: At the 2026 Henan Spring Breeze Action employment assistance recruitment fair, AI digital humans were deployed to provide intelligent job-matching services, allowing job seekers to interact with a digital human interface for personalized position recommendations. In Tianjin, the 2026 Dongli Lake half-marathon incorporated digital human interactive Q&A alongside live entertainment to create an immersive event atmosphere for participants and spectators.

Enterprise and Technology Development: Nanchang University of Aeronautics (南昌航空大学) jointly with Jiangxi Kejun Industrial (江西科骏实业有限公司) filed a patent for a talking head animation synthesis method designed to significantly improve generation efficiency for virtual anchors and digital humans. Social platform Soul open-sourced its SoulX-FlashHead real-time digital human generation model, achieving 96 frames per second streaming inference on a single NVIDIA 4090 GPU. Phantom Future Tianjin (幻影未来（天津）数字科技有限公司) exhibited a digital human front-end integrated with a pixel-style virtual office interface, designed to enable direct user interaction with enterprise AI agents. Xianxin Technology (相芯科技) in Hangzhou appeared in connection with Migu Culture's acquisition of a self-collision processing patent relevant to digital human rendering. A separate report noted that miHoYo (米哈游) founder Cai Haoyu invested in new AI models, with the broader digital human broadcasting landscape cited as spanning Tencent Hunyuan digital human, ByteDance, Alibaba, and Kuaishou alongside international entrants.

Ethical and Social Dimensions: Reports from Xinhua's New Beijing Daily explored the concept of bidirectional digital immortality, in which virtual digital humans are designed to interact with living people in real time, including AI-driven "resurrections" of deceased individuals. The coverage noted that the social and psychological implications of such deployments remain largely unresolved. In a parallel case widely discussed across Chinese media, the practice of companies training digital humans based on former employees without consent was framed as a potential violation of personal information rights, with commentators citing the forthcoming CAC draft measures as a necessary corrective.

April 14 News

Cultural Heritage and Tourism: The Guangxi Ethnic Museum has deployed a digital human named "Gui Ling'er" to narrate historical stories along the Li River in Guilin, while visitors to Wuzhou's Qilou City heritage district can scan codes to hear century-old trading port tales delivered by digital guides. In Hunan, Shuangfeng County Cultural Tourism Development Co. debuted an interactive digital human system called "AI Meet Zeng Guofan" at a basketball event, drawing crowds of fans, parents, and children to engage with a virtual recreation of the Qing-dynasty statesman. Students from Zhejiang Tourism Vocational Academy have been producing digital human narrated guide videos for underfunded county-level museums, with Wenzhou's Cangnan Museum reporting a measurable uptick in visitors after the videos were published online. ByteDance's "non-heritage digital human" project, which uses digital figures to present intangible cultural heritage, has been selected as a demonstration case by the UNESCO Creative Center. In Guangxi, the Commerce Department's digital humans Shangwujun and Liu Sanjie were announced as co-hosts for the launch night of the provincial "33 Consumer Festival," merging cultural iconography with commercial promotion.

ByteDance’s “non-heritage digital human” project uses AI-driven virtual humans to present and transmit intangible cultural heritage through interactive, multilingual dialogue and real-time demonstrations, combining large language models with deployment on platforms such as Douyin and Volcano Engine. These digital figures, exemplified by systems like “Feifei,” have been used at major cultural events in China as guides and educators, shifting heritage preservation from static display to interactive transmission aimed at broader and younger audiences. The initiative was selected as a demonstration case by UNESCO’s International Centre for Creativity and Sustainable Development under its program on protecting cultural expression in digital environments, which evaluated global projects for innovation and scalability, positioning ByteDance’s approach as a replicable model for AI-enabled cultural preservation and dissemination. 

The UNESCO International Centre for Creativity and Sustainable Development (ICCSD) is a Beijing-based UNESCO Category 2 centre established through cooperation between UNESCO and the Chinese government, positioning China as a central institutional hub for advancing creativity-led sustainable development within the global UNESCO framework. While aligned with UNESCO’s cultural and development agendas, the centre is funded and operated by China, allowing it to integrate national priorities such as digital innovation, cultural preservation, and creative industries into international programs. Through research, policy coordination, and global forums like Creativity 2030, ICCSD functions as a platform where China promotes models that combine technology and culture—such as AI-driven heritage projects—as scalable solutions for sustainable development, reinforcing its role in shaping how digital creativity and cultural expression are applied within global governance structures. 

Healthcare: Xuanwu Hospital in Beijing, affiliated with Capital Medical University, has launched what it describes as the country's first Parkinson's disease AI doctor platform, deploying physician "AI avatars" that answer foundational patient queries around the clock while operating within strict safety boundaries that exclude prescribing or recommending specific treatments. At the 2026 Healthy China Hospital Presidents' Forum in Wuhan, a digital human named Chu Daifu was highlighted as handling sixteen service interactions per day in a clinical support role. Southern Medical University has released a Hospital AI Platform whose architecture includes digital avatar capabilities integrated into a multi-agent system supporting automated model training and deployment, with named applications including Zhi Shen, Nanfang Zhima, and Nanyi Xiaozhi.

Entertainment and Media: A television program has paired the hyper-realistic digital human Noah with live-action host Li Hao, dividing celebrity performers into two competing teams, one led by the human host and the other by Noah, in a format that blends metaverse aesthetics with variety-show competition. The China Radio and Television Social Organization Federation Actors Committee issued a formal statement opposing unauthorized AI face-swapping, voice cloning, and virtual-human replication of real performers for commercial use, including in short dramas and branded content. Separately, reporting on AI-generated short dramas noted that producing a digital human whose appearance approximates a real person costs vary by fidelity level, with entry-level versions available cheaply and higher-end versions commanding significantly more, raising ongoing questions about likeness rights in the booming short-drama market.

Livestreaming and E-commerce: Haier Smart Home (海尔智家) operates an AI livestream center in Wuhan where digital human broadcasts now account for roughly thirty thousand hours alongside approximately one hundred thousand hours of human-presented content, using what the company calls "digital clone humans" that replicate a real presenter's appearance, voice, speech patterns, and body language. Huiboxing (慧播星) digital humans were used in an agricultural livestreaming video promoting red jujube farming from Cele County in Xinjiang's Hotan Prefecture, as part of a broader rural-assistance broadcast campaign. MiHoYo (米哈游) founder Cai Haoyu's investment in a new AI model has prompted industry commentary positioning virtual hosts and AI digital human livestreaming as among the most commercially viable near-term applications, with platform operators expected to absorb these tools into their own ecosystems rather than offering them through third-party creators.

Enterprise and Workforce: A gaming and media company in Shandong drew national attention and widespread criticism after it trained AI digital humans based on departed employees, enabling the virtual replicas to introduce themselves and continue performing work tasks, raising questions about personal information rights when consent is ambiguous or absent. At Qingdao Port's QQCTU terminal, young dockworkers independently formed a "digital human creation group" to produce AI-narrated educational micro-videos, repurposing the technology for internal workplace communication. Shandong Digital Culture Group (山东数字文化集团) unveiled its third-generation digital human AI consultant at the 2026 Qilu Spring Auto Show, where attendees noted visible improvements over the previous edition. In Guiyang, a recruitment fair for eastern Chinese university graduates featured a dedicated AI digital human zone using voice interaction to match candidates with positions and answer talent-policy questions in real time. Meituan (美团) maintains a dedicated digital human and creative generation team within its platform technology division, staffed in part by Shanghai Jiao Tong University graduates specializing in semantic parsing. Guijiren (硅基数字人), showcased at an OPC event in Jiangsu, offers small-business owners personalized AI avatars intended to serve as always-on digital representatives for individual shop operators.

Consumer Services and Insurance: New China Life Insurance (新华保险) has launched a digital human service layer on its 95567 customer hotline, described as an innovation in policyholder interaction. In Hangzhou, a consumer-rights digital human named Hang Xiao Xiao has been deployed by local authorities to shift dispute-resolution services from scheduled in-person appointments to instant online responses, operating across Zhejiang province as part of the 3.15 consumer protection campaign.

Education and Training: Hefei Normal University's School of Music has launched a "Good Show on Stage" project that integrates digital human opera anchors and immersive opera experience spaces as part of a full-chain intellectual property plan for traditional Chinese opera, with deployments already active at the university and at multiple sites across Anhui province. Guangdong Industry and Trade Vocational Technical College (广东工贸职业技术学院) has incorporated virtual digital human production into hands-on training for students, alongside AI video creation competitions and public AI courses, as part of its broader AI-plus-vocational-education strategy. Chengdu University of Technology's Xunhai Zhiqing student team has developed a foreign-trade support solution that uses high-fidelity digital human technology to produce multilingual product videos at scale, targeting cost barriers faced by small and mid-sized export enterprises.

Cross-border Commerce and Marketing: Tianjin Jiuniu Data (天津九牛数据) operates a cross-border marketing system called Tainiu that incorporates localized virtual digital humans alongside multilingual AI voiceover and overseas live-footage libraries, aimed at helping Chinese brands build presence on TikTok and other international platforms. Ruilishi (瑞立视) has published an overview of virtual digital human monetization pathways, positioning the technology as a cost-reduction tool for enterprise clients in the business-to-business market rather than a direct revenue generator.

Technology and Research: Duandian (Shaanxi) Technology (端点（陕西）科技有限公司) has developed a system that drives digital human shoulder, neck, and hand gestures directly from voice characteristics, automatically generating forward-leaning posture and emphatic hand movements when the system detects rising pitch and increased volume in the audio input. Yingshi Technology (萤石科技) has released an AI digital human described as capable of nuanced emotional expression, first shown at the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai by locally based robotics firm Zhikepai (智可派机器人), whose debut mass-produced character-type embodied intelligence robot was presented at the same event. JD.com (京东) has open-sourced JoyAI-Image-Edit, a twenty-four-billion-parameter image-editing model, as part of a broader technology pipeline that extends from foundation models through digital humans to embodied-intelligence data centers. The Agricultural Bank of China (中国农业银行) has announced the establishment of a Smart Banking Construction Office tasked with building enterprise-grade AI digital human employees, reported in the context of its institutional business restructuring.

JoyAI-Image is a unified multimodal foundation model designed to handle image understanding, text-to-image generation, and instruction-guided editing within a single integrated system, whereas JoyAI-Image-Edit is a specialized derivative model focused solely on instruction-based image editing, taking an existing image and applying precise, spatially controlled modifications; the key difference is that JoyAI-Image functions as a general-purpose visual intelligence model covering multiple tasks, while JoyAI-Image-Edit is optimized specifically for high-accuracy, controllable editing workflows. 

Regulatory and Ethical Contexts: The Cyberspace Administration of China published draft measures titled the Digital Virtual Human Information Services Management Measures in early April 2026, marking the first dedicated regulatory framework for digital virtual humans and requiring that a visible "digital human" label be displayed continuously throughout any virtual-human presentation. Five Chinese government departments jointly issued rules establishing that virtual companions must not be provided to minors, setting a boundary on AI anthropomorphic interaction services. Legal commentary on the Shandong employee-cloning case has centered on whether the draft measures, combined with existing personal information protection law, would render the practice unlawful absent explicit, informed, and specific consent, particularly when the digital replica's appearance, voice, and behavioral mannerisms are closely modeled on a real individual. A separate report from Shanghai flagged the proliferation of "AI boss" romance-scam videos, noting that a single digital human video can be produced in under five minutes and that operators may run dozens or even hundreds of such accounts simultaneously, targeting elderly viewers. The Hong Kong International InnoEX exhibition, opening on April 13 for a four-day run, featured digital humans among its headline technology categories alongside AI, smart office solutions, and Internet of Things applications.

April 13 News

Regulatory and Standards: China's first national standard for customer-service digital humans, formally designated GB/T 46483-2025 and titled "Information Technology: General Technical Requirements for Customer-Service Virtual Digital Humans," came into effect in April 2026. The standard establishes unified specifications for product form, functional boundaries, performance metrics, image generation, visual interaction, voice interaction, and emotional response for customer-service digital humans. SenseTime (商汤科技) became the first enterprise to pass compliance testing under the new standard, with its SenseTime Ruying platform cited as the first national-standard-compliant digital human. Separately, the Cyberspace Administration of China published for public comment its draft "Measures for the Management of Digital Virtual Human Information Services," which stipulates that digital virtual human services that are sufficiently identifiable as a specific natural person may not be offered without that person's explicit consent. In a parallel regulatory development, five agencies including the CAC, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, and the State Administration for Market Regulation jointly issued rules governing AI anthropomorphic interaction services, explicitly prohibiting the provision of virtual companions to minors. These regulatory moves coincide with judicial precedent: television host He Jiong successfully sued over an unauthorized AI virtual likeness, with the court ordering 203,000 yuan in damages, a case subsequently designated by the Supreme People's Court as a typical case in personality rights judicial protection.

Healthcare: Capital Medical University's Xuanwu Hospital in Beijing launched what it described as China's first Parkinson's disease AI doctor platform, deploying AI avatars modeled on real physicians to provide round-the-clock consultation for patients. The system enables patients to interact with digital replicas of their treating doctors at any hour, addressing questions about symptom management such as worsening tremors. In a separate development reflecting the emotional dimensions of digital human companionship among older populations, reports from Hubei province described an octogenarian who became deeply attached to an AI digital human companion, an episode that prompted broader media discussion about the gap between the emotional needs of elderly populations and the current capabilities of AI companionship products.

Ethics and Labor: A game and media company in Shandong province generated substantial public controversy by training AI digital humans based on departed employees to continue performing their work duties. The company's own assessment was candid, describing the resulting digital clones as limited in capability, able only to handle simple commands and repetitive inquiries. The case rapidly escalated online when the open-source project "Colleague.skill" appeared on GitHub, quickly followed by derivative projects including "Ex.skill," "Boss.skill," and "Parents.skill," collectively forming what commentators termed a "digital cloning" ecosystem. The controversy intensified further when a separate project produced an AI digital clone of Zhang Xuefeng, the prominent education consultant, within two weeks of his death, prompting widespread debate about the ethics of posthumous digital replication and the commercial implications for knowledge-based professionals whose expertise and likeness can be synthesized without consent. Media commentary framed the Zhang Xuefeng case as a harbinger of challenges facing all content creators and professionals whose livelihoods depend on specialized personal knowledge.

Cultural Tourism and Public Events: In Chongqing's Hechuan district, local authorities unveiled an AI digital human modeled on Tao Xingzhi, the celebrated educator, to mark the 134th anniversary of his birth. Shiyou Technology (世优科技) provided full-stack digital human technology for the project, encompassing the complete pipeline from digital human creation to deployment. Shiyou Technology also deployed its Bota AI digital human interaction kiosk at Nanning Baiyun Airport in Guangxi to support smart travel services. Separately, the Guangxi Department of Commerce announced that its digital human "Shangwujun" would appear alongside the iconic cultural figure Liu Sanjie at the launch of the provincial "33 Consumer Festival," using a digital human performance format to promote consumer engagement. Guangxi-based AI applications were also reported to be producing digital humans for e-commerce services targeting both Chinese and ASEAN markets. In Tianjin, the 2026 Dongli Lake Half-Marathon incorporated digital human interactive question-and-answer sessions at start and finish areas as part of the event's experiential programming, alongside real-time comment walls and live music.

Enterprise and Government Services: The Shijiazhuang municipal government in Hebei province launched "Shi Baobao," an AI digital human intelligent customer service agent for the city's social security system, providing automated public-facing inquiry services. In Shaanxi province, the National Defense Industry Vocational Technical College deployed a floor-standing AI interview kiosk equipped with the "Zhimianxing" digital human interview system, covering job positions across all industries as part of a career services initiative combining AI-based resume diagnostics with human mentorship. China Financial Certification Authority (中金金融认证中心) presented its digital human "A Zai" at the 2026 Zhongguancun Forum's metaverse innovation and development session, positioning the product within the financial-sector track of metaverse digital human standards. Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (浦发银行) applied for a patent on a business data processing method designed to improve the accuracy of digital human-driven product recommendations.

