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Education: Several deployments illustrate the embedding of digital humans into Chinese educational infrastructure across multiple levels. In Chongqing, the Tao Xingzhi AI Digital Human (陶行知AI数字人) was launched in Hechuan using high-fidelity reconstruction combined with a proprietary knowledge base of the historical educator's writings, with the project framed as a replicable template for historical-figure intellectual property in pedagogy. At the 2026 World Digital Education Conference held in Chengdu, the Yuanchuang Future AI Education Platform (猿创未来人工智能教育平台) was formally integrated into the national primary and secondary school smart education platform, providing teachers with AI painting, AI audio and video, AI digital human, AI intelligent agent, AI recognition, and model training capabilities through its teacher-facing module. In Fuzhou, the local political consultative system showcased an AI-plus-intangible-heritage art classroom in which digital human study companions deliver layered assignments adapted to differing student ability levels and provide real-time feedback on performance. Guangzhou's 2026 Vocational Education Activity Week opened in the Guangzhou Science and Education City, where Guangzhou Polytechnic University (广州职业技术大学) introduced itself to attendees using a "real person plus digital human" dual-role narration format as the city's first municipal undergraduate-level vocational university.

Cultural Tourism: Provincial tourism authorities deployed digital humans as cultural ambassadors during the spring tourism cycle. The Zhejiang provincial cultural tourism digital human Zhe Zhe (浙浙) debuted at the 24th Xu Xiake Travel Opening Festival in Ningbo's Ninghai county, launching the Poetic Zhejiang Stroll Long Corridor co-creation campaign in tandem with the fifth anniversary of the Hangzhou-Ningbo Twin Cities partnership and a joint Million Travelers initiative between the two cities. In Hangzhou's Shangcheng district, the Xiaoying Street area integrated digital human avatars and 3D-printed souvenirs into its Science-Technology Cultural Tourism check-in offering, with AI-designed silk products as a featured draw on China Tourism Day. Guangxi Tourism Development Group (广西旅游发展集团) saw its Liu Sanjie (刘三姐) digital human go viral as part of an intangible-heritage AI rejuvenation push, with the figure cited alongside AI drama exports to ASEAN markets as evidence of digital civilization's reach. In Wuhan, the Hankou district cultural tourism integration project at Yuanbo Garden featured the digital human Greich (格里希), reconstructing the likeness of the historical "foreign factory director" for cross-temporal cultural storytelling at the area's flagship cultural tourism conference. In Chongqing, the Hanma Nature Reserve (汗马自然保护区) unveiled a 3D digital human modeled on the reindeer as the prototype mascot for its nature-education offering.

Museums and Heritage Display: Museum institutions are integrating digital humans into visitor-facing exhibits as part of broader smart-museum upgrades tied to International Museum Day. The Inner Mongolia Museum (内蒙古博物院) launched a VR Grand Garden experience, while the Ordos City Museum (鄂尔多斯市博物院) introduced an AI digital human docent to deliver natural-history narration in concert with its physical galleries, positioned by the Inner Mongolia cultural and tourism authority as part of cross-civilizational exchange infrastructure. At the 4th Hong Kong International Cultural Creative Expo, the Hainan delegation led by Zhu Huayou used a digital human image to represent the new-era Hainan Free Trade Port to international audiences, with the Haikou College of Economics (海口经济学院) framed as the institutional anchor supporting the showcase.

E-commerce and Livestreaming: Digital human livestream hosts are scaling rapidly across major Chinese e-commerce platforms. JD.com (京东) used its 2026 JD 618 launch event in Beijing on May 18 to disclose that its JoyStreamer (京东慧播星) digital human livestreaming free service has now been used by more than seventy thousand merchants, with first-quarter livestreaming volume rising tenfold year on year, positioning digital human livestreaming alongside smart home scene reconstruction as the twin pillars of the company's regular AI commercialization roadmap. Haier Smart Home (海澜之家) participated in the JoyStreamer programme in Chongqing on May 16 and 17 at the Dewu (得物) App-hosted "Some Things Conference," using JD.com digital human livestreams alongside its summer polo shirt launch. In Hubei, JD.com's previous 11.11 cycle was cited as a benchmark in which digital human livestream hosts achieved a level of naturalness that left consumers unable to tell real from synthetic, with the 2026 cycle framed as the moment inclusive AI accelerates into ordinary household life via thousands of smart hardware endpoints.

Enterprise Marketing and Communications: Vendors are bundling digital humans into general-purpose enterprise software products. iFlytek (科大讯飞) promoted its iFlytek Zhizuo (讯飞智作) marketing platform on the proposition that a single AI digital human can be deployed across an enterprise's full set of promotional scenarios, positioning the avatar as an all-scenario marketing surface for corporate users. Shiyi (视颐) deployed its 75-inch smart conferencing tablet at a Shanghai e-commerce company's CEO office under an AI new-era digital human intelligent agent solution that integrates the avatar into executive meeting workflows as the basis for enterprise information upgrade.

Transportation and Customer Service: Public-facing transport hubs are adopting digital humans as front-line service agents. Nanning Airport (南宁机场) launched an online intelligent customer service avatar named Gui Feifei (桂飞飞), built on an AI digital human all-in-one machine that delivers multilingual real-time translation and one-station passenger service in Guangxi. Baiyun Airport (白云机场) in Guangzhou used its inaugural China Airport Charm Index release on a passenger-experience day to publicly position its digital human system as the leading edge of its smart civil aviation transformation. Guangxi Jiaotou Group (广西交投集团) introduced a digital human employee called Yunshu (云枢), integrating the avatar with mobile robots and a holographic warehouse to deliver multi-screen interactive smart guided tours of group operations.

Government Outreach and Service Consumption Policy: Provincial authorities are folding digital humans into both public information campaigns and consumption stimulus packages. The Guangxi Three-Three Bagui Carnival (广西三月三·八桂嘉年华) anchored an online AI digital human legal popularization toolkit alongside its folk mountain-song short-video challenge under the Pufa Mountain Song Dou Lai Chang grassroots law-popularization brand, with the combined campaign reaching more than thirty million users. Shanxi (山西) issued a thirty-six-measure service-consumption stimulus package whose provisions explicitly support digital human livestreaming as a recognized commercial format in core commercial circles in Taiyuan and other municipal centers, paired with intelligent shopping guides, contactless payment, and smart parking coverage.

Foundational AI Models and Technical Research: Chinese-led research groups are publishing core building blocks for the next generation of digital humans. BosonAI, founded by Li Mu (李沐), released Higgs Avatar v1, a real-time foundation model aimed at voice intelligent agents and real-time digital humans, presented officially as a real-time base model for live avatar interaction in connection with Li Mu's renewed engagement with Bilibili audiences. Beijing Normal University (北京师范大学) and the Tencent Hunyuan team (腾讯混元) jointly proposed the IPA framework, which allows generative models to learn correct hand drawing without paired good-and-bad training samples and directly targets the visible hand-artifact problem in AI-generated dance video and digital human video output.

Industry Recognition and Industrial Exhibitions: Digital human technology has become a recurring category in industry rankings and trade fairs. Wisdom Eye (智慧眼), based in Hunan, was selected for the 2026 Forbes China AI Technology Enterprise TOP 50, with the list explicitly enumerating digital human alongside AI chips, AI education, intelligent transportation, AI manufacturing, and AI for Science as the company's qualifying capabilities in the long-tail tier. At the 10th China-Russia Expo and the 35th Harbin International Economic and Trade Fair in Harbin, the Heilongjiang industrial showcase organized by the provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology under the theme of Digital Empowerment for Longjiang exhibited digital humans alongside dexterous hands and inspection robots as new-product centerpieces of the smart-manufacturing exhibition floor.

Cultural Design and Creative Industry Competitions: Digital humans have themselves become subjects of design and creative-industry programming. The first Digital RMB Mascot and Cultural Creative Design Competition launched on May 19 in Chengdu, Sichuan, under the guidance of the Digital RMB Operation Management Center and jointly hosted by the digital RMB business operating institutions, treating the digital persona of the currency as a design brief. The first stop of the International Digital Cultural Creative Innovation Application Competition was held at Communication University of China (中国传媒大学), co-launched by the Chengdu City Digital Cultural Creative Industry Association together with Bilibili (哔哩哔哩), where AI department instructor Liu Hong delivered a session on the controllable reshaping of AI character appearance and motion as a core method for digital human creation.