Education and Workforce Development: Guangdong Industry and Trade Vocational Technical College introduced virtual digital human production as a hands-on training module within its broader integration of AI into vocational education, alongside AI video creation competitions and artificial intelligence open courses. Jiangsu Broadcasting, in partnership with Huawei (华为), launched what was described as the first national "Media Intelligent Assistant" innovation competition, with participating tracks that include digital human broadcasting alongside intelligent writing and video editing, drawing academic collaboration from Nanjing University, Southeast University, and Communication University of China. At Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, a spring recruitment fair for graduating students deployed "AI Hua Dao," a digital human providing on-site services including resume consultations and career counseling, with the event attracting nearly 20,000 university graduates from across Hubei province. In Nanchang, Jiangxi province, the municipal fire and rescue brigade launched an AI short-video creativity competition for university students that specifically emphasized the use of AI-generated content technologies including digital human broadcasting and AI-generated voiceover. The city of Wuhan announced the launch of an AI online community with plans to distribute tens of millions of yuan in AI product experience vouchers covering more than one hundred products including digital humans, AI painting tools, coding assistants, and research instruments.

Entertainment and Content: Blue Focus (蓝色光标), the marketing communications group, continued to develop its virtual human and metaverse business segment, which includes the Su Xiaomei intellectual property, virtual production capabilities, and extended reality studio operations, positioning these alongside its AI-powered full-chain marketing and e-commerce conversion services. On Bilibili (哔哩哔哩), the annual creators' conference highlighted the expanding ecosystem of virtual UP hosts, with coverage noting the growth of content formats that blend virtual presenter identities with commentary on gaming updates and anime narratives, a format driving engagement through what was characterized as immersive "phantom narrative" audience participation.

Infrastructure and Industrial Policy: In Beijing's Mentougou district, a new XR Immersive Audiovisual Joint Laboratory was inaugurated, occupying nearly 3,000 square meters and featuring a digital human production center equipped with advanced spatial video systems capable of high-precision reconstruction of drivable and editable digital human models. Shandong province's fifteenth five-year plan formally incorporated digital humans alongside AI, metaverse technologies, and science fiction industry development as priorities for integration with cultural innovation, while a separate Shandong provincial initiative called for accelerating the development of humanoid robots, bionic robots, and digital humans as strategic intelligent products within the province's digital industry corridor linking Jinan and Qingdao. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced plans to release a new batch of "AI+" high-value application scenarios with manufacturing as the primary focus, with industry commentary noting the potential for AI digital humans to be deployed across livestreaming and office environments.

April 12 News

Regulatory and Standards: On April 10, 2026, the Cyberspace Administration of China, along with the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, and the State Administration for Market Regulation, published the Interim Measures for Management of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services (人工智能拟人化互动服务管理暂行办法), which will take effect on July 15, 2026 and explicitly prohibit the provision of services designed to induce minors into becoming dependent on digital virtual humans. This regulation complements the earlier draft Digital Virtual Human Information Service Management Measures released by the CAC on April 3, 2026, which established a broader framework for governing digital virtual human services including rules around consent and data use. Separately, SenseTime (商汤科技) secured the first national-standard digital human certification under GB/T 46483-2025, titled General Technical Requirements for Virtual Digital Humans (虚拟数字人通用技术要求), which defines a reference architecture and functional and performance requirements for customer-service-type virtual digital human systems.

The Ministry of Public Security (中华人民共和国公安部), headquartered in Beijing, is China's principal law enforcement and public security agency, and it has become a significant institutional actor in the digital human space through both regulatory authority and operational deployment. On the regulatory side, the MPS co-issued the 2022 Provisions on the Administration of Deep Synthesis of Internet Information Services alongside the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), establishing the foundational compliance framework governing digital human content generation, and it co-issued the 2025 measures on face recognition technology application and security management. Its Science and Technology Information Bureau guides the China Security and Protection Products Industry Association, which hosts the annual Politico-Legal Intelligence Exhibition where digital humans are a featured technology category alongside smart policing and intelligent terminals. On the deployment side, public security bureaus across China have increasingly adopted digital human police officers for citizen-facing services, including the anti-fraud AI digital human developed by Hebei's Handan anti-fraud center, the digital human police officer in Zhangjiakou's government service hall answering queries on household registration and traffic management, Nanjing's anti-fraud digital humans enabling one-click propaganda video generation, Xinjiang's first digital human police officer "Xiaoke" (小克) launched in January 2025, Kunming's "Chunxiao" (春晓) AI police assistant built on China Mobile's cloud infrastructure and DeepSeek, Guangzhou's "Rong Xiao'an" (榕小安) digital human police deployed in commercial districts, and Xi'an traffic police's "Yong'an Jun" (永安君) intelligent Q&A system. The MPS's First Research Institute publishes the journal Police Technology (警察技术), and its research affiliates contribute to cybersecurity and identity authentication standards that underpin the secure deployment of digital human systems nationwide, including the national network identity authentication platform and associated public safety industry standards published in late 2025. 

The Interim Measures for the Management of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services (人工智能拟人化互动服务管理暂行办法) is a regulatory instrument jointly issued on April 10, 2026, by five Chinese government agencies: the Cyberspace Administration of China, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, and the State Administration for Market Regulation. The regulation originated as a CAC draft released for public comment on December 27, 2025, with a feedback deadline of January 25, 2026, and was formally approved at the CAC's third internal meeting on February 2, 2026, before receiving interagency sign-off and publication. Taking effect on July 15, 2026, the measures govern AI services that simulate human personality traits, thought patterns, and communication styles, establishing provider safety responsibilities across service standards, data security, user protection, security assessments, and supervisory compliance. The regulation's most prominent provisions prohibit the provision of virtual companion, virtual intimate relationship, and virtual family member services to minors, and ban the generation of content for minors that could trigger imitation of unsafe behavior, produce extreme emotions, or encourage unhealthy habits. Chinese legal commentators have framed the measures as marking China's entry into a new phase of scenario-specific, fine-grained AI governance, and at least one cross-jurisdictional analysis has drawn parallels between these measures and California's Companion Chatbots law passed in October 2025, noting that the two regulatory systems arrive at similar protective goals through different institutional mechanisms. 

The General Technical Requirements for Virtual Digital Humans (虚拟数字人通用技术要求), formally designated GB/T 46483-2025 under the full title Information Technology -- General Technical Requirements for Customer Service Virtual Digital Humans (信息技术客服型虚拟数字人通用技术要求), is China's first national standard in the virtual digital human field, published on October 5, 2025, and taking effect immediately upon release. The standard was led by SenseTime (商汤科技) as the primary drafting unit and developed over two years of preparation under the guidance of the China Electronics Standardization Institute (中国电子技术标准化研究院), with more than thirty participating organizations from industry, academia, and research, managed by TC28 (the National Information Technology Standardization Technical Committee) and executed by its SC24 subcommittee on computer graphics, image processing, and environmental data representation, under the supervision of the Standardization Administration of China. It establishes a comprehensive reference framework for customer service digital human systems covering six modules -- image generation, visual interaction, voice interaction, emotional interaction, image driving, and operations maintenance -- and sets quantified performance benchmarks including lip-sync accuracy of at least 90 percent, gesture interaction success rates of at least 80 percent, emotional interaction success rates of at least 80 percent, 2D digital humans with clear and complete facial features, 3D hyper-realistic digital human models with polygon counts of at least 200,000, and voice interaction response times under two seconds, while also specifying requirements for keyword maintenance, corpus updates, and multimodal interaction across voice, gesture, and body movement, effectively filling a long-standing gap in unified technical norms for customer service digital humans deployed across finance, government affairs, education, e-commerce, and telecommunications. SenseTime became the first company to pass conformity testing under the standard in April 2026 with its Ruying (如影) live interactive digital human product, and the standard is now being positioned as a foundation for China to promote its digital human technical norms internationally. 

Financial Services: At the 2026 Zhongguancun Forum Metaverse Innovation and Development Forum held in Beijing, China Financial Certification Authority (中金金融认证中心) showcased its digital human "A Zai," which was presented as a frontrunner in the financial sector's adoption of metaverse digital human standards. Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (浦发银行) filed a patent for a business data processing method designed to improve the accuracy of digital human-driven product recommendations, indicating the bank's continued investment in personalized digital human interactions within its customer service infrastructure.

Enterprise and Workforce: A Shandong-based game and media company drew widespread attention and controversy after reportedly training departed employees' work data into AI digital humans that continued performing their former job functions. The underlying project, an open-source GitHub initiative called "colleague.skill" (同事.skill), quickly went viral and spawned derivative projects including "ex-partner.skill" (前任.skill) and "boss.skill," raising public alarm about the boundaries between human labor and AI replication. In a related development, a downloadable "skill pack" modeled on the late education consultant Zhang Xuefeng appeared online, enabling an AI persona to field questions about school selection, major choice, and career planning in his distinctive communication style, prompting discussion about the posthumous digital replication of public figures. Shandong Shuchang Digital Technology (山东数昶数字技术有限公司), a Jinan-based company established in 2021, filed a patent for a generative AI-based method of creating digital employees, further signaling corporate interest in systematizing the production of AI-driven workforce substitutes. Separately, discussions around the One Person Company model, as articulated by commentator Bu Anxun, highlighted the role of shared digital human tool platforms and computing resources as foundational public infrastructure for AI-driven solo entrepreneurship.

E-commerce and Brand Marketing: Australian health supplement brand Swisse deployed JD.com's digital human livestreaming technology on its flagship store, reportedly doubling consumer dwell time during off-peak traffic periods by using an AI-driven digital host to maintain continuous engagement. Tianyu De Liquor (天佑德酒) disclosed in an investor Q&A that it has deployed a virtual digital human named Li Ling'er (李灵儿) alongside an internal AI customization system, though the company clarified that both applications are built on third-party models rather than proprietary technology.

Healthcare and Community Wellbeing: In Shanghai's Yangpu District, Jiangpu Road Subdistrict opened the "Jiang Xiaoyue" (江小悦) Mental Health Service Center, which features an AI experience zone where a digital human serves as a conversational companion for local residents, described as their most popular "friend" for discussing personal concerns. Hong Kong-listed traditional Chinese medicine healthcare provider Gushengtang (固生堂) has introduced an AI avatar system for its practitioners alongside an AI health assistant aimed at improving the patient-side consultation experience, with the company receiving a maintained "buy" rating from Huafu Securities in connection with its accelerating technology deployment.

Government and Public Services: The Shijiazhuang Municipal Social Security Administration in Hebei province launched "Shi Baobao" (石保保), an AI digital human intelligent customer service agent designed to handle public inquiries on social insurance matters. Zhejiang province issued new guidance calling for the accelerated rollout of a "digital human social security" platform integrating AI-powered intelligent consultation, recruitment, policy assessment, and targeted support services as part of its broader "fifteen-minute employment service circle" initiative.

Media and Broadcasting: Huiboxing (慧播星), a digital human video production platform, appeared across multiple unrelated news broadcasts as the credited production tool, with its digital human presenters delivering reports on subjects ranging from a Yunnan school disciplinary incident to coal mining damage in Guizhou to satellite imagery of the world's largest iceberg, reflecting the quiet but steady normalization of synthetic anchors in routine Chinese news video production. At a digital transformation event held by China Southern Power Grid's Guangdong Yangjiang Power Supply Bureau, an AI digital human named Zhiling (智玲) served as the on-stage host, replacing a traditional human emcee. Jiangsu Provincial Broadcasting and Television Bureau and Huawei jointly launched the first national "Media Intelligence Assistant" innovation competition, in which AI digital human broadcasting was cited as one of the core application areas alongside intelligent writing and video editing.

Cultural Tourism and Education: At the Chinese Culture Learning Center in Kashgar, Xinjiang, visitors can pass through an interactive "magic door" installation to explore cultural heritage sites and modern cityscapes, and can engage directly with a digital human guide as part of the immersive experience. In Nanjing, the 2026 Jiangsu Green Low-Carbon Building International Expo featured interactive digital humans and immersive multi-screen displays within its "AI + Housing and Urban-Rural Construction" exhibition zone. Xuzhou's Quanshan District, designated by the Jiangsu municipal government as an experimental zone for digital economy and AI industry development, is producing digital humans that require only twenty to thirty minutes of real-person data capture to generate highly realistic virtual replicas. Guangdong Industry and Trade Vocational Technical College incorporated virtual digital human production into its hands-on AI training curriculum as part of a broader push to integrate artificial intelligence into vocational education, while a fire safety short video competition in Nanchang, Jiangxi, specifically encouraged participants to use virtual digital humans and AI-generated visuals in their creative entries.

Entertainment and Content Production: The AI-driven short drama sector has given rise to a growing gray market in which production companies purchase performers' permanent likeness rights for as little as 1,500 yuan to create digital human actors, with actress Lu Jia reporting that casting calls for such "AI artists" have become commonplace in performer notification groups. Industry observers noted that because of legal risk around unauthorized use of celebrity likenesses, current commercial exploration remains confined to original digital human characters or mid-tier internet personalities whose intellectual property carries less litigation exposure. miHoYo (米哈游) released a new performance large model designed to drive virtual character animation, part of a broader convergence of AI music generation, digital human technology, and virtual character performance that is reshaping the foundational logic of China's cultural entertainment industry.

April 11 News

Cultural Tourism: Digital humans are entering China's scenic areas and cultural tourism events at scale. At the third Hunan Tourism Development Conference opening ceremony, a digital human named Hengyang "Huo Chuquan" appeared on stage alongside celebrity host He Jiong, delivering fluent real-time interaction that demonstrated digital humans moving beyond screen-based concepts into live event co-hosting. Across the country, from Luzhou in the southwest to the Yili General's Mansion in the northwest, and from Shanxi's historical sites to Shanghai's modern landmarks, digital humans are being deployed as cultural interpreters and immersive guides. In Shaanxi, Xi'an Jiaotong University's Westward Migration Museum has completed an exhibition upgrade incorporating digital humans alongside immersive experiences of the historic straw-shed auditorium and touchscreen access to professors' manuscripts, using the technology to animate historical narratives. Danfeng County in Shangluo, Shaanxi is building smart tourism benchmarks across the full chain of dining, lodging, transport, sightseeing, shopping, and entertainment using digital tools including digital human livestream rooms for e-commerce.

Livestreaming and E-Commerce: Haier Smart Home has established an AI livestream center in Wuhan where digital human broadcasting now accounts for approximately 30,000 hours per month alongside 100,000 hours of human-hosted livestreaming, with the facility integrating AR, VR, and digital human technologies and holding 11 patents. The center chose Wuhan for its talent pool and cost advantages, with staffing costs roughly 70 percent of Hangzhou's rates, and the team has grown to over one thousand people. In Sichuan, a forum on platform economy empowering individual business operators held in Chengdu's Pidu District saw platform companies announce digital human livestreaming capabilities alongside AI-powered product selection and pricing tools, enabling 24-hour agricultural product broadcasting. Tianyoude liquor (天佑德酒) has deployed a virtual digital human named Li Ling'er alongside an internal AI customization system, with the company confirming these applications are built on third-party models.

Workforce and Labor Ethics: A game and media company in Shandong has drawn intense public attention and debate after training AI digital humans based on departed employees' work data to continue performing tasks including HR consultation, appointment scheduling, and spreadsheet creation. The case prompted commentary from the Shandong Provincial Computing Center at the National Supercomputing Center in Jinan, where experts emphasized that technical feasibility does not equate to legal safety, and that "informed consent" alone may be insufficient to address the complex rights issues involved. Zhou Hongyi weighed in publicly on the controversy, stressing that boundaries around such practices must be clearly defined. The case has raised broad questions about whether AI digital replicas of former employees could catalyze entirely new workplace models, with multiple commentators warning that the practice sits at a sensitive intersection of personal data rights, labor law, and AI ethics.

Technology and Open-Source Frameworks: SentiPulse (思维光谱), in collaboration with a doctoral team from Renmin University of China's Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, has open-sourced SentiAvatar, described as China's first interactive 3D digital human framework. SentiAvatar is a complete text-to-motion generation solution that enables digital humans to produce contextually and emotionally responsive real-time movements, moving beyond preset animation libraries. Separately, Soul App's AI research team Soul AI Lab has released the open-source model SoulX-LiveAct, which applies structural optimizations to an autoregressive diffusion framework to achieve stable long-duration digital human video generation, advancing streaming generation from basic capability to sustained output quality. In Tianjin, Tuguan Digital Technology (图观（天津）数字科技有限公司) has been granted a patent titled "A Method, Device and Medium for Digital Human Generation and Interaction," with authorization notice number CN121547664B and an application date in January 2026, covering methods for generating and interacting with digital humans.

Enterprise and Government Services: In Shijiazhuang, Hebei, the city's first social insurance AI digital human intelligent customer service agent and AI digital human instructor, named Shi Baobao, have been launched to handle public inquiries on social security topics including pension verification procedures and self-service options through the Hebei Human Resources and Social Affairs App. In Guizhou, the provincial sports lottery system has implemented a digital human training framework to standardize and automate training for sales personnel, replacing traditional training methods with intelligent delivery. Wuhan has launched an AI-focused online community that will distribute tens of millions of yuan in AI product experience vouchers covering categories including digital humans, AI painting, programming assistants, intelligent writing tools, and research instruments.

Financial Services and Standards: China Financial Certification Authority (中金金融认证中心, CFCA) has had its digital human "A Zai" selected as one of the first verification units under new metaverse industry standards. The standards being developed include classification and grading frameworks for virtual digital humans under the metaverse services rubric, with CFCA leveraging its expertise in financial security and identity authentication to advance digital human deployment in the financial sector. The standards work features a dual-track approach, with ten draft industry standards open for comment covering virtual digital human classification and industrial metaverse scene construction.

China Financial Certification Authority (中金金融认证中心有限公司), commonly known as CFCA, is a national-level electronic authentication institution affiliated with China UnionPay that provides digital certificate services, SSL certificates, and security infrastructure to China's banking and financial sector. In the digital human domain, CFCA has developed its own digital human named "A Zai" (A仔), which in April 2026 became the first financial-sector entity to pass the national metaverse digital human industry standard verification, earning CFCA designation as the inaugural verification unit under these standards at the 2026 Zhongguancun Forum. The A Zai digital human system integrates financial security authentication technology and has been deployed at scale in scenarios including identity verification and intelligent customer service, with cumulative transaction processing exceeding ten million instances. CFCA also provides a digital human SDK used by major Chinese banks including ICBC, China CITIC Bank, China Merchants Bank, Ping An Bank, Huaxia Bank, and Bank of Communications for customer-facing digital human services within their mobile banking applications. Additionally, CFCA operates the China Electronic Banking Network, which features its own digital human anchor named Echo, and the organization publishes the annual Digital Bank Survey Report, a widely cited benchmark in China's digital banking industry. CFCA has also signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Tencent Cloud to build a trusted digital ecosystem. 

Digital Identity and Trust Infrastructure: Anheng Information (安恒信息) and e-Qianba (e签宝) have jointly launched VeriAgent in April 2026, positioned as a trusted digital human infrastructure for the AI agent era. VeriAgent's core function is to issue tamper-proof digital identity credentials to each AI agent, establishing a trust foundation for digital human and AI agent interactions in an environment of growing autonomous agent deployment.

VeriAgent is a "trusted digital human infrastructure" jointly launched in early April 2026 by e-Qianbao (e签宝) and DBAPPSecurity (安恒信息). It addresses growing security and trust concerns around AI agents by providing each digital human instance with a tamper-proof digital identity certificate, binding every digital human to a real human entity (individual or legal person), and applying cryptographic signatures to each operational step. The product covers identity authentication, behavioral security, dynamic authorization, and skill certification across the full lifecycle of a digital human, from creation through activation, suspension, and revocation. VeriAgent was developed in response to incidents like the OpenClaw security vulnerability, which highlighted risks of identity fraud and skill misuse among AI agents. Rather than functioning as a standalone security tool, VeriAgent positions itself as a trust layer that migrates the established electronic signature trust framework from "carbon-based" humans to "silicon-based" digital humans, aiming to support compliant deployment of AI agents in high-risk sectors such as finance and commerce. 

Regulation: The Cyberspace Administration of China has published the draft Digital Virtual Human Information Services Management Measures for public comment, establishing requirements including prominent display of "digital human" labeling throughout the duration of any digital human's operation and compliance with national regulations on AI-generated synthetic content labeling. Commentary has noted that the draft provides a feasible and forward-looking governance framework addressing issues including digital humans that resemble celebrities, unauthorized resurrection of deceased individuals, and deepfake abuses, with identity disclosure requirements imposed at the source.

Healthcare and Traditional Medicine: The Beijing Digital Intelligent Traditional Chinese Medicine Industry Development Research Institute (北京数智中医产业发展研究院) has been established with an AI-plus-TCM multi-scenario application demonstration center. The center's first cohort of nearly 40 representative industry products includes TCM digital humans alongside large language models, brain-inspired intelligence systems, embodied systems, brain-computer science applications, and intelligent management platforms.

Education: In Fuzhou, Fujian, the Gulou District is pursuing a smart education development path where digital humans are being used to recreate the aesthetics of the ancient Silk Road, and AI motion capture technology enables precise error correction and personalized guidance for students, with teachers integrating these technologies into instructional practice.

Advertising and Brand Interaction: OPPO has deployed AI Agent interactive advertising on information feed platforms, transforming standard ads into brand-avatar chat experiences where users encountering an advertisement can engage in real-time conversation with a brand AI persona, completing brand consultation and product navigation in a single interaction.

Film, Media, and Content Creation: An OPC (one-person company) entrepreneur with a background in film and television visual effects has pivoted to combine AI technology with 3D applications, expanding into interactive content, AI-generated film and television, media interaction, digital humans, and digital twins as part of a broader trend of solo creators leveraging AI to multiply output across creative domains.

Zheng Haifeng (郑海峰) is a post-1970s entrepreneur in Qingdao who began a second venture after more than 20 years of professional experience, during which she witnessed rapid advances in computing technology that motivated her to shift into AI-driven entrepreneurship. Her current focus is on building digital humans and developing proprietary IP around them, using these assets to enable low-cost, high-efficiency brand promotion. The approach relies on AI to construct and deploy digital human representations as scalable media interfaces, reducing production costs while increasing output capacity. This transition reflects a broader move from traditional media or technical roles into AI-enabled content systems, where digital humans function as both creative products and commercial tools. 

April 10 News

Workplace and Labor: A game and media company in Shandong recently trained an AI digital human based on the work data of a departed human resources specialist, enabling the digital clone to continue performing tasks such as consultations, appointment scheduling, and document preparation. The experiment, which the company says was conducted with the former employee's consent, has triggered widespread debate across Chinese media and social platforms about the legal boundaries of creating digital replicas of workers. Wu Xiaoming, director of the Shandong Provincial Computing Center (National Supercomputing Center in Jinan), cautioned that training an AI digital human goes beyond producing a talking virtual likeness, instead converting a person's appearance, speech patterns, knowledge structure, and workflow into machine-callable and reusable assets. Legal commentators cited by multiple outlets warned that unauthorized use of a person's data to create such digital surrogates could carry criminal penalties of up to seven years, and a prior Shanghai court case involving similar issues was recognized as one of the city's exemplary cases for 2023. The Cyberspace Administration of China's draft regulation on digital virtual human information services, released on April 3, 2026, directly addresses this category of risk by requiring prominent "digital human" labeling and imposing shared accountability across service providers and users throughout the production chain.

Regulation and Standards: The Cyberspace Administration of China published its draft Measures for the Management of Digital Virtual Human Information Services for public comment, defining the scope of digital virtual humans, mandating personality rights and personal information protections, and requiring that all digital human content carry a visible "digital human" identifier in compliance with national AI-generated content labeling rules. Separately, at the 2026 Zhongguancun Forum annual Metaverse Innovation and Development Forum held in Beijing, CFCA (中金金融认证中心) announced that its digital human "A Zai" became the first financial-sector digital human to pass verification under the metaverse digital human standard, as detailed in the document "Metaverse Common Services: Virtual Digital Human Grading and Classification" (元宇宙共性服务虚拟数字人分级及分类), which specifies technical parameters, application scenarios, and safety requirements.

Cultural Tourism: Digital humans are being deployed across scenic and cultural heritage sites throughout China in increasingly varied forms. At Dunhuang's Mogao Caves digital experience hall in Gansu, an AI digital human identified as a "painter" uses dynamic light and projection to recreate the mural restoration process while interacting with visitors in real time. In Hunan, the digital human "Hengyang" appeared alongside celebrity host He Jiong at the opening ceremony of the Second Hunan Tourism Development Conference, delivering fluent improvisational dialogue on stage. Across a broader landscape spanning Luzhou in Sichuan, the Ili General's Mansion in Xinjiang, historical sites in Shanxi, and modern landmarks in Shanghai, a wave of digital humans is being embedded into tourism experiences ranging from IP revival to VR immersion. In Guangxi, a China-Vietnam cooperation initiative on AI-enabled cross-border tourism includes the digital human "Detian A Mei" alongside smart customs clearance and payment systems as part of a broader smart tourism training program conducted in Nanning, Liuzhou, Guilin, and Hechi.

Livestreaming and E-Commerce: JD.com (京东) launched its "free-form digital human" product JoyStreamer, built on its JoyAI large model, which achieves human-level motion and intelligent camera tracking for livestreaming applications. In Sichuan, a platform economy summit held in Chengdu's Pidu District by provincial, municipal, and district market supervision authorities saw platform companies announce digital human livestreaming capabilities for individual business operators, aimed at enabling small merchants to access AI-driven live commerce. Silicon Intelligence (硅基智能), based in Nanjing, continues to operate its digital human livestreaming system with all related services driven by token-based computation, as described by its founder Sima Huapeng in a separate interview in which he characterized AI as a new generation of "digital labor force" and identified Hong Kong as fertile ground for cultivating AI engineering talent.

Open-Source Technology: SentiPulse (思维光谱) partnered with a doctoral team at the Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence at Renmin University of China to release SentiAvatar, described as China's first open-source interactive 3D digital human framework, along with companion 3D digital human character assets. The framework is designed to address foundational pain points in the industry by giving 3D digital humans more natural, expressive motion. Separately, Soul AI open-sourced SoulX-LiveAct, a digital human generation system claiming hour-level stability with high lip-sync and body fidelity scores, applicable to digital human livestreaming, AI education, and metaverse scenarios, alongside companion releases SoulX-FlashTalk and SoulX-FlashHead.

AI-Generated Content and Short Drama: The short drama industry in China is increasingly relying on AI-generated digital humans rather than human actors. Actors who previously appeared in over a hundred short dramas report losing work since early 2026, with one publicly opposing the practice of selling one's likeness for digital replication on grounds that an AI virtual human can be infinitely copied and permanently deployed, effectively constituting a permanent transfer of one's digital portrait rights. E-commerce platforms across China now host numerous shops offering AI video generation and digital human customization services, reflecting the low technical barrier to entry that regulators have identified as a key enforcement challenge.

Education: Universities in Hunan are adopting "counselor digital humans," AI-powered virtual counselors available around the clock to answer student questions about academic planning, mental health, and employment, freeing human counselors to focus on more complex interpersonal support. Guangzhou University's Cantonese Zhisheng team has built a large-scale multimodal Cantonese-language corpus platform using AI voice technology, with applications including digital humans and cross-language simultaneous interpretation, developed in partnership with Tencent and Baidu.

Healthcare and Funerary Services: Health AI applications in China have begun deploying "AI avatars" of real physicians as intelligent agents that function as always-available health consultants, a development framed as requiring mandatory human-AI collaborative review to ensure safety. In Gansu, the Lanzhou Fushouyuan cemetery has introduced an AI digital human funerary service, demonstrated publicly on March 31, 2026, representing an emerging application of digital human technology in memorial and bereavement contexts.

Brand and Regional Marketing: China National Salt Xinjiang (中盐新疆) launched an AI digital spokesperson for its Tianshan lake salt product line, depicted as a young woman in ethnic attire set against Tianshan mountain scenery, integrating regional geographic identity and ethnic cultural motifs into a branded virtual character. The company opened a public naming campaign for the character across its digital channels.

April 09 News

Workplace and Labor: A game and media company in Shandong province trained an AI digital human replica of a departed HR specialist, using the former employee's chat records, work documents, and decision-making habits to create a digital clone that continued answering colleagues' questions, producing PPTs, and generating spreadsheets via DingTalk. The case sparked national debate across outlets including Pengpai News, Ziniu News, Sichuan Online, and Guangzhou Daily, raising questions about consent, data rights, and the legal boundaries of digital labor clones. Separately, Huxi News reported on an emerging trend of AI friendship products in which users train AI avatars of themselves to socialize with other users' AI avatars online, with humans intervening only at key moments.

Regulation and Governance: The Cyberspace Administration of China published its draft Measures for the Administration of Digital Virtual Human Information Services for public comment on April 3, 2026, establishing requirements for full-process management of digital virtual humans. The draft mandates that all digital humans carry a visible "digital human" label throughout their use and comply with national standards for AI-generated synthetic content identification. Provisions address the use of digital likenesses of deceased persons, requiring respect for the wishes of the deceased and protection of next-of-kin rights, and explicitly prohibit the provision of virtual romance or virtual companionship services to minors. Multiple expert commentaries characterized the draft as offering a feasible and forward-looking governance framework with global relevance. Separately, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and nine other departments jointly issued the Measures for AI Science and Technology Ethics Review and Services, strengthening ethical oversight of AI applications including digital humans. The Inner Mongolia autonomous region government issued its AI+ Action Implementation Plan for 2026 to 2028 on April 8, 2026, targeting digital humans among the application domains for cross-sector AI integration. Zhengquan Shibao reported on proposed copyright frameworks for AI short dramas, recommending the creation of celebrity image banks, ordinary-person image banks, and digital asset libraries for managing digital human likenesses used in content production.

Short-Form Video and Entertainment: Jiangxi Soy Sauce Culture Media (江西酱油文化传媒有限公司) operates a production base where AI screenwriting, digital human voiceover, and automated image generation are integrated into an industrialized pipeline capable of producing over 1,000 AI-generated micro-dramas per year. The topic of "AI face-stealing in short dramas" trended nationally after actor Wang Jinsong publicly alleged that his likeness was used without authorization in the short drama Taohua Zan, prompting broader discussion of digital human platform liability and personality rights litigation. QQ News reported that under the proposed regulations, digital virtual humans must be labeled throughout short drama content, and platforms failing to display such labels would be in violation. Huibboxing (慧播星) digital humans were credited in at least two nationally distributed news videos, one covering a medical story from Chongqing and another reporting on cross-strait diplomatic developments, indicating the company's digital human technology is being used as a production tool for news video narration and presentation across multiple outlets.

Virtual Idols and Digital Characters: Luo Tianyi, recognized as China's first digital virtual character and the first Chinese virtual figure to use voice synthesis technology for a Chinese voice bank, has appeared alongside human singers on major satellite TV broadcasts, Spring Festival Galas, and even the Winter Olympics. Chaoxinwen profiled the emergence of a new generation of AI-powered virtual idols positioned as upgrades over earlier vocaloid-style characters. The hyper-realistic virtual idol Miya, created under the miya163 project, was presented as a showcase of advanced digital human production technology applied to metaverse entertainment.

Open-Source Technology and Research: Soul App's AI research team, Soul AI Lab, released the open-source model SoulX-LiveAct, which achieves a technical breakthrough in real-time interactive digital humans by overcoming the hour-scale generation bottleneck through a Neighbor Forcing co-diffusion step alignment mechanism. SentiPulse, in collaboration with Renmin University's Hillhouse research group, open-sourced the SentiAvatar framework for interactive 3D digital humans, alongside the 3D digital human character model SUSU and the high-quality motion dataset SuSuInterActs, aiming to redefine the paradigm for 3D digital human motion generation.