Cross-Cultural Exchange and Soft Power: Universities are using digital humans to mediate cultural experiences for international visitors. Hunan Information Institute (湖南信息学院) hosted a Thai visiting delegation in which Thai students wore Hanfu and engaged with digital human content designed to convey Changsha's urban vitality and Hunan's local folk customs as part of a broader Chinese culture immersion programme. In Hangzhou, Zhejiang University of Science and Technology (浙江科技大学) hosted international students in a Perceive China social practice activity in which participants used a Renda Metaverse VR installation at the Xiaoying Street centre to interact with virtual digital humans, paired with a learning visit to the CCP Hangzhou Group Memorial Hall covering the founding of Zhejiang's first local party organization in 1922.

This "Perceive China" social practice activity demonstrates how China utilizes the "Red Metaverse" (红色元宇宙) to merge cutting-edge technology with state ideology. By equipping international students from the Zhejiang University of Science and Technology with a Renda-developed VR installation at Hangzhou's historic Xiaoying Street, the program transformed a traditional lesson on the 1922 founding of Zhejiang's first local CCP organization into an immersive, high-tech experience. Through real-time interactions with AI-driven virtual digital humans alongside a physical museum visit, the event serves as a textbook example of how academic research, sovereign VR technology, and patriotic education are deployed to showcase China's modern digital economy and historical narrative to a global audience.

The "Red Metaverse" (红色元宇宙) is a distinctly Chinese variant of the metaverse concept that fuses immersive XR technologies (VR/AR/MR), digital twins, and AI-driven digital humans with "red culture" — the heritage, sites, figures, and narratives of the Chinese Communist Party and the revolutionary era — primarily in the service of Party-building (党建), ideological education, and "red tourism" (红色旅游). Within these environments, digital humans play three interlocking roles: as user avatars that Party members or visitors customize to "enter" reconstructed historical scenes (the Dalian Neusoft "Red Metaverse" launched in November 2025 lets users build virtual characters to immersively experience the "great Party-founding spirit"); as AI-driven intelligent narrators and tour guides who explain exhibits and converse with visitors inside venues such as the CPC First Congress Memorial Hall's new-media/metaverse lab, Hunan Xiangtan's Shaoshan digital twin, the Hongqi Canal Spirit cloud exhibition hall, and Harbin's red-resource activation projects; and as virtualized resurrections of historical revolutionary figures, used to "fill the gap" left by deceased protagonists of red history so that visitors can interact with them directly. Backed by municipal innovation programs (e.g., Shanghai's 2025 metaverse showcase, which highlighted projects like "Digital First Congress · Journey of Original Aspiration") and provincial cultural-tourism strategies (Jiangxi's planned "Red Metaverse Alliance" with cross-scene identity authentication, AI guides, and interactive holographic archives of revolutionary relics), the Red Metaverse positions the digital human less as an entertainment IP or commercial livestreaming avatar — its dominant use elsewhere in China — and more as a state-aligned pedagogical interface for delivering political memory in a generationally appealing, gamified, avatar-mediated form. 

May 19 News

Cultural: Multiple Chinese institutions are deploying digital humans to enliven cultural and heritage venues. Xi'an Museum (西安博物院) anchors a national first cultural heritage digitalization initiative that uses XR to recreate virtual tower climbing with a one-to-one reproduction of the tower structure and underground palace, accompanied by an AI digital human guide for full commentary, as part of more than two hundred Museum Month activities held across the city. Nanjing has rolled out smart curator and smart guide projects across multiple museums, with digital humans modelled on the literary characters Mr. Cao (曹先生) and Lin Daiyu (林妹妹) animating exhibition walls to narrate stories from Dream of the Red Chamber and play poetry games with visitors, in a joint project produced by Nanjing Cultural Tourism Group (南京文旅集团), Jiangsu Cultural Creative Company (江苏文创公司) and Nanjing Museum Administration (南京市博物总馆) at the Chaotiangong site of Nanjing Municipal Museum. Chengdu Wuhou Shrine Museum (成都武侯祠博物馆) features a digital human called Little Zhuge (小诸葛) as a featured attraction during International Museum Day (国际博物馆日) programming alongside traditional music and Han clothing events. A Hubei museum has launched an original digital human called Lulu (鲁鲁) together with an AI youth innovation contest and a themed promotional film for International Museum Day, and a parallel Hubei production delivers the core knowledge points of a Chu-region musical performance through an AI digital human accessed via QR code, with an AI side-story series planned after the run. Guangxi Tourism Development Group (广西旅游发展集团) operates the Liu Sanjie digital human (刘三姐数字人) on its One-Tap Travel Guangxi (一键游广西) platform as part of an AI-plus-cultural-tourism push. Fengtai District in Beijing has presented its Cultural Tourism Bureau director as a digital human promoter at the Digital and Smart Cultural Tourism Ecology Conference, which also released 124 smart tourism opportunity scenarios extending into the Yuanboyuan park. In Heilongjiang, Harbin's polar park has integrated digital humans into real-time interactive engagement with cultural exhibits.

International Museum Day on May 18 has become a showcase for China's digital human deployments in cultural institutions, anchored by conversational AI guides like the Capital Museum's Jinghui (京慧), which replaces fixed audio scripts with open-ended dialogue across touchscreens and phones. The most ambitious deployment is Hubei's Time Door (时光门), an all-in-one unit built on China Unicom's AI digital human large model that renders historical figures like Qin Shi Huang, Chang'e, and Yu Ji as conversational avatars while compositing visitors into period scenes via real-time computer vision. Smaller deployments solve specific institutional problems: the Beijing Auto Museum's AI presenter handles technical questions visitors are too embarrassed to ask staff, Wuhan's Qingchuan Pavilion uses an AI Digital Curator to anchor a recurring artifact series called Treasures of the Museum: The Curator Speaks (镇馆之宝·馆长说), and the Ordos Museum stations digital humans inside virtual halls for remote visitors. Jiangsu's provincial host Susu (苏苏) unifies 62 exhibitions, 98 educational programs, 15 cultural-creative showcases, and 21 night tours across the Suxinyou (苏心游) platform under a single digital identity. Adjacent experiments include Inner Mongolia's Tech + Tradition VR pavilion, track-mirror devices that animate museum specimens, the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum's user-chosen avatars, and the Lady's Procession (丽人行) immersive exhibition — together signaling that domestic large-model infrastructure, with telecoms like China Unicom as the visible suppliers, is being procured to solve concrete institutional problems rather than serve as novelty. 

The 丰台数智文旅生态大会 (Fengtai Digital-Intelligent Cultural Tourism Ecology Conference) was officially held in mid-May 2026 (specifically on May 18) in Beijing’s Fengtai District. Centered on the theme of “Technology + Cultural Tourism,” the event focused on deepening the application of digital intelligence technologies in the cultural and tourism industry. Key highlights included multiple strategic cooperation signings between the Fengtai District Culture and Tourism Bureau and leading enterprises such as Xiamen Airlines Hotels and Ewen Group to develop immersive experiences, smart guides, and digital IP content. The conference also launched the “Fengtai Digital-Intelligent Cultural Tourism Alliance” led by Fanhua Group, established the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei “Treasure Small Cities” Alliance to address homogenization issues, and introduced new projects such as 13 new study tours, an industrial tourism route titled “Decoding Industry – From Craftsmanship to Innovation,” the “Treasure Fengtai” exploration campaign, and the interactive city-wide game “Find the Horse in Fengtai.” The district’s Culture and Tourism Bureau director even appeared as a digital human promoter during the event. (Wu Jing is the Director of the Fengtai District Culture and Tourism Bureau in Beijing, known for her innovative approach in promoting the district’s cultural tourism, including appearing as a digital human promoter at the 2026 Fengtai Digital-Intelligent Cultural Tourism Ecology Conference.)