Government Services: China Unicom Heilongjiang deployed a smart guidance AI digital human system at the Yichun municipal government services hall, powered by DeepSeek and China Unicom's Yuanjing large language model, providing both online intelligent customer service and an in-person AI digital human assistant. Jize County in Hebei province launched a digital human intelligent guidance system to optimize the experience at its government services center. Hebei Radio and Television Wireless Media (河北广电无线传媒股份有限公司) disclosed that it is developing an AI-based digital human interactive system. Dahua Intelligent Technology (福州达华智能科技股份有限公司) has partnered with Xingke Nuo Mobile on AI digital human initiatives.

Industry and Enterprise: Xuzhou's Quanshan district in Jiangsu is positioned as a digital culture industry hub where local digital human technology requires only 20 to 30 minutes of real-person data capture to generate a high-fidelity digital clone, with single-video production costs significantly reduced. Yan Hanping, a Jiangsu provincial leader, inspected digital human applications at Yancheng's Yanfu Bao newspaper, including the Yanfu Bao digital human and the Ziwei Hua corpus for AI-powered industry tools. Sichuan Business Vocational College signed a cooperation agreement with Chengdu Mingtu Technology (成都明途科技) to co-build an AI assistant platform and a Sichuan Provincial intelligent digital human system based on Mingtu's WorkBrain platform. Daming County in Hebei is expanding its logistics and e-commerce ecosystem by incorporating AI digital humans alongside local and externally hired personnel. A young entrepreneur working from a co-working space in Wuhan's Dongxihu district developed an AI digital human tool alongside blockchain projects and secured $100,000 in international investment. The Shenzhen municipal government highlighted Shenzhen Zhouming Digital Culture Technology (深圳市洲明数字文化科技有限公司), whose Shanyin large model integrates traditional Chinese culture to provide users with round-the-clock cultural companionship and inspiration, and Shenzhen Shuyuan Wansuan Information Technology (深圳市术源万算信息技术有限公司), listed among firms deepening AI applications across finance, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and cultural verticals. Jili province's women's federation organized an e-commerce training program in Changchun covering digital human livestreaming and data-driven product selection.

Hospitality: Shangmei Hotel Group deployed a virtual digital human named Shang Xiaomei (尚小美), integrated with the DeepSeek large model, as part of an AI-driven approach to hotel guest services, as reported in the context of broader industry moves toward AI-powered hospitality.

Cultural Heritage and Education: Hubei University's School of Journalism and Communication unveiled the Jingchu Red Press and Journalists exhibition hall, where a digital human narrator guides visitors through historical materials tracing the development of the Chinese Communist Party's news enterprise. Plans for the exhibition include further digitization using QR codes and digital human narration to bring the stories of historical press figures to life.

April 08 News

Regulation: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家互联网信息办公室) released the draft "Administrative Measures for Digital Virtual Human Information Services" (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法（征求意见稿）) for public comment, with a feedback deadline of May 6, 2026. The measures aim to regulate the full lifecycle of digital virtual humans, defined as non-physical entities generated through graphics, digital image processing, or artificial intelligence that simulate human appearance and possess voice, behavioral, interactive, or personality characteristics. Key provisions include mandatory display of a "digital human" label throughout any interaction, image authorization requirements, protections for minors, and ethical guardrails around "resurrecting" deceased persons as digital humans, requiring respect for the decedent's wishes and protection of next-of-kin rights. The Hangzhou Internet Court has established judicial precedent by ruling that original digital human likenesses constitute fine art works protected under copyright law, affirming both personality rights and intellectual property protections. iiMedia Research (艾媒咨询) projects that the core digital human market will exceed 40 billion yuan, with associated industries surpassing 600 billion yuan.

Workplace and Labor: A game and media company in Shandong province trained an AI digital human based on a departed employee's likeness and voice to handle customer inquiries and produce presentations, claiming the former employee consented to the training. The case, reported by Dahe Daily (大河报) and widely circulated across Chinese media, triggered debate over personal information protection, privacy rights, and AI ethics. Legal commentators cited potential violations of China's Personal Information Protection Law and relevant Criminal Law provisions, with one attorney from Henan-based Zejin Law Firm (泽槿律师事务所) noting that unauthorized training of an "AI clone" using a person's likeness could carry penalties of up to seven years' imprisonment. The CAC's concurrent release of the draft digital virtual human regulations was widely referenced in coverage as a timely governance response.

E-commerce and Livestreaming: Eastern Shopping (东方购物), a home shopping platform under Shanghai Media Group (上海广播电视台), launched an AI-powered digital human named Lingling (灵灵) to deliver a new interactive shopping experience, marking SMG's push to integrate intelligent agents into consumer-facing media services. Separately, in Hebei province, Daming county is expanding its e-commerce logistics ecosystem by building a diversified livestreaming operation that includes AI digital human hosts alongside human presenters. In Zhejiang province, manufacturers in Jiaxing are deploying digital human livestream rooms and online VR showrooms as part of broader smart marketing initiatives tied to the region's industrial digitization drive.

Government Services: Jize county (鸡泽县) in Handan, Hebei province, deployed a digital human named Xiaoze (小泽) at its government services hall, appearing on a smart screen to guide citizens through personal and enterprise service processes. The Xining Housing Provident Fund Center in Qinghai province launched a digital human intelligent customer service agent named Jiajia (家家) to provide immersive consultation for housing fund inquiries, as part of the city's effort to modernize its first open-format provident fund service outlet.

Funerary and Memorial Services: Lanzhou Fushouyuan Cemetery (兰州福寿园公墓) in Gansu province has begun offering customized AI digital humans generated from photographs of the deceased, producing short biographical films screened during farewell ceremonies to narrate the life story of the departed. Cemetery general manager Dai Qiong and corporate planning director Gao Xiaoxia described the service as a response to families who were unable to say a final goodbye. Separately, Jimu Yida (积木易搭) developed a metaverse-based memorial platform for the China Martyrs Network (中华英烈网) titled "Remembrance 2026 Qingming Tribute," enabling users to select digital human avatars to participate in immersive online memorial activities honoring revolutionary martyrs.

Healthcare: Yidu Tech (医渡科技) deployed an AI physician clone through its Yidu Qianxun (医渡千循) platform, creating a digital counterpart of a prominent cervical pre-cancer specialist. The AI doctor clone supports frontline healthcare workers and health management teams in performing precise patient stratification and intelligent follow-up across the full disease management cycle, aimed at improving quality and efficiency of care delivery at the grassroots level.

Tourism: Inner Mongolia's Hulunbuir region is integrating digital human technology into its cultural tourism branding strategy as part of a broader "Fusion Road" initiative. Between 2023 and 2025, Hulunbuir's tourist reception volume grew from 29.22 million to 36.82 million visitors, with tourism revenue climbing from 49.4 billion to 64 billion yuan, and digital human applications are being incorporated alongside other innovations to sustain that trajectory.

Education: Qinghai Normal University Affiliated No. 3 Experimental Middle School (青海师范大学附属第三实验中学) is exploring AI digital human applications in classroom instruction, with teachers independently producing safety education micro-courses and building a human-machine collaborative teaching model as part of the school's smart campus development.

Metaverse and Esports: In Guangxi, industry observers are positioning digital humans, large-space technologies, and real-time cloud rendering as foundational elements for building immersive esports experiences within the broader AI-plus-metaverse framework, as part of discussions around Guangxi's strategy for breaking into the sector.

Intellectual Property: A case handled by Jiangsu-based Sutao Law Firm (苏韬律师事务所) illustrates emerging IP disputes around digital humans. A company contracted with a live model to create an exclusive digital human based on her likeness, specifying permitted platforms, channels, and product categories. The case highlights the growing complexity of digital human image authorization as the technology scales commercially.

Enterprise Technology: Tencent Cloud (腾讯云) is accelerating the deployment of its digital human technology across multiple industries, with its CSIG division marketing avatar-based services internationally. Japan's Vector Group adopted Tencent Cloud's technology to launch an avatar-driven video advertisement production service called Abamo (阿巴莫). Separately, Dingjiee DigiSmart (鼎捷数智) is offering digital clone capabilities as part of its AI-native enterprise software platform, providing "spatial services" including command-center intelligent agents and digital twins of personnel. "Yue Xiang Holdings" (悦享控股) is conducting global beta testing of its overseas product Klon AI, which enables users to generate consistent digital avatar models for ongoing social media content creation and short video production. In the Yangtze River Delta, Wuxi High-tech Zone signed a cooperation memorandum with Volcengine (火山引擎), ByteDance's enterprise technology arm, to recruit projects focused on digital human production and AI-plus-content initiatives.

Tencent Cloud’s digital human initiative is driven by its Cloud & Smart Industries Group (CSIG), which repackages Tencent’s internal AI, media, and interaction technologies into enterprise-facing cloud services. Rather than offering standalone avatars, Tencent provides modular “AI Digital Human” systems that combine speech synthesis, language models, and real-time rendering to create interactive virtual humans for applications such as customer service, marketing, education, and live streaming. These digital humans function as the front-end interface for backend AI systems, aligning with an “agent + avatar” architecture in which avatars handle user interaction while AI systems perform underlying tasks. Internationally, CSIG is expanding deployment through localized partnerships and industry-specific solutions, embedding its digital human technology into regional markets rather than distributing a single standardized global product. 

Tencent's Cloud & Smart Industries Group (CSIG) is led by Dowson Tong, who serves as Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent and CEO of CSIG, overseeing the company's cloud computing, AI, and enterprise strategy. Within CSIG, Wu Zurong (Lori Wu), previously responsible for incubating Tencent Meeting from its inception, took on leadership of the Yuanbao AI assistant application following its transfer from the Technology Engineering Group to CSIG in early 2025, reflecting a product-execution layer focused on specific consumer-facing AI applications rather than a broad AI portfolio mandate. At the corporate level, James Mitchell serves as Chief Strategy Officer and Senior Executive Vice President, responsible for strategic planning, mergers and acquisitions, investment activities, and investor relations across Tencent as a whole rather than within CSIG specifically. Pony Ma, as Chairman and CEO, and Martin Lau (Liu Chiping), as President, set overall corporate direction, investment priorities, and international expansion strategy. 

Dingjiee DigiSmart (鼎捷数智), listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange under stock code 300378, is a Taiwan-founded enterprise software company established in 1982 that rebranded from Dingjiee Software (鼎捷软件) in September 2024 to reflect its pivot toward AI-driven digital intelligence. Led by Chairman and CEO Ye Zizhen (叶子祯) and Executive Vice President Liu Bo (刘波), the company operates across mainland China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia with over 5,300 employees and more than 50,000 accumulated clients in sectors such as equipment manufacturing, automotive parts, and electronics. In the digital human context, Dingjiee DigiSmart has built its Athena (雅典娜) industrial internet platform as a foundation for integrating AIGC and large language model capabilities, launching products such as ChatFile and a personal AI assistant called "Nana Help Me" (娜娜帮我) developed in partnership with Microsoft OpenAI in Taiwan. The company's IndepthAI multi-agent platform, which integrated DeepSeek in early 2025, supports digital human interaction scenarios for enterprise use, and Liu Bo has publicly articulated a vision of carbon-based humans coexisting and collaborating with silicon-based digital humans in work and life, positioning the company's AI agents not as replacements but as "digital extensions" of human workers across manufacturing, sales, and customer service applications. 

Klon AI is a global-facing AI portrait and digital identity creation tool developed by "Cheers Holdings" (悦享控股, NASDAQ: CHR), which reported RMB 1.07 billion in full-year 2025 revenue and 550 million registered users across its platforms. The product features a professional-grade AI Portrait Generation Engine that combines generative AI, intelligent visual processing, and traditional photography techniques into an AI-native application, allowing users to produce high-quality personal portraits and social content in minutes. It sits within a broader product ecosystem that includes HomeGlow AI and Huanju AI (焕居AI) for smart home design, CheerChat (悦灵犀AI) for multimodal AI content creation, and CheerCar for connected vehicle entertainment, all underpinned by the company's Beichenxingyue (北辰星悦) large model infrastructure that Cheers Holdings plans to deepen across all business lines in 2026. 

Media and Content: Huiboxing (慧播星) digital human technology is being used to produce video segments for news outlets, with recent deployments noted in coverage by Anhui-based and other regional media organizations for general news presentation. Beijing Daily (北京日报) featured an AI digital human named Xiaolu delivering a comedy-style monologue segment on trending topics, illustrating the use of digital humans in editorial entertainment content.

April 07 News

Regulation: The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) drafted the Measures for the Administration of Digital Virtual Human Information Services (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法), which was published for public comment on April 3, 2026, with a feedback deadline of May 6. The draft requires that all digital virtual human services display a prominent "digital human" label throughout the entire service process, in compliance with national regulations on marking AI-generated and synthetic content. The measures prohibit inducing minors to become addicted to digital virtual human services, and require that any use of a natural person's sensitive personal information for modelling, image generation, or scene construction must comply with applicable law. Portrait rights are a central concern: the Civil Code already prohibits the unauthorized creation, use, or public disclosure of another person's likeness, and any AI-generated image capable of identifying a specific natural person constitutes infringement under that standard; the draft extends this framework specifically to virtual human services. Platforms are required to upgrade content review mechanisms, and portrait licensing compliance for AI short dramas is identified as a specific operational requirement. Tencent's (腾讯) cloud digital human is referenced in media coverage as an illustrative example of the services this regulatory framework is designed to govern.

Enterprise & Workplace: A gaming media company in Shandong drew widespread attention in early April 2026 after it was reported that the company had trained an AI digital human modelled on a departed employee to continue performing work functions. An internal source identified as Xiaoyu confirmed that the former colleague had in fact left the company and that a digital double had been created with the individual's consent, though the system remained in an internal testing phase and had not yet been deployed externally. The case generated significant public and legal commentary, with Fu Jian, director of Henan Zejin Law Firm (河南泽槿律师事务所), warning that an employee's chat records, work emails, and personal work materials constitute personal information, and that reissuing a departed employee's image or voice in digital human form without explicit authorization constitutes an infringement of personal rights. Parallel commentary framed the phenomenon under the concept of digital avatars (数字分身), noting that the "人.skill" series of applications — developed on large language model foundations — allow specific individuals' memories, personality traits, and linguistic habits to be converted into interactive digital doubles capable of sustained virtual interaction, raising unresolved questions about accountability when such systems communicate, make decisions, or deflect responsibility on behalf of a real person.

Government & Public Services: In Hebei Province, Jize County (鸡泽县) within Handan City launched a digital human intelligent guidance system at its government service hall, deploying a virtual digital human named Xiaoze (小泽) on a large interactive screen to greet citizens and direct them through personal or enterprise service procedures. In Heilongjiang Province, the city of Yichun deployed an AI digital human as part of China Unicom Heilongjiang's (黑龙江联通) Smart Guidance System, allowing citizens to access government services by following the digital human's directions after scanning an official public account. In Gansu Province, Lanzhou incorporated AI digital human livestreaming into its Spring Wind Employment Action, using the format as a new-mode recruitment channel alongside conventional online platforms such as Ruyi Employment Network and short-video platforms. In Fujian Province, the Women's Federation deployed digital human lecturers to conduct 63,000 advocacy sessions across the province as part of ideological and political outreach work.

Cultural: Beijing Capital Library (首都图书馆) deployed an AI digital librarian named Tuyueyue (图悦阅), capable of providing precision book recommendations and information queries. Beijing City Library's metaverse hall features an AI digital human modelled on the writer Lu Xun (鲁迅), enabling real-time dialogue with readers. Zhongyuan Book Building (中原图书大厦) introduced an AI study room as part of its Echo Hall offering. In Fujian, visitors to a Lin Huiyin (林徽因) themed exhibition hall were able to interact with an AI digital human experience integrated into the venue. In Inner Mongolia, Hulunbuir (呼伦贝尔) incorporated digital human technology into its Fusion Road cultural tourism brand as part of a cross-provincial tourism cooperation initiative.