Fanhua Group (泛华集团), also known as Fanhua Construction Group, is a major Chinese enterprise headquartered in Beijing, specializing in urban planning, construction, investment, and integrated urban operations. The group is actively involved in large-scale city development projects, infrastructure, and cultural tourism initiatives. In the context of the 丰台数智文旅生态大会 held on May 18, 2026, Fanhua Group played a leading role by initiating and heading the newly established “Fengtai Digital-Intelligent Cultural Tourism Alliance,” demonstrating its strong presence in driving digital-smart cultural tourism ecosystem development in collaboration with local government bodies.

Memorial: A distinct strand of Chinese digital human work focuses on memorializing the deceased and reconstructing historical figures. In Jiangxi, the digital human of Yudu Red Army martyr Wang Jinchang was shown to his widow Duan Guixiu to enable a cross-temporal reunion ninety-four years after his death, with local officials presenting the rendered figure to her in person. The Lady Xinzhui (辛追夫人) 3D digital human at Changsha's Mawangdui collection extends visits beyond the Western Han exhibition halls through an experiential dinner format that places the Han-dynasty noblewoman in conversation with audiences. In Chongqing, the early-twentieth-century educator Tao Xingzhi (陶行知) has been rendered as a high-fidelity AI digital human and unveiled at Hechuan as part of an initiative tying memorialization to educational outreach.

Education: Chinese educational institutions are integrating digital humans into pedagogy, curriculum and student work across multiple provinces. Tianjin No. 100 Middle School (天津市第一百中学) teacher Han Jian uses an AI digital human to reconstruct historical mathematics scenes and pair narrative learning with 3D dynamic animation that visualises abstract concepts such as arbitrary cross-sections. Jiujiang Vocational University (九江职业大学) has held a specialised training conference on integrating digital human and related smart technologies into course design, resource development, teaching implementation and learning analytics. The 2026 Guangxi Vocational Education Activity Week in Nanning showcased virtual simulation training and AI digital human teaching applications from multiple vocational colleges. Nanjing University of the Arts (南京艺术学院) held its 520 graduation showcase featuring digital human cross-temporal dialogue and AI and 3D technology applied to traditional elements in fashion design coursework. Wuchang Shouyi College (武昌首义学院) in Hubei staged a graduation art and design exhibition whose student projects included an online digital human consultation feature added to a telemedicine prototype. Qingdao Vocational Technical College (青岛职业技术学院) has deepened cooperation with Huawei Cloud (华为云) and Yunxiaohua Digital Technology (云小华数字技术有限公司) to develop digital human teaching resources. Zhengzhou Airport Economic Comprehensive Experimental Zone (郑州航空港经济综合实验区) demonstrated its education digital human Gang Xiaozhi (港小智) at the 2026 World Digital Education Conference in Hangzhou, leading Chinese and international participants through immersive smart classroom experiences. Liaoning Communication College (辽宁传媒学院) has obtained approval for five new undergraduate and two new associate-degree programmes targeting intelligent product human-machine interaction, UI design, virtual digital human interaction, AR and VR immersive experience and short-content production. The 2026 China Education Technology Academic Conference in Hangzhou included the third edition of the Education Digital Human Showcase awards, recognising entries received from across the country. Communication University of China (中国传媒大学) hosted the first Chengdu International Digital Cultural Creativity Innovation Application Competition Flight Academy event, where lecturer Liu Fang presented work on controllable reshaping of AI character appearance and motion for AIGC comic-drama digital human generation. Jiangxi University of Applied Science and Technology (江西应用科技学院) has supplied the youth entrepreneurship team behind Zhimei Maotong (智媒贸通), which reconstructs cross-border marketing for small and medium-sized merchants through hyper-realistic digital human technology.

Transportation: Public transport operators in China are using digital humans to broaden accessibility and multilingual service. Hangzhou Metro (杭州地铁) launched an AI digital human sign-language broadcasting service on selected trains of Lines 1 and 19 on National Day for Helping the Disabled, developed jointly with the municipal Deaf Association to deliver route and station announcements for hearing-impaired riders. Nanning Wuxu International Airport has introduced a smart customer service character called Gui Feifei (桂飞飞), operating through an AI digital human all-in-one terminal that provides multilingual real-time translation and one-stop service for travellers connecting between China and ASEAN destinations.

Healthcare: Healthcare-related digital human deployments in China span insurance administration and student-built telemedicine prototypes. China Telecom (中国电信) Chongqing branch (重庆电信) has signed a strategic cooperation framework with the Chongqing municipal healthcare insurance bureau and partnered with district-level healthcare insurance bureaus, contributing to Chongqing's smart healthcare insurance build-out and co-developing a digital human dedicated to medical insurance fund supervision. Wuchang Shouyi College student work on telemedicine adds an online digital human consultation feature on top of AI symptom triage, demonstrating an early-stage application targeting at-home patients.

Marketing: Chinese marketing, livestreaming and avatar businesses are converging around real-time digital humans. Baidu (百度) has rebranded its Huiboxing (慧播星) digital human agent as Baidu Yijing (百度一镜), positioning it as the company's first omni-scene multi-agent digital human platform that extends from live commerce streaming to advertising, marketing and broader scenarios, with reported Double 11 livestream gross merchandise volume up ninety-one percent year on year. Baidu Smart Cloud is bundling Baidu Yijing with Baidu VOD and Hogee to support Chinese brands and short-drama and animated-drama producers going overseas. Baidu executives have stated that AI now accounts for over fifty-two percent of company revenue and that further model iteration will concentrate on AI search, digital humans and code generation, with cloud computing supply under strain. BosonAI (boson.ai), founded by the AI researcher Mu Li (李沐), released Higgs Avatar v1 as a real-time foundation model for voice agents and demonstrated it through a return appearance on Bilibili (哔哩哔哩), targeting customer-service dialogue, virtual assistant work, training and interactive experiences. Soul App has open-sourced SoulXFlashTalk, a 14-billion-parameter real-time digital human generation model that the company describes as the first in its category to achieve 0.87-second sub-second latency at 32 frames per second with stable extended-video generation. WeChat (微信) has begun a gray-scale rollout of an AI avatar generation function that produces personalised profile images directly from user style descriptions, with current outputs leaning toward anime, cartoon and virtual-image styles and requiring no further cropping after generation. During the June 18 shopping festival, digital human anchors became an increasingly common cost-saving substitute for live human anchors in major-appliance livestreams with lower viewer density. Guizhou Juyinglian Network Technology (贵州聚英联网络科技有限公司) markets Douyin payment QR-code services bundled with digital human cloning and AI editing tools positioned at lowering content production costs for local merchants.

Entertainment: China's short-drama, gaming and AI content sectors are using digital humans as core production technology. Kunlun Tech (昆仑万维) is commercialising its Matrix line of physical AI and world models under the Skywork World Model (天工世界模型) brand, targeting short-drama producers who can generate 3D scenes, dynamic shots and virtual humans without physical filming and game studios that can produce assets in days rather than months at roughly half the previous cost. Youxi AI (有戏AI), backed by parent company Fengping Intelligence (风平智能), positions itself as an AI short-drama tool whose competitiveness rests on full-process optimisation and on its parent's experience in digital humans and multimodal generation. Qinnian Zhiying (亲年智影) general manager Liu Bo has described premium AI short-drama production as requiring per-shot generation cycles measured in fifteen-second draws and combining digital humans with environments such as vehicles, replacing what previously cost roughly 150,000 yuan in conventional promotional film production. Zhengzhou's Erqi District is running an AI plus micro-drama talent cultivation programme aimed at AIGC industry transformation, covering digital human technology, short-drama compliance production and promotional efficiency. In Henan, a Shangqiu farmhouse styled after the Big Bad Wolf castle from Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf became a viral feature whose accompanying video was assembled using Baidu's Huiboxing digital human tool, illustrating the spread of digital human production into informal regional content.