Tourism: In Anhui Province, a tourism experience framed as "touring Huangshan with an AI digital human" was active during the Qingming holiday period, positioning the digital human as an interactive travel companion integrated into the park environment. In Hubei Province, a Wuhan cultural tourism digital human commissioner (武汉文旅数字人推荐官) was deployed within the Hubei Humanoid Robot Innovation Center's 7S store in the Optics Valley district of Wuhan's East Lake High-Tech Development Zone — a facility that soft-opened on November 11, 2025 and formally launched in February 2026, and which Hubei Daily subsequently characterised as Central China's first embodied intelligence showroom — where it functioned as an AI-driven virtual guide, interacting with visitors on-screen to generate personalised Wuhan travel itineraries on demand, alongside a broader exhibition of robotic exhibits spanning more than ten application scenarios. 

Entertainment & Short Drama: The short drama sector in China has shifted substantially toward AI-produced content, with AI short dramas now dominant across the segment. Jiangxi Soy Sauce Culture Media Co., Ltd. (江西酱油文化传媒有限公司), operating in the Ganjiang New Area (赣江新区), uses a fully integrated AI workflow — covering scriptwriting, digital human voiceover, and image generation — to produce more than 1,000 AI animated short dramas annually. The unauthorized use of celebrity likenesses by AI-generated actors became a concurrent controversy, with actor Yi Yang Qianxi (易烊千玺) identified as a subject of allegedly infringing content concentrated on the Honguo Short Drama (红果短剧) platform. Broader reporting noted that AI actors in short dramas can be produced using only a small set of photographic source materials without engaging real performers, costumes, or props, and that the practice of using ordinary citizens' faces without authorization has emerged as a related concern. Legal commentary on real-person-driven digital humans noted that where such a digital human is driven by and identified with a specific natural person, questions of identity equivalence and portrait-right compliance apply.

Technology: JD.com (京东) unveiled what it termed a free-form digital human (自由态数字人), described as the company's latest technical breakthrough in digital human development, characterized by the ability to move and operate without physical constraints in a virtual environment. JD.com simultaneously open-sourced the Instruct version of its foundational large model JoyAI-LLM Flash as part of the same technology release. Huibo Xing (慧播星) digital humans were used in news video production, appearing credited in video content published by NetEase (网易) across multiple regional news items. In the AI short drama production context, real-person-driven digital human technology was identified as a distinct technical category in which the digital human's motion and expression are controlled by an actual operator, creating specific regulatory and identity-rights implications distinct from those of fully synthetic AI actors.

April 06 News

Regulatory Context: On April 3, 2026, China's Cyberspace Administration (国家互联网信息办公室) released for public comment a draft document titled the Measures for the Administration of Digital Virtual Human Information Services (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法（征求意见稿）), structured across five chapters and twenty-seven articles covering general provisions, rights protection, service norms, supervisory inspection, legal liability, and supplementary provisions. The draft defines digital virtual humans as virtual digital images existing in a non-physical world that simulate human appearance and possess voice, behavior, interactive capacity, or personality characteristics, created through computer graphics, digital image processing, or artificial intelligence, and driven by real persons or computation. All digital virtual human content must carry a prominent "数字人" (digital human) label in compliance with national AI-generated content identification standards, and any organization or individual using sensitive personal information for modeling, image generation, or scene construction must obtain explicit separate consent from the relevant natural person. The draft explicitly prohibits providers from offering virtual intimate relationship services to minors, including virtual relatives and virtual companions, and bans content designed to induce excessive consumption or guide users through religious means. Yu Xun (虞浔), a professor at East China University of Political Science and Law, described the regulation as aligned with the trajectory of artificial intelligence development and a necessary framework for the industry.

Yu Xun (虞浔) is a professor at East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai, where he also serves as Director of the Social Cooperation Office, Deputy Director of the Shanghai Institute for Comprehensive Social Security Administration, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Zongzhi Yanjiu, and Research Fellow at the Shanghai Research Center for Xi Jinping Thought. His academic disciplines are Legal Theory and Digital Law, and his teaching and public commentary span AI governance, digital rule of law, procuratorial studies, consumer protection, and foreign-related legal services. He has twice been seconded to the Chuzhou People's Procuratorate and has participated in cooperation activities with the Beijing and Shenzhen procuratorates. 

Cultural and Memorial: In Tianjin, a cultural initiative titled "Color China" deployed an AI digital human to recreate the likeness of late Peking yun drum master Luo Yusheng (骆玉笙), enabling a simulated three-generational co-performance alongside living inheritors of the art form. A separate Tianjin ceremony marking the 150th anniversary of educator Zhang Bolin's birth incorporated an AI digital human to re-enact Zhang Bolin's historical speeches, presented alongside AI short dramas, poetry, Peking opera, and spoken drama. In Shanghai, a Qingming-period education event organized by Putuo District used an AI digital human to reconstruct scenes from the Long March in combination with live student recitations. The Qingming period more broadly saw growing public engagement with AI digital humans as a form of memorial practice: actor Bao Xiaobo (包小柏) attracted nationwide attention for creating a digital life reconstruction of his deceased daughter, while a Bilibili content creator known as Wu Wuliu (吴伍六) used AI tools to generate a virtual digital human of his late grandmother, drawing widespread emotional response and commentary on the social role of synthetic beings in grief and remembrance.

Tourism: In Hubei, a flagship embodied intelligence showroom described as the first of its kind in central China featured a Wuhan cultural tourism digital human recommendation officer capable of producing customized travel itineraries, deployed as part of a broader experiential demonstration space that also included robotic music performance, companion robots, and robotic animal demonstrations. In Inner Mongolia, the Hulunbuir city government and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Department of Culture and Tourism (内蒙古自治区文化和旅游厅) jointly incorporated digital human technology into the promotion of a regional cultural tourism brand built around the theme of a heritage fusion route, with the digital human serving as a vehicle for brand communication. In Anhui, tourists at Huangshan were able to follow an AI digital human guide through the scenic area during the spring holiday and Qingming travel season, with the application framed as a technology-augmented visitor experience.

Ji Xiaoqing (冀晓青) is the current Director (厅长) of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Department of Culture and Tourism (内蒙古自治区文化和旅游厅), appointed by the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region People's Congress Standing Committee on July 24, 2025. Her earlier career included serving as Vice Chairwoman and party group member of the Inner Mongolia Women's Federation, Vice Mayor and party group member of the Wuhai city government, and Standing Committee member and head of the Propaganda Department of the Wuhai city party committee. From May 2020 she served as party secretary of the Inner Mongolia Federation of Literary and Art Circles, and from January 2021 as its elected chairwoman, a position she held until her appointment to the department. 

Library and Public Information: The Beijing City Library's metaverse hall features an AI digital human modeled on the writer Lu Xun (鲁迅), capable of interactive exchange with library visitors in a technology-oriented exhibition environment. The Capital Library (首都图书馆) separately deployed an AI digital librarian named Tu Yueyue (图悦阅), designed to provide personalized book recommendations with precision. Both deployments were cited alongside the broader integration of artificial intelligence into library services in China, including the use of AI systems to answer research queries and manage reference services across a range of institutional contexts.

Public Services: An AI intelligent customer service digital human developed under a multimodal transportation large model program has been deployed as a pilot at airports in Xiamen, Fuzhou, and Shanghai, providing front-facing service interaction to address operational efficiency gaps in smart transport management. In Jiangsu, the Kunshan Civil Affairs Bureau (昆山市民政局) introduced a digital human at cemetery service locations during the Qingming period to provide visitors with intelligent navigation assistance and policy explanation, presented as a measure to make grave-tending more orderly and accessible. In Zhejiang, the Hangzhou market regulation authority introduced a digital human named Hang Xiaoxiao (杭小消) for consumer rights services, enabling real-time online responses to complaints and inquiries and replacing a model based on scheduled in-person appointments.

Enterprise and Finance: Shanghai Beiling (上海贝岭), a semiconductor manufacturer listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, incorporated digital human broadcasting as a presentation format in its 2024 annual performance briefing, using the technology to convey operational and financial results to investors. Shandong Digital Culture Group (山东数字文化集团) unveiled a third-generation digital human AI advisor at the 2026 Qilu Spring Auto Show held at the Shandong International Convention and Exhibition Center, positioning the system as an upgraded interactive intelligence capability for automotive retail and exhibition contexts. In Guangdong, reporting on the province's large model ecosystem noted that several of the 132 certified models are applied to digital human interaction and multilingual overseas marketing scenarios, reflecting the integration of digital human technology into enterprise services and cross-border commerce.

Broadcasting and Media: Huibo Star (慧播星), a digital human production platform, provided the synthetic presenter credited in the production of a video documentary about the Chinese Navy's amphibious assault ship Sichuan, with the digital human anchor explicitly noted in the publication credits of the article. Shanghai Beiling's use of digital human broadcasting in investor communications, noted above, further illustrates the deployment of AI presenters in formal corporate communication contexts, extending the application of synthetic anchors beyond entertainment media into regulated financial disclosure.

Livestreaming and Labor: A prominent trend in 2026 coverage is the displacement of human livestream hosts by AI digital humans, with one actor-turned-livestreamer reporting that deployment costs for digital humans have fallen to less than one-tenth of previous levels, substantially reducing the commercial advantage of human performers in the sector. Industry coverage noted that AI digital humans in 2026 are adapted for full-scenario livestreaming and office environments, with efficiency gains sufficient to substitute for human labor across a widening range of use cases. Jiufang Zhitou (九方智投), a financial data and AI services provider, lists a product called Jiufang Digital Human (九方数字人) as part of its AI capability suite, alongside intelligent image recognition and sentiment analysis tools, targeting financial media and investor communication applications.

Digital Identity: A GitHub project titled Colleague.Skill (同事.Skill) attracted significant attention in Chinese technology media for its demonstration that an AI digital double of a departed colleague can be constructed by ingesting that individual's workplace chat records and professional documents, reproducing their technical norms, communication register, and interpersonal habits with reported fidelity. Coverage described the project as a form of workplace satire with substantive implications, prompting discussion about posthumous data rights, digital legacy, and the governance of personal AI avatars in professional settings. Separately, commentary in Chinese business media noted the practice among some technology entrepreneurs of deploying AI digital doubles to manage personal and administrative affairs, directing human attention toward core business operations, a pattern that reflects an emerging category of delegated AI persona use among founders in China's technology sector.

April 05 News

Regulation: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家互联网信息办公室) released the draft Regulations on Digital Virtual Human Information Service Management for public comment on April 3, 2026, with a submission deadline of May 6, 2026. The draft formally defines digital virtual humans as entities existing in non-physical worlds that simulate human appearance, voice, behavior, and interactive capability using graphics, digital image processing, or artificial intelligence technologies, driven either by real humans or computational systems. Under the proposed framework, all digital virtual human services must display a prominent label containing the characters "数字人" (digital human) continuously throughout the duration of each service session, in conformity with national standards for AI-generated and synthesized content identification. The draft explicitly prohibits service providers from inducing minors to develop dependency on digital virtual human services and requires that all digital virtual human content uphold socialist core values, respect social ethics, and serve public interests. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (工业和信息化部) has concurrently advanced standardization efforts across the metaverse and digital human sector, placing ten industry standards covering digital humans, industrial metaverse applications, and virtual exhibition hall technologies under public consultation, with a separate standard for digital human identity identification having been initiated in January 2026. National People's Congress representative Zhong Zheng called separately for stronger regulatory enforcement against the widespread abuse of AI digital humans in commercial livestreaming environments, which she characterized as generating systemic disorder in that sector.

Tourism: On April 3, 2026, the i Huanggang (i黄冈) cultural tourism supply chain platform launched in Hubei province with AI digital human versions of the historical figures Su Dongpo and Li Shizhen as its principal virtual companions. The Su Dongpo digital human is capable of planning travel itineraries, narrating historical content, and recommending local services to visitors, while the Li Shizhen digital human serves a parallel function as a dedicated virtual guide within the platform's tourism ecosystem. In Guizhou, the province's cultural tourism digital human Huang Xiaoxi (黄小西) made a prominent debut at the Guizhou Tourism Development Conference, where she presented a new family of related virtual characters and promoted the "ticket root economy" initiative, positioning AI-driven virtual beings at the center of the province's smart tourism strategy. In Hangzhou, Zhejiang, a large-scale water performance titled Xiang Hu Ya Yun (湘湖·雅韵) incorporated a digital human in the ceremonial role of torch-lighter, combining drone displays and water-screen projection with the virtual character's appearance. Students at Ningxia University reported developing AI digital human tour guide applications as campus projects, reflecting the embedding of this technology in academic training programs for the digital economy workforce.

The i Huanggang (i黄冈) platform is a Hubei province public services application that has adopted AI digital human technology across cultural tourism, government services, and elderly care. Its most prominent digital human deployment is the i Huanggang Cultural Tourism Supply Chain Platform, launched on April 3, 2026, which features a "digital human ensemble" built around AI-rendered versions of historical figures associated with the Huanggang region, most notably Su Dongpo and Li Shizhen. The Su Dongpo digital human serves as a virtual tourism companion capable of planning travel routes, narrating historical content, and recommending local services, while Li Shizhen fulfills an equivalent guide function within the same platform ecosystem. In government and commercial service contexts, the platform deploys digital human agents as customer service representatives and shopping assistants offering intelligent question-and-answer interaction. A separate elderly care module, developed as an extension of the i Huanggang infrastructure and documented as operational from at least late 2024, uses a virtual digital human to provide companionship services and general query responses for senior users. The platform is supported by China Telecom Wing Payment (中国电信翼支付), which provides backend infrastructure and has deployed comparable digital human service configurations in analogous city-level government applications elsewhere in China. 

Cultural Commemoration: AI digital human technology featured prominently in memorial and cultural programming across multiple cities. In Tianjin, a commemorative event marking the 150th anniversary of the birth of educator Zhang Bailing integrated AI digital human performances alongside Peking opera, spoken drama, poetry, and AI-generated short film as part of a multimedia tribute. A documentary video about martyr Su Yilin, produced in connection with a Tianjin repatriation ceremony, credited Huibo Star (慧播星) digital human technology in its production credits. At the national level, ByteDance's (字节跳动) intangible cultural heritage digital human program was selected as a demonstration case by the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, recognizing it as an instance of AI-powered cultural activation. The Cyberspace Administration's reference guide on positive AI content production explicitly endorsed digital human broadcasting as a format for news delivery and endorsed the deployment of digital humans alongside high-precision reconstructions of historical cultural relics and ancient architectural heritage.

Entertainment: An AI-generated ancient-style short drama titled Taohua Zan (桃花簪), comprising 72 episodes distributed through the Hongguo (红果) platform, was taken down following public controversy over the unauthorized use of real individuals' facial likenesses in its production. The incident intensified industry debate about compliance obligations in AI short drama production and amplified calls for regulatory intervention from legislators and commentators. Legal analysis circulating in investment and entertainment media noted that digital humans do not possess civil subject status under current Chinese law and therefore cannot hold performers' rights, leaving the legal ownership of AI-generated performances in an unresolved position. An AI virtual host appeared alongside live Yue opera performers in the 2026 Yue Opera Spring Festival Gala, a television program distributed simultaneously to more than two hundred countries and regions and augmented with three-dimensional holographic technology, marking a mainstream broadcast application of the AI virtual host format.

Workplace Ethics: An open-source project named colleague-skill, identified on GitHub, generated substantial public controversy in China for enabling companies to generate AI digital human replicas of departed employees by ingesting their historical chat records and work documents into a large language model. The resulting digital human is reported to replicate a former employee's communication style, working habits, and responses based on their accumulated prior output. Public discussion on Chinese social platforms prompted extensive debate about whether the creation of a digital likeness of an individual without explicit consent constitutes a violation of personal information protection law, with no authoritative legal resolution yet established. A related stream of commentary identified the structural risk that employees may effectively continue performing labor in digital form after resignation without compensation or awareness, raising questions about the limits of corporate data governance authority.

Marketing: Yunnan Aibing (云南爱冰), a regional digital marketing service provider operating in Yunnan province, offers a package of AI digital human livestreaming, short video scripting, and e-commerce promotion services targeting local commercial clients. As a designated regional agent for the Xiaoice (小冰) digital employee system covering Yunnan, Guizhou, and Chongqing, Yunnan Aibing deploys Xiaoice's digital human technology to operate virtual livestreaming for clients including Kunming Department Store Group (昆明百货大楼集团), Yunnan Zhenghao Home Furnishing (云南正豪家居), and Guizhou Cili Workshop (贵州刺梨工坊). The broader pattern of AI digital human deployment in livestreaming commerce across southwestern provinces reflects a regional scaling of this application, with multiple service providers offering integrated packages covering digital human creation, script generation, and platform traffic acquisition.

Public Services: In Kunshan, Jiangsu, a smart cemetery management system has incorporated AI digital human technology to deliver intelligent navigation and policy interpretation services to visitors, accumulating more than 150,000 service engagements over two years of operation with zero fire incidents and zero safety events recorded. In Hebei, provincial tax authorities have deployed a digital human named Ji Xiaoyue (冀小悦), using an anthropomorphic avatar and intelligent voice interaction to provide around-the-clock tax information services to residents. In Ankang, Shaanxi, an employment service terminal features a digital human to walk job seekers through the registration and position-matching process step by step, reducing the need for human staff at self-service kiosks. In Nanning, Guangxi, city government agencies incorporated digital human demonstrations as part of an immersive AI experience event organized around public-sector innovation, with digital human applications showcased alongside workplace innovation competitions and a public-private engagement framework. Shanghai Beiling (上海贝岭) introduced digital human broadcasting as part of its 2024 annual results presentation, marking an early corporate adoption of the format in financial communications.

Virtual Production: In Chongqing, entrepreneur Lu Qi, recipient of the New Chongqing Contribution Award, established a digital film enterprise focused on virtual production and digital human technology, relocating operations to Yongchuan district in 2018. The team achieved a recognized industry milestone in 2019 by completing development of what was described as the first fully autonomous real-time digital human technology built on an end-to-end domestic technical pipeline in China, subsequently open-sourcing the platform to support the broader development of the domestic digital human industry.

Lu Qi (卢琪), born in Beijing in October 1990, is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Dawa Future (重庆达瓦未来影像科技有限公司). A postgraduate-educated entrepreneur and representative to the Chongqing Municipal People's Congress (6th term), he launched his first company, Dawa Future (Beijing) Imaging Technology Co., Ltd., in 2014, with a focus on virtual production and digital human technology. In 2016 he established an associated incubator, and in 2018 he relocated the enterprise's core operations to Yongchuan District in Chongqing, founding Dawa Future (Chongqing) Imaging Technology Co., Ltd. with a team of three core members. Under his leadership the company developed into the operator of the Yongchuan Science and Technology Film Studio, which became one of China's largest virtual production facilities, and contributed simulation technology to major national projects including the 70th National Day parade and the Beijing Winter Olympics opening ceremony. Lu Qi has received the 26th Chinese Youth May Fourth Medal and the New Chongqing Contribution Award. 

Legal: The accumulation of AI digital human applications across commercial, entertainment, and interpersonal contexts has surfaced a cluster of unresolved legal questions within China's legal and regulatory environment. Adjudicated cases cited in media coverage include an AI companion application found to have infringed personality rights by using a public figure's likeness without consent to construct a virtual character, and a "digital artist" product adjudicated to be too similar in appearance to a named celebrity. The commercial exploitation of deceased individuals' likenesses through digital human services has generated ongoing ethical controversy, and the formation of simulated intimate or dependent relationships between minors and virtual companions has been identified as a social harm requiring specific regulatory attention. These documented issues collectively informed the Cyberspace Administration's decision to draft binding sectoral regulations for digital virtual human information services.

April 04 News

Regulation: China's Cyberspace Administration (国家网信办) issued a draft regulation titled the Digital Virtual Human Information Services Management Measures (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法（征求意见稿）), which requires all digital virtual human content to carry a prominent disclosure label bearing the words "digital human" and to comply with national standards for AI-generated and synthetic content identification. The draft additionally prohibits providers from designing services in ways that induce minors to become addicted to digital virtual human platforms. Separately, the China Broadcasting Association Actor Committee (中国广电联合会演员委员会) issued a formal statement declaring that any AI face-swapping, voice cloning, virtual human replication, or secondary derivative content that can be associated with specific public-figure actors constitutes infringement regardless of whether it is labeled as non-commercial, publicly shared, or personal fan creation, with all such content carrying full legal liability.

On April 3, 2026, China's Cyberspace Administration (国家互联网信息办公室) released for public comment a draft regulation titled "Measures for the Administration of Digital Virtual Human Information Services" (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法), marking a significant step in the governance of AI-driven virtual human technology. The draft defines digital virtual human service providers as any organization or individual offering such services, and establishes two central prohibitions: using a virtual human to defame or damage another person's personality rights, and creating a virtual human based on a specific natural person's likeness or voice without that person's consent. All parties in the service chain — providers, platform users, and content distributors — are required to maintain proper labeling wherever virtual humans are displayed. The regulation acknowledges that digital virtual humans have expanded far beyond entertainment into finance, healthcare, and cultural tourism, and frames the draft as a governance framework that sets clear safety boundaries while encouraging continued sectoral adoption. 

Cultural Heritage: ByteDance (字节跳动) developed an intangible cultural heritage digital human named Feifei (非非), which was selected as a demonstration case by the UNESCO Creative Cities Network. Feifei is proficient in Mandarin, English, and Sichuan dialect, holds specialized knowledge of intangible cultural heritage subjects, can perform heritage segments and explain traditional craft knowledge, and supports real-time voice interaction with users. In Anhui, a digital human rendition of the historical figure Cao Cao (曹操) was produced as part of the "AI Captures AH" campaign organized by the Anhui Provincial Cyberspace Administration and hosted by Phoenix Network's Anhui channel (凤凰网安徽频道), inviting audiences to explore the province's Three Kingdoms cultural landscape through AI-mediated historical dialogue.

Phoenix Network (凤凰网), the integrated digital media platform operated by Phoenix New Media under the broader Phoenix Television ecosystem, functions in the digital human space primarily as a content distribution and editorial amplifier rather than as a technology developer or vendor. Its flagship internet platform ifeng.com and associated verticals including Phoenix Finance and Phoenix Video have published coverage of major digital human developments in China, including China's first national standard for virtual digital humans issued in December 2025, debates around the commercial viability of digital human livestream e-commerce, and emerging controversies such as the practice of converting former employees into AI digital human surrogates for continued commercial use. Phoenix Network's regional AI studios have also entered content production territory, with the Phoenix Anhui AI Studio producing digital human narrative content such as a historical immersive project following the Three Kingdoms figure Cao Cao, suggesting a selective move from pure coverage into digital human-enabled storytelling. Across these activities, Phoenix Network occupies the position of a media infrastructure player that shapes public discourse around digital humans in Chinese-speaking markets while cautiously experimenting with the technology in its own editorial and regional content operations, without staking a claim as a platform or ecosystem participant in the vendor sense. 

Tourism: The Guangxi Culture and Tourism Department deployed a tour guide digital human named Guilinger (桂灵儿) at the Lijiang River scenic area, providing AI-generated narration and scene interpretation as part of the region's broader effort to integrate digital intelligence into cultural tourism services. In Guizhou, the tourism digital human Huang Xiaoxi (黄小西) debuted at the opening ceremony of the Guizhou Tourism Development Conference, unveiling new character forms within a family identity and promoting the province's ticketing economy, with its AI-interactive capabilities positioned as a centerpiece of smart tourism strategy. Both deployments illustrate the consolidation of province-level digital human branding within official government tourism promotion frameworks.

The Guizhou Tourism Industry Development Conference (贵州旅游产业发展大会) is China's longest-running provincial tourism conference, held annually since 2006 and now in its 20th edition, rotating competitively among Guizhou's prefectural cities and consistently organized by the Guizhou Provincial People's Government. Its digital human engagement is anchored entirely in a single character, Huang Xiao Xi (黄小西), whose name is drawn from the provincial tourism mnemonic "黄小西吃晚饭" encoding Guizhou's key destinations: Huangguoshu, Xiaoqikong, Xijiang Miao Village, dining in Guiyang, an evening in Zunyi, and Fanjingshan. Huang Xiao Xi made her debut at the 19th conference in Anshun in April 2025, presented at the opening ceremony as Guizhou's official provincial cultural tourism digital image spokesperson, depicted as a cartoon girl wearing silver ornaments and Miao ethnic dress, built on Unreal Engine rendering with iFlytek Spark large model powering her intelligent interaction, and deeply integrated with the "One Code Travel Guizhou" (一码游贵州) 3.0 smart tourism platform launched at the same event. At the 20th conference in Guiyang in March 2026, an upgraded Huang Xiao Xi crossed from screen to physical reality in the form of an intelligent embodied robot, participated in a purpose-written AI scenario drama, and was also deployed as a hotel intelligent agent providing room guests with local recommendations, sleep aid, and parent-child companion services; simultaneously, Amap (高德地图) launched a "Follow Huang Xiao Xi to Tour Guizhou" one-click smart gateway in partnership with the character, driving a visit volume increase of more than twenty times across Amap's two million-plus Guizhou data points, with tourists accounting for 72.6% of users served. 

Amap (高德地图), China's leading mapping and navigation platform owned by Alibaba Group, has pursued digital human integration as a core interface strategy since September 2022, when it introduced its first AI virtual navigator, "Teacher Xiao Gao" (小高老师), distinguishing itself from conventional voice-only navigation by giving the guidance function a fully visualized, human-like virtual form. The same month, Amap rolled out a complete 3D navigation experience — pairing its digital human with immersive street-level rendering — across six major cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Chengdu, and Shenzhen. This positioned the digital human not as a cosmetic feature but as the primary user-facing layer of an evolving spatial interface. Amap has continued to deepen this direction, expanding 3D coverage to include 164 cities with detailed toll station environments by December 2025, while also entering adjacent digital human territory through research conducted jointly with Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, resulting in the FantasyTalking system — a portrait-animation technology capable of generating expressive, naturally moving talking faces from a single photograph. The platform has further extended into 3D restaurant display, competing with Meituan in AI-powered dining services, and Alibaba open-sourced a mobile-native 3D digital human application in June 2025 tied to Amap's infrastructure. Together, these developments position Amap as one of China's most consequential deployment environments for functional, service-embedded digital humans at national scale. 

Entertainment: China's short drama production sector is undergoing structural change driven by digital human and AI actor technology, with production costs for AI short dramas estimated at approximately one-tenth those of conventional short dramas. Yushao Media (聿潇传媒) announced in March 2026 the signing of multiple AI performers, including internet celebrity Han Anran (韩安冉), who holds tens of millions of followers, establishing a contractual model of authorized AI digital doubles grounded in real-person consent rather than algorithmically generated likenesses without authorization. Shandong Digital Human Technology Co., Ltd. (山东数字人科技股份有限公司) operates as a publicly reporting entity within this sector, and industry analysts note that digital human technology and video generation technology jointly constitute the underlying infrastructure for AI actors, which present particular challenges in replicating the full range of performance demands in dramatic content.

Healthcare: Guangdong Second People's Hospital (广东省第二人民医院) activated what is described as China's first doctor digital double (医生数字分身) in conjunction with a digital therapy ecosystem, representing a formal institutional deployment of virtual human technology in clinical and therapeutic contexts. In Yunnan, Yunnan Moucheng Digital Technology (云南谋成数字科技) implemented an AI digital human for a medical education institution, enabling the client to conduct brand presentation and customer acquisition through a synthetic virtual presenter integrated into its service workflow.

Government Services: The Guangzhou Housing Provident Fund Center integrated its AI digital human with the DeepSeek large language model, enabling the virtual agent to deliver precise, personalized guidance on housing provident fund business inquiries. In Jiangsu, a digital human service was deployed to support enterprise overseas institutional registration, consolidating previously multi-step processes into a single intelligent form submission interface with AI verification capability. In Xinjiang, a community-facing digital human named Shegoung Xiaoke (社工小克) was deployed with intelligent voice interaction, a legal knowledge graph, and on-demand legal popularization video playback, providing 24-hour legal consultation services to residents. The Tibet Autonomous Region's cyberspace authority similarly promoted AI digital humans as a mechanism for transitioning public legal education from broadcast-style delivery to interactive, service-oriented engagement. Tianjin's municipal tax administration incorporated digital human smart notification into its public tax compliance outreach, deploying virtual human reminders as a channel alongside open-microphone dialogue sessions.

Enterprise: JD.com (京东) announced through its JD Cloud division the launch of what it describes as an industry-first free-state digital human (自由态数字人), built on its proprietary JoyAI large model, with stated technical innovations centered on digital human lip model design. Endpoint Technology (端点（陕西）科技有限公司), headquartered in Xi'an's High-Tech Zone, positions itself as a full-process digital human service provider, handling the complete range of technical and deployment tasks on behalf of clients across all stages of a digital human project. Zhongyi Technology (中熠科技) produces holographic 3D digital humans designed for government services, medical, and cultural tourism interaction contexts, with industry analysts observing that such systems are evolving from single-function interface tools into broader scenario-based service platforms as metaverse applications deepen. In Chongqing, consumer AI television products are being marketed with embedded AI digital human functionality that greets users upon returning home and delivers weather and personalized information, illustrating deployment of virtual beings in domestic smart device contexts. At the 2026 Shanghai International Hotel and Commercial Space Expo (上海国际酒店及商业空间博览会), AI digital human live streaming with voice cloning was presented as a low-cost branded broadcasting solution for hospitality operators. The Nasdaq-listed Meitianpin AI Group (美天拼AI集团, HNDI) presented AI digital human and intelligent marketing case studies at the 2026 China AI Summit held in Chengdu. In Hangzhou, Hangzhou Qingganlan Network Technology Co., Ltd. (杭州青橄榄网络技术有限公司) deployed digital human assistants to streamline internal business process flows and improve operational efficiency.

The 2026 Shanghai International Hotel and Commercial Space Expo (Hotel & Shop Plus), co-organized by the China Tourist Hotel Association and the China General Merchandise Business Association and held March 31 to April 3 at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre, served as a showcase for the accelerating deployment of AI digital humans across China's hospitality sector, with multiple vendors presenting distinct implementations. Luma Intelligent Technology (鹿马智能科技) drew the most sustained coverage with its AI Super Check-in Butler, an anthropomorphic AI digital human interaction system supporting natural voice dialogue, framed as the solution bridging the last mile of hotel AI service at a moment when unmanned hotels are transitioning from concept to scaled deployment. Dindan Cloud PMS (订单来了) demonstrated a digital human live-streaming solution with voice cloning capability designed to give hotel brands a low-cost broadcast presence. Skyworth Commercial (创维商用) integrated AI digital human features into its screen-centric smart hotel infrastructure, combining them with wireless AP functionality. Yunzhiji Technology (云迹科技), backed by Qiming Venture Partners, presented its digital human Yuni within a full smart hotel experience zone encompassing self-check-in and related guest services. Peripheral coverage also noted that Nanjing has already institutionalized AI digital human deployments in hotel settings, and that the broader Chinese hospitality market in 2026 is characterized less by a shortage of AI tools than by the challenge of integrating them into coherent, systemized operational frameworks. 

Memorialization: E-commerce platforms accessible across China, including in Jilin Province, are offering services marketed as "AI revival," "make photos speak," and "AI digital human" for the purpose of recreating deceased relatives, with pricing ranging from 10 yuan to several thousand yuan and product quality reported as highly variable; some vendors have been specifically criticized for exploiting grief-driven demand. In Jinan, Shandong, a national organ donor commemoration event formally incorporated AI digital humans into ceremonial proceedings, conducting digital memorial rites for eight donors at the Shandong Provincial Ji'nan Organ Donor Memorial Plaza, representing a formal institutional adoption of virtual human technology in commemorative public ritual.