Enterprise: Industrial and enterprise applications of digital humans are expanding across Chinese provinces. A home-textile manufacturer in Nantong, Jiangsu employs 932 digital employees in its workforce, including 30 working specifically on pattern design, as described by company representative Hu Junlong in coverage of the local industry's AI reconstruction. The Beijing Digital Human Base (北京数字人基地) has been formally upgraded to version 2.0 and rebranded as the Beijing Municipal Digital Human Base OPC Innovation Community O-Hub, with the relaunch event at the 2026 GuangZhi Space AI OPC ecology salon in Chaoyang positioning AI digital employee capability building for OPC enterprises as the community's central deliverable. The tenth China-Russia Expo and thirty-fifth Harbin International Economic and Trade Fair in Heilongjiang showcased a cluster of new products including digital humans, dexterous hands and inspection robots in the digital economy themed exhibition area. International correspondents on a Hefei reporting tour organised through China's State Council Information Office (国务院新闻办公室) were given hands-on demonstrations of digital human products and AI office terminals as part of a survey of Anhui's modern industrial system. Chengdu-made digital humans appeared at the 2026 Tsinghua PBC School of Finance Wudaokou Global Finance Forum providing multimodal interaction services and demonstrating AI-plus-cultural-tourism use cases.

Finance: Financial services firms in China are pairing digital humans with always-on customer care and analytics. Xiaoying Card Loan (小赢卡贷) has elevated a virtual digital human called Win-Daidai to the centre of its 2026 service upgrade, anchoring a seven-by-twenty-four online companionship and intelligent service system for credit customers. Jiufang Smart Investment (九方智投) markets the Jiufang Digital Human (九方数字人) as part of a wider toolkit combining intelligent image recognition, AIGC creation, sentiment classification, public-opinion analysis and finance-focused features for retail investors.

Government: Chinese government communications and propaganda projects are increasingly mediated through digital humans. In Guangxi, a regional intelligent communication matrix combines a mascot character called Gui Xiao Ai (桂小Ai) and the Liu Sanjie digital human using 3D plus AI and VR and AR technologies to project an "AI empowerment plus Guangxi characteristics plus public benefit" message into network civilization campaigns convened in Nanning, with the latter event identified as the 2026 China Network Civilization Conference. Guangzhou's Good Family Style theme propaganda activity, organised at the city's new Children's Activity Centre, supplemented sixteen industry-based speaker groups with situational short plays and an AI digital human delivering segments alongside human presenters drawn from across Guangdong. The Hohhot Youth Science and Technology Carnival's digital human Youth Business Welcoming Officer (青商迎宾官), projected as the digital twin of a chamber-of-commerce president, illustrates the same template applied to talent-attraction events under United Front and industry-and-commerce federation direction in Inner Mongolia.

Regulation: Chinese central regulators have framed virtual being deployment through industry typical-case selection and joint rule-making. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (工业和信息化部), Ministry of Education, Ministry of Culture and Tourism and National Radio and Television Administration jointly issued the 2025 Metaverse Typical Cases list. NetDragon (网龙) of Fujian had its High-Fidelity True Digital Human Rapid Construction and Multimodal Interaction project selected in the technical tool category, while Migu Xinkong (咪咕新空) submitted a Smart Digital Twin Digital Human (数智分身数字人) project that was also among the chosen cases, and Migu Culture Technology (咪咕文化科技) was recognised for work on digital humans and original IP digital humans. (Migu Xinkong was previously known as Migu Animation, but rebranded in 2023 to better reflect its shift toward "Metaverse" technologies, 5G, and AI.)

Ethical Contexts: Discussion of virtual-being expansion in China has also surfaced compliance and boundary debates. A pointed Shandong-originating discussion thread has asked whether departing employees can be refined into digital humans to continue working after their separation, framing the practice as a flashpoint for AI compliance and employee rights. So-called virtual romantic companion (虚拟恋陪) services, in which game hosts and NPCs offer immersive one-to-one in-character storyline accompaniment to young consumers, have meanwhile drawn attention as an emotional-consumption niche carrying its own boundary and consent risks for participants.