Broadcasting and Media: The Jiangsu Women's Federation officially launched Suxin (苏馨), a female digital human broadcaster, as the public-facing digital representative of its official media channel. Tianjin Haihe Media Center (天津海河传媒中心) produced the television program Chuancheng (传承), which used an AI digital human to recreate the stage presence of Luo Yusheng (骆玉笙), a celebrated Peking Drum-Song (京韵大鼓) performer, realizing what the production described as a simultaneous three-generation performance. Inner Mongolia Film Group (内蒙古电影集团) held an AI achievement showcase in Hohhot in April 2026, presenting digital human applications among its results in AI-assisted film production and audiovisual publishing. Huiboxing (慧播星) digital humans were used to produce short-form news video content in both Yunnan and Guizhou contexts, functioning as synthetic virtual presenters in journalistic material distributed across online platforms.

Inner Mongolia Film Group Co., Ltd. (内蒙古电影集团有限责任公司) is a state-owned cultural enterprise under the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region government, primarily engaged in film production, cinema operations through its Xinghe circuit, and cultural media services. Its engagement with digital human technology is peripheral rather than foundational, manifesting chiefly through AI-assisted film production workflows and immersive experiential installations. In April 2026, the group publicly demonstrated AI capabilities spanning the full production pipeline, including AI digital human applications in content creation. Its "XR Future Cinema" installation, deployed at Yijinhuoluo Airport and regional cultural expos, employs high-precision spatial tracking and multi-user interaction to deliver walk-through immersive experiences in which virtual human presences form part of the experience layer. The group has also participated in signed cooperation with CCTV and the Ordos Convergence Media Center in initiatives touching on digital human service applications, and has appeared in provincial cultural industry showcases alongside other Inner Mongolia state-owned media entities where digital human technology was among the broader attractions on display. It is not a digital human developer, platform, or dedicated vendor, but rather a regional film and media group that incorporates digital human and AI production tools as part of a wider modernization of its content and exhibition capabilities. 

Education: In Hangzhou, a community school operating under the name Xi Xuetang (西·学堂) at the Cuiyuan Street Social Education Center introduced AI digital human creation as part of an expanded AI curriculum offered to middle-aged and elderly learners, with planned modules covering photo animation, video production, and digital human generation. Changchun Digital Technology Vocational College (长春数字科技职业学院), in collaboration with Jilin Huashu Chuangke Digital Technology Co., Ltd. (吉林省华数创科数字科技有限公司), launched a digital intelligence talent platform drawing on over 30 enterprise practice projects and incorporating digital human skills as a component of vocational readiness for the digital economy. In Foshan, Guangdong, the Zhonghuang Xingyu Hong Kong-Macao School (中黄星瑜港澳子弟学校) integrated AI digital humans alongside smart ink screens and intelligent paper-pen devices as teaching tools across subject-area classrooms, with visiting Hong Kong educators citing AI digital human integration as among the most notable observations from their school exchange visit.

April 03 News

Cultural Heritage: ByteDance (字节跳动) had its intangible cultural heritage digital human project selected as an exemplary case by the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, alongside its ancient manuscript preservation work. Commentary published in Hong Kong in April 2026 examined digital human technology as a mechanism for converting the implicit, orally transmitted knowledge of traditional practices into replicable and interactive explicit knowledge, framing the technology as central to heritage digitization efforts. The Fujian Women's Federation deployed an AI digital human named "闽姐姐" (Min Jiejie) as a public-facing representative character linked to provincial women's federation communications.

Government and Public Services: Dunhuang city in Gansu Province deployed an AI digital human in its government service hall as part of a smart government initiative, alongside the intelligent guide robot "敦小飞" (Dun Xiaofei), making it the first county-level government service platform in Gansu Province to integrate the DeepSeek AI large model. A separate Gansu initiative introduced AI sign language digital humans across government, education, and cultural institutions as part of a barrier-free information accessibility program serving deaf and hard-of-hearing users. China Telecom Ningxia (中国电信宁夏公司) launched its self-developed AI digital human "宁姐姐" (Ning Jiejie) at the regional commemoration of International Women's Day, with the character designed for multi-scenario deployment across the company's AI intelligent service operations.

Tourism: Guizhou's cultural tourism digital human "黄小西" (Huang Xiao Xi) made its initial appearance as a virtual digital human at the 19th Guizhou Tourism Development Conference and was substantially upgraded for the 20th conference in 2026, transitioning from a screen-based presence to an embodied interactive form offering personalized recommendations across four service domains: hotels, scenic areas, dining, and personal services. Yunnan Tourism (云南旅游股份有限公司), headquartered in Kunming's Panlong District, is classified within virtual digital human and metaverse concept sectors as part of its digital and technology-focused business strategy. At the 2026 national spring job fair held in Yinchuan, students reported applying AI tools to create digital human tour guides as practical school projects, reflecting emerging real-world integration of digital human technology in tourism-adjacent vocational training.

Yunnan Tengyun Information Industry Co., Ltd. (云南腾云信息产业有限公司), commonly known as 腾云公司, was established in December 2017 as a joint venture initiated by the Yunnan provincial government and Tencent, with Yunnan Investment Holdings Group and Yunnan Transportation Investment and Construction Group as co-founding shareholders, and operates as the builder and operator of the provincial "游云南" (Travel Yunnan) platform, China's leading provincial smart tourism digital infrastructure. In November 2023, 腾云公司 signed a strategic partnership with MoFa (Shanghai) Information Technology Co., Ltd. (魔珐科技 / Xmov) to co-build what was announced as China's first AI virtual human cultural tourism demonstration project, with the signing attended by Tengyun Company Executive VP Wang Lei (王磊) and MoFa Partner and Business VP Mao Haifeng (毛海峰). Under the partnership, MoFa's three AIGC product lines — Youyan (有言) for virtual human video production, Youguang (有光) for virtual human live streaming, and Youling (有灵) for virtual human services — are deployed across scenic area guide training, point-of-interest navigation, and rural e-commerce promotion in Yunnan, with a concrete deployment cited at the Xishuangbanna visitor hub, where Youyan was used to produce digital guide videos for tourists. 

Enterprise and Finance: China Construction Bank (建设银行) accelerated development of its retail AI tool "帮得助理" (Bangde Assistant), which equips personal client managers with a digital avatar to integrate AI into customer-facing workflows covering needs analysis and asset allocation, as part of a stated move toward a human-plus-digital-employee collaborative operating model across its 398 large model application scenarios. Binance co-founder He Yi announced in April 2026 that her AI double (AI分身), developed through a dedicated training process, had assumed responsibility for her daily work with greater precision and efficiency than she had previously achieved herself.

E-commerce and Live Streaming: JD.com (京东) unveiled what it described as an industry-first free-state digital human alongside two named digital human systems, JoyAvatar and JoyStreamer, with core technical breakthroughs in lip synchronization modeling and motion generation enabling naturalistic performance across extended and complex multi-modal interactions. The company also released the open-source large model JoyAI-LLM Flash as the underlying infrastructure supporting these digital human capabilities. In the cross-border e-commerce sector, individual operators described using AI digital human tools to produce multilingual product videos from Chinese-language scripts, with one operator generating Russian-language promotional content featuring an AI digital human with synchronized lip movement, reporting a 70 percent reduction in labor costs.

Marketing: Blue Label (蓝色光标) ranked second in a Q1 2026 GEO service provider competitiveness assessment, with its self-developed BlueAI model covering 95 percent of operational scenarios; the company reported that its virtual human marketing segment achieved gross merchandise value exceeding 100 million yuan, producing a structural improvement in its business mix and gross margin. Shenzhou Intelligent (深度智联), based in Shanghai, received the "AI+Industry Outstanding Case Award" at the Global Developer Pioneer Conference (GDPS 2026), with its platform providing digital human video production as one of five core capabilities for real estate marketing personnel alongside content generation, customer profiling, and related functions.

Education: Guangdong Province's lifelong learning platform incorporates digital human interaction as one of its AI-enabled learning features, available alongside intelligent study companions and a credit bank system within a four-domain curriculum framework. Changjiang Vocational College (长江职业学院) in Wuhan, Hubei Province, operates a dedicated digital human live streaming room as part of its digital training infrastructure, which was visited in April 2026 by John McLean, chairman of the British-Chinese Business Development Centre, during a tour of the college's applied technology facilities. Zhonghuang Xingyu Hong Kong-Macao Children's School (中黄星瑜港澳子弟学校) in Foshan integrates AI digital human tools with smart ink screens and AI-assisted instruction in mathematics, an approach that made a notable impression on Hong Kong teachers visiting as part of a mainland teaching practice exchange program.

Memorial: A Hubei native, Wang Zhe, working in Shenzhen's Longgang district, described how a digital human of his deceased mother appeared at his wedding ceremony one year prior, delivering personalized words of blessing to fulfill an unfulfilled promise between them. The broader commercial market for AI memorial digital humans, marketed under labels including "AI resurrection" and "AI digital human," is available across multiple Chinese e-commerce platforms at prices ranging from ten yuan to several thousand yuan, with significant variation in output quality and documented cases of operators exploiting grief-driven purchasing behavior.

Technology and Infrastructure: Guangzhou Zhongyi Technology (广州市中熠科技有限公司), a national high-tech enterprise with thirteen years of experience in commercial display and an independent production base in Guangzhou's Panyu district, delivers full-chain holographic 3D digital human solutions across government, healthcare, and cultural tourism sectors, with annual production capacity exceeding 100,000 holographic projection units and AI digital human systems. A company operating within Beijing's Fengtai Science and Innovation Talent Corridor deploys an array of 80 4K cameras combined with laser infrared technology for rapid holographic digital capture, generating interactive video content in which audiences select viewing angles and project digital humans into arbitrary scenes. Xuanwu Intelligent Computing (玄武智算（内蒙古）信息科技有限公司) leverages computing resources at the Horinger New Area in Inner Mongolia to operate a cloud gaming e-sports platform providing millisecond-level acceleration for cloud gaming and AI digital human workloads. Wangda Software (网达软件) has developed metaverse applications including a metaverse conferencing platform and a digital human face customization system, classified within the virtual digital human and AIGC concept sectors. Hisense Vision (海信视像) developed AIGC capabilities for both semi-realistic and hyper-realistic digital human modeling and interaction as part of its metaverse and smart home technology portfolio.

Alibaba (阿里巴巴) released Wan2.7-Image, a unified image generation and editing model with enhanced virtual avatar face customization functions supporting full-range personalization from skeletal structure and eye shape to fine facial feature detail. PixVerse (爱诗科技) launched PixVerse R1 (realtime.pixverse.ai), described as the world's first real-time world model, incorporating a personal digital avatar feature that enables users to upload a photograph and generate a personalized avatar rendered in Realistic, Anime, or Cyberpunk visual styles.

Entertainment and Media: Tianjin's AI short drama sector incorporated digital humans into a content development project linked to the Nezha legend IP, integrating the digital human character into a coordinated content and marketing strategy alongside the underlying mythological property. Hebei Broadcasting and Television Wireless Media (河北广电无线传媒股份有限公司), based in Shijiazhuang's Qiaoxi district, carries a digital human concept classification alongside its IPTV operations, reflecting the company's positioning within the virtual digital human sector.

April 02 News

Entertainment: China's AI short drama sector is generating significant intellectual property disputes centred on the unauthorised use of celebrity likenesses in digitally generated characters. After AI-produced short drama content appeared to incorporate the facial image of actor Xiao Zhan without permission, related topics trended widely on social media, with reports noting that infringement in this domain could carry criminal sentences of up to ten years. Multiple film and television companies have faced similar accusations, with their AI digital artist characters alleged to resemble named performers, leaving unresolved questions about the legal boundaries governing synthetic actors. Actor Wang Xun spoke publicly on the matter, urging rights holders to move quickly on licensing, framing AI digital human authorisation as an opportunity for his home province's screen industry. At the high-production end of the spectrum, Lingyun Optics (凌云光), through its subsidiary Yuanke Vision (元客视界), deployed Light Field technology and its S4D human body dynamic modelling system to complete sub-millimetre precision digital doubles for "Mengdi" (梦底), a creative segment of the 2026 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, with the system delivering dynamic reconstruction and virtual-real fusion presentation at broadcast. Digital human guest ViviDora made her official debut on March 25 at the Boao Asia Forum, appearing in a session dedicated to the advancement and development of humanoid robots.

Cultural Heritage: ByteDance (字节跳动) has had its intangible cultural heritage digital human application selected as a demonstration case by the UNESCO Creative Cities Network alongside its ancient book preservation initiative. The virtual intelligent agent is fluent in Mandarin, English, and Sichuan dialect, holds specialised intangible heritage knowledge, and is capable of performing heritage segments, explaining craft processes, and engaging users through real-time voice interaction. It has provided guided explanations at the Chengdu International Intangible Heritage Festival and at cultural venues in Beijing. The Hunan Museum released a three-dimensional digital human portrayal of Han Dynasty noblewoman Xinchui (辛追夫人) in two age versions, one at thirty-five years old and one at fifty, with the digital figure subsequently deployed on electronic column displays at Changsha's Wenchang Pavilion subway station. Shanghai selected four works for the 2025 China Positive Energy Network Communication AI Showcase Cases (中国正能量网络传播AI精品案例), including productions that applied digital human technology to traditional culture innovation and international communication themes, demonstrating the medium's use in state-endorsed cultural content.

The China Positive Energy Network Communication AI Showcase Cases (中国正能量网络传播AI精品案例) is an annual state-administered recognition program jointly organized by the Cyberspace Administration of China (中央网络安全和信息化委员会办公室) and People's Daily (人民日报社), designed to identify and promote AI-generated content that exemplifies officially endorsed values in digital media production and dissemination. Works are solicited through a national collection and exhibition campaign, shortlisted candidates undergo a public comment period, and final selections are announced at an annual conference; the 2024 edition results were disclosed in March 2025 following a five-day public review window, while the 2025 edition results — comprising 95 selected works — were announced on March 28, 2026, at the Digital Intelligence Empowers Positive Energy Production and Communication Conference (数智赋能正能量生产传播大会) held in Zhengzhou, Henan Province. Winning entries have spanned short video, music composition, and animated content, with recognized works including AI-generated pieces by the People's Daily New Media Center tied to international events such as the Paris Olympics, an AI short video from the Jiangxi branch of People's Daily pairing Shakespeare with the Ming dynasty playwright Tang Xianzu, and a musical composition produced by the Central Conservatory of Music's AI composition system; participating provinces submit works through coordinated regional campaigns, with Shanghai placing four works in the 2025 selection and Yunnan placing three. 

Healthcare: Ant Group (蚂蚁集团) has opened its AI twin technology through its health platform Afu (蚂蚁阿福) to prominent physicians across China, enabling specialists to extend their clinical expertise through personalised AI doubles. Participating physicians include Chinese Academy of Sciences members Wang Jianan, Chen Zijiang, and Fan Jia, among more than thirty nationally recognised experts. Multiple tier-three hospitals in Fujian province have deployed expert AI digital twins operating continuously around the clock, conducting multi-round diagnostic conversations with patients to assess symptom onset, severity, and accompanying manifestations before generating tiered care plans spanning home management through clinical referral guidance. Shandong Digital Human Technology Co., Ltd. (山东数字人科技股份有限公司) disclosed at its 2025 annual performance meeting that overseas business grew by 65.28% and that revenue from its high-definition anatomical table product line exceeded 30 million yuan.

Tourism: At the Twentieth Guizhou Tourism Industry Development Conference, the upgraded digital human tourism agent "Huang Xiaoxi" (黄小西) was unveiled alongside the Guizhou Tourism Industry large language model and a unified service code system. The character has evolved from a static virtual figure into a physical intelligent agent capable of full-scene deployment, representing a shift from presentational function to active operational participation in Guizhou's smart tourism infrastructure. Tourism industry participants in Xinjiang have highlighted that digital human livestream rooms can reduce operational costs, extend service hours, and substantially improve tourism information delivery and visitor conversion rates, citing the technology as a strategic tool for regional tourism development. Analysts examining the smart tourism sector have separately identified high-fidelity cultural tourism digital human technology as a distinct application category, encompassing virtual tour guides and explainers capable of natural language interaction and emotional expression.