May 18 News

Live Commerce and Streaming: Baidu (百度) has consolidated its digital-human ambitions under a rebranded platform, Baidu Yijing (百度一镜), upgraded from its earlier livestream-shopping product Baidu Huibo Xing (百度慧播星), with chief executive Robin Li (李彦宏) characterising digital humans as "visible" intelligent agents and unveiling a new "DAA" measurement framework intended to govern self-evolving agents in the AI era. The platform's trajectory has been positioned as a shift from purely livestream commerce toward "imagination production," with public framing that contrasts its synthetic hosts against well-known live-shopping personalities such as Luo Yonghao (罗永浩) and references to figures such as Pamela as benchmarks for what the company argues are avatars that can outperform human presenters. Kuaishou (快手), through executive Liu Xiao (刘逍), has detailed parallel progress with Kuaishou Nuwa (女娲), a digital host that uses multimodal scripts to drive interactions between virtual presenters and merchandise, executes wide-amplitude movements designed to look natural, and is pitched as a fix for the long-standing "fake" appearance problem of earlier digital humans, while Kuaishou has also launched a companion product known as Pi Digital Employee (π数字员工), which integrates merchant knowledge bases to support local-services operators on the platform. Supporting the underlying streaming infrastructure, Hangzhou Qukan Technology (杭州趣看科技) and People's Daily Online (人民网) have jointly secured a video-processing patent that prioritises encoding quality in the digital-human region of livestream feeds so the central avatar remains stable when networks fluctuate, with the filing aimed at collaborative livestream workflows. Adjacent commentary on Binance Square from a Chinese cross-border e-commerce operator active since 2013 described how mainland sellers in clothing categories have replaced traditional photographer-and-model production with digital-human modelling, indicating broader adoption of avatar-based product presentation across China's outbound retail sector.

Short Drama and Entertainment Production: The boom in Chinese vertical-screen "duanju" short dramas has begun reshaping the labour market for older performers, with the case of Wu Weibin (吴维斌), a thirty-nine-year-old actor previously typecast as the "overbearing tycoon father" at Hengdian World Studios (横店影视城), illustrating the shift; at his peak Wu was filming on roughly twenty-nine days a month as Hengdian crews bid up rates to secure middle-aged male leads, but he has since been displaced from the most lucrative shoots by AI-generated synthetic actors that producers have adopted to cut costs and accelerate output. On the user-generated side, Jimeng AI (即梦AI), the avatar and video tool operated by ByteDance (字节跳动), is running an "AI Alter Ego Drama Competition" in which mainland Chinese creators use the platform's on-camera mode to insert their own AI doubles into short comedic and dramatic scenarios, with submissions including pieces such as "Parents' Perfect Child" circulating widely and positioning Jimeng AI's avatar generation as a consumer tool for short-form scripted entertainment rather than only for marketing.

Cultural Tourism and Public Events: Provincial and municipal cultural-tourism programmes have continued to embed virtual digital humans as guides, performers, and educational figures. In Shaanxi (陕西), Yongshou County (永寿县) has launched the province's first county-level rural-revitalisation virtual digital human, the Sophora Flower Fairy (槐花仙子), which appears in the AI cultural-tourism animated drama "Silk Road Messenger Crosses the Locust Country" (《丝路信使穿越槐乡》) as a digital guide who accompanies the protagonist through locust groves and evolves from a static brand image into a personified character. In Guangzhou (广州), a municipal programme on "red family traditions" presented oral histories of exemplary local families through short dramas combined with AI digital humans, which conducted "across time and space" dialogues with present-day participants to dramatise the city's family virtues across different eras. The Haidian sub-venue of the 2026 China Tourism Day (中国旅游日) on 19 May, hosted at Zhongguancun Yi Hao (中关村壹号) in Beijing, assembled multiple virtual-being and embodied-AI exhibits alongside performances by the Xiaomi Choir (小米合唱团), which sang "Haidian Has No Sea"; participating exhibitors included Galbot (银河通用), showing humanoid robots, and the Tsinghua University Interactive Media Research Institute (清华大学交互媒体研究所), which demonstrated VR large-space and naked-eye 3D digital-human experiences for cultural-tourism use, while a separately featured product based on holographic-replica digital-human technology was equipped to render Chinese ethnic costumes for visitors as an interactive cultural display.

China Tourism Day, observed on May 19 each year since the State Council's 2011 designation and rooted in the Ninghai-led 2000 proposal commemorating Xu Xiake's seventeenth-century journey, has evolved into a national showcase for digital human applications