Education: The DEL Studio of the School of Art and Design at Xi'an Eurasia University (西安欧亚学院) has undertaken frame-level lip-sync matching for digital human characters in industrial-grade AI comic drama production, with team leader Yao Xiaotong describing the process as giving digital characters a soul. In Chongqing, the City Management Vocational College's "Mashang Learning" (马上学习) ideological education smart classroom employs a digital human delivered in holographic projection form to interpret core theoretical content, with the system simultaneously broadcasting to partner institutions across the Chengdu-Chongqing urban region. At a national employment promotion event held in Taiyuan under the "100 Cities, 1000 Schools, 10,000 Enterprises" initiative, a digital human was deployed for mock job interviews, with students including a software engineering graduate from Hebei University of Geosciences conducting simulated conversations about Java engineering roles. In Nantong, Jiangsu province, an AI digital human was used during a Two Sessions public education event to present policy learning content to a general audience. The Jiangsu provincial women's rights media platform separately introduced a digital human named "Suxin" (苏馨) to explain the newly issued Jiangsu Women's Rights Protection Regulations in plain, accessible language.

Marketing: Samsonite partnered with JD.com (京东) to deploy a digital human replicating its brand identity on a one-to-one basis, enabling round-the-clock commercial engagement without continuous human staffing. Meitu's (美图) roboneo.com system allows users to film a real dance performance and then transfer that motion with high precision to a cartoon virtual avatar in a single step, requiring no professional equipment or post-production experience, with the resulting output described as smooth and visually coherent. Observers of the AI short drama market have also noted the commercial utility of hyper-realistic AI digital humans as brand endorsers, citing their capacity to eliminate the reputational risks and scheduling constraints associated with human spokespersons at substantially reduced cost.

Memorial and Bereavement: Zhejiang province's Anxian Garden (浙江安贤园) in Hangzhou hosted an AI farewell ceremony on March 31 during which an AI digital human portrait frame was used to recreate the appearance and voice of a deceased person for attending family members. One participant had used the service to preserve the likeness of his wife, who died three years prior. In Guangdong, a digital human rendering of a deceased mother appeared at her son's wedding to deliver personal words of blessing, fulfilling a promise between mother and child that was left incomplete at the time of her death. In Jinan, at the city's body donation memorial square, AI digital humans were used to conduct digital ritual burial services for eight donors during a commemorative gathering. AI bereavement services in China are reported to range in price from tens of yuan to tens of thousands of yuan, reflecting a broad market spanning basic memorial functions to complex personalised reconstructions.

Governance: At the 2026 Digital Economy Cooperation and Innovation Forum held at the United Nations Palais des Nations in Geneva, Beijing Economic and Information Bureau Director Jiang Guangzhi delivered his opening address in digital human form, using the occasion to advocate open cooperation and mutual benefit in global digital governance. In Chongqing, Lu Qi led a research and production team that developed what is described as China's first independently controllable domestic digital human technology, accumulating more than one hundred related patents and intellectual property rights across real-time rendering and motion capture disciplines. Guangdong province has issued an AI innovation development action plan covering the period 2026 to 2028, signalling continued policy support for the digital human industry within the province.

Enterprise: Lingban Intelligent (灵伴智能) applies its proprietary intelligent voice and language core technologies to virtual digital human applications, alongside AIGC long-audio content production and intelligent voice service deployments. Jilin Broadcasting Media (吉视传媒) presented a naked-eye three-dimensional holographic digital human combining holographic display and artificial intelligence at the Fifth Jilin Provincial Digital Economy Development Promotion Conference and Third Jilin Province Artificial Intelligence Conference held in Changchun, incorporating the system into a public electronic screen networked broadcast and control project built on independently controlled technology. Hangzhou has launched an initiative to identify a second batch of recognised "technology specialty products," with virtual digital humans listed among the qualifying categories in the human-computer interaction and emotional companionship segment.

April 01 News

Entertainment and Media: BesTV (百视通) deployed a digital human anchor named Shangwenxuan (尚文萱) in a purpose-built virtual studio for the 2026 Major League Baseball season broadcast, marking the digital host's first appearance in a professional sports broadcast environment alongside human hosts Zhao Lu and Guo Can and celebrity guest Lou Yichen. The virtual studio was described as enabling multi-scenario interactive viewing experiences, with Shangwenxuan serving as a supplementary on-air presence designed to bring a distinct visual energy to live game coverage. China Ruyi (中国儒意, HK:00136) disclosed its use of AI to generate high-precision three-dimensional digital characters for film and television production, employing content-understanding algorithms including CLIP to automatically annotate character behavior within simulated real-world environments, supporting rapid 3D digital human asset generation for its AIGC content pipeline.

The AI virtual stand-up comedian Qiaoqiaozi (脱口秀演员桥桥子) attracted significant online attention through a short-video persona rendered in an AI virtual form with a short-hair design delivering original lifestyle comedy material. The account accumulated nearly 200,000 followers and exceeded 30 million total views, gaining 30,000 followers within a single 24-hour period. The character's creator, known as Xiaojiu, a coffee shop owner and AIGC practitioner, publicly stated that AI cannot yet genuinely understand human humor and expressed interest in obtaining an official Beijing virtual human identity credential for the character. Actor Wang Xun (王迅), vice chair of the Sichuan Provincial Federation of Literary and Art Circles and vice chair of the Sichuan Filmmakers Association, publicly endorsed AI digital human licensing at an event in Chengdu on March 30, declaring immediate willingness to authorize his likeness and expressing hope that AI technology would benefit Sichuan's film and television sector. The short drama industry more broadly has registered anxiety about AI digital human performers, with short drama actor Wang Liyu publicly stating he had considered changing careers in response to the proliferation of AI-generated performers, and Xi'an's short drama sector described as having entered a period of acute structural disruption driven by digital human substitution.

At the 2026 China Science Fiction Convention, a virtual human named Huanhuan (幻幻) replaced a traditional human host to lead the opening ceremony audience into the convention program, framing the virtual host as emblematic of the convergence between science fiction and emerging AI-driven technology.

Tourism and Cultural Heritage: The Guizhou tourism digital human Huang Xiaxi (黄小西) made its upgraded debut at the 20th Guizhou Tourism Industry Development Conference in Guiyang. Originally launched as a virtual digital human at the 19th conference the prior year, the upgraded version extended beyond screen-based interaction to physical-venue deployment, adding four functional modules covering hotels, scenic areas, dining, and personalized travel assistance, enabling visitors to receive comprehensive travel guidance through a single AI-driven conversational interface. Singer Gong Linna, present at the conference, expressed direct interest in the character's one-stop travel guidance capability upon learning of its expanded functions.

A Li Bai virtual digital human supporting real-time conversational dialogue was showcased at the China Network Media Forum using AI digital interaction, dynamic restoration, and virtual performance technologies, with coverage reported by both Yunnan and Shandong provincial media outlets. The historical game Ming Jian Wan Li (明见万历), deployed at the Ming Tombs scenic area in Beijing, uses digital characters for on-site narrative explanation, combining cinematic plot design with virtual human presentations to guide visitors through the full construction history of the Thirteen Tombs.

Healthcare and Memorial: Lingxi Bio (灵析生物) developed a chronic disease management platform integrating wearable continuous blood pressure monitoring with a doctor AI avatar (医生AI分身) system, positioning the doctor avatar as a personalized health management presence extending clinical expertise beyond the point of care. Professor Zhang Yuanting, founder of non-invasive continuous blood pressure monitoring and academician of the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering, was appointed Lingxi Bio's chief scientist in January of this year and is directly associated with the development of this combined platform. The Fujian Health News (福建卫生报社) deployed a digital avatar (数字分身) for its health ambassador program, describing the avatar not as a question-answering tool but as an extension of the medical practitioner's professional expertise and an expression of the intent to serve patients more broadly, framing the deployment as part of the organization's implementation of the national "AI+" strategy.

AI digital human technology was applied at the 2026 National Human Organ Donation Memorial and Awareness Event held in Jinan, Shandong, where digital human presentations recreated the likenesses and personal testimonies of deceased donors, including the restored image of Zhang Junqiao, recognized as a "Qilu Model of the Era," and his wife, who were the first married couple in Jinan to jointly donate their bodies. In Hangzhou, Zhejiang Anxian Garden (浙江安贤园) showcased a newly developed AI digital human photo frame product capable of recording and recreating the appearance and voice of deceased individuals as a memorial object, building on the cemetery operator's existing track record of ecological burial innovation since 2000. In Wuhan, Hubei resident Wang Zhe had an AI digital human reconstruction of his deceased mother deliver a wedding address at his ceremony, fulfilling a commitment his mother had been unable to keep before her death.

Government and Public Services: The Yinchuan Municipal Administrative Approval Service Bureau (银川市审批服务局) in Ningxia launched a digital human named Yinxiao Fu (银小服) at the city's citizen service hall on March 30, introducing AI-driven virtual human interaction as the new standard for government service delivery in the city. The Postal Savings Bank of China's Liaoning branch (邮储银行辽宁省分行) deployed a digital human for customer-facing banking services, reporting coverage of 99 percent of high-frequency banking transactions including intelligent product explanation and business process guidance. Nanjing created a medical insurance digital human named Xiao Jinling (小金灵) to serve the city's 8.96 million insured residents, providing accessible interactive access to medical insurance information and services, with the system described as having brought direct convenience to residents navigating insurance queries. At a political theory education event in Nantong, Jiangsu, digital humans named Tongtong (通通) and Xuanxuan (暄暄) participated alongside six human youth lecturers in a structured dialogue on the spirit of the 2026 National Two Sessions. Southeast University's Nanjing Alumni Association launched a digital human named Ning Xiaodong (宁小东) to represent the association at the AI+ Industry Innovation Summit and Alumni Association General Meeting.

Education: The AI Taiyan (AI太炎) digital human was developed to explain Chinese character origins, meanings, and cultural content for overseas Chinese-language learners, enabling students abroad to study Chinese characters without requiring physical access to China-based educational resources. A practitioner in Gansu province working in the intangible cultural heritage of Longdong Daoqing (陇东道情), a six-hundred-year-old traditional performing art, collaborated with local universities to develop a digital human lecture system for this art form, combining the digital presenter with modern musical adaptations to make the tradition accessible to younger audiences. Guangxi Medical University was the site of the second national campus stop for Kejian Bang (课件帮), a platform offering customized digital human teacher functions for educational courseware, following its first stop at a university in Nanchang, Jiangxi. In Inner Mongolia, digital humans were deployed in smart library environments within schools as part of science and technology education outreach. At Zhengzhou No. 11 Middle School in Henan, a teacher incorporated an AI digital human into a civic and legal education lesson structured around 2026 National Two Sessions current affairs, using life-scenario cases to teach constitutional principles through an AI-driven interactive presentation. Students from Hebei Geological University participated in mock job interviews with a digital human at the 2026 National Hundred Cities Thousand Schools Ten Thousand Enterprises Employment Promotion Event, using the interaction to practice for positions in software engineering.

Kejian Bang (课件帮), accessible at kejian365.com and operated by Beijing Tianyuan Dike Network Technology Co., Ltd. (北京天源迪科网络科技有限公司), is a one-stop AI-powered courseware creation platform that positions digital human technology as its central delivery mechanism for educational content. The platform enables users to generate PPT slideshows with a single click, then automatically convert those slideshows into digital human presenter videos, with the system extracting lecture scripts page by page and eliminating the need for manual recording or editing. The digital human presenter's appearance, voice, and background are all customizable, and the platform supports batch video generation at scale, targeting use cases across enterprise internal training, marketing training, Party building education, and academic subject instruction. A design priority noted in product coverage is the shift away from generic, template-bound digital human avatars toward more personalized presenter identities, directly addressing educator complaints that standard digital human tools produce undifferentiated on-screen figures with cumbersome customization workflows. Within the Chinese digital human ecosystem, Kejian Bang represents a focused vertical deployment of synthetic presenter technology, applying it narrowly but systematically to the high-volume instructional content market rather than pursuing the broader commercial avatar or virtual influencer applications dominant among larger platform players. 

Enterprise and Commerce: Shenzhen Zhongtong Electronics (深圳市证通电子股份有限公司) presented AI digital human solutions alongside its LightBeeOS medical product suite at the Shenzhen Medical HarmonyOS Ecosystem Supply-Demand Matching Conference, positioning the digital human as part of its open-source HarmonyOS-based healthcare technology portfolio. Meitu (美图) integrated AI digital human production into its AI operations team architecture, assigning digital human content creation as a discrete function within a broader AI-driven workflow that also encompasses AI photography and AI editing teams. Kaiyun Software (开普云) has developed virtual digital human voice-driving capabilities within its metaverse business alongside automated text content generation and text-to-image functions. Wangda Software (网达软件) has built a digital human face-customization system and government-facing metaverse applications as part of its metaverse product portfolio, also developing a metaverse meeting platform with virtual digital human components. Shanghai Mobile and Migu (咪咕公司) jointly applied AI intelligent modeling and digital human rendering technology to the Suhe Half Marathon in Shanghai, building a full-process digital event service system that generated personalized digital experiences for individual participants. Zhejiang Lao Nian Bao (浙江老年报) created a digital human persona called Rock Grandpa (摇滚爷爷数字人) to narrate stories of social and generational change for elderly readers. Hangzhou Bank (杭州银行) developed a digital human financial advisor named Xiao Xin (小信) for investment advisory services within its wealth management product ecosystem.

OpenHarmony (开源鸿蒙), at openharmony.cn, is an open-source distributed operating system incubated by the Open Atom Open Source Foundation from Huawei's 2020 code contribution, now functioning as the primary domestic infrastructure alternative to foreign OS stacks for Chinese enterprise and institutional device deployments. Its relevance to digital humans derives from several converging properties: its distributed architecture enables one-time development across heterogeneous device types, its native AI capabilities support the multimodal interaction pipelines that interactive digital humans require, and its security framework satisfies the compliance requirements of regulated sectors such as finance and healthcare where digital human terminals are increasingly deployed. The search data confirms that the OpenHarmony-digital human connection is actively present in the Chinese technical and commercial discourse — the Huawei Cloud marketplace hosts content specifically on "数字人开源技术" (digital human open-source technology) framing OpenHarmony-based all-in-one devices and AI interaction hardware as the delivery platform, and at the 2025 Open Atom Developer Conference, Zhongtong Electronics presented on OpenHarmony and AI as a dual-drive architecture for bank hall integrated scenarios. The ecosystem player 深开鸿 (Shenzhen OpenHarmony entity) has additionally published content directly linking the platform to digital human applications, and OpenHarmony's first open-source robot OS, M-Robots OS, extends the same stack toward embodied and robotic digital human forms. Taken together, OpenHarmony is not a peripheral consideration for digital human deployment in China but rather the OS layer around which a structured domestic digital human hardware and software ecosystem is actively consolidating. 

Ethical and Legal Contexts: Police in Fujian province identified a social media account using an AI-generated virtual persona to fraudulently attract followers and solicit money, with the scheme involving a fabricated virtual identity and exaggerated promotional claims. Officers intervened to prevent an elderly person who had traveled a long distance to meet the perceived influencer from falling victim to the fraud, marking the case as part of a broader pattern of anti-fraud warnings issued around AI-generated virtual identities. Separately, the growing realism of AI-generated virtual appearances has created detection failures on content platforms, with users reporting that original human-created content is being incorrectly flagged as AI-generated by automated review systems as virtual human imagery continues to narrow the visual gap with real persons, prompting industry analysis of the limitations of current AI-detection algorithms. The viral success of Qiaoqiaozi also generated a wave of unsolicited private messages directed at the AI virtual character, with the creator identifying this behavior as illustrative of broader gender-related difficulties faced by virtual idol personas when audience boundaries are unclear.

Qiaoqiaozi (巧巧子) is a Chinese virtual persona used in short-form social media content, particularly on platforms such as Douyin and Bilibili, characterized by a human-like animated or AI-assisted presence with a stylized, personable identity typical of online culture; rather than being a single officially defined digital human, it functions as a flexible character label that can be adopted or interpreted by different creators, placing it within the category of lightweight virtual influencers rather than high-fidelity, company-developed digital human systems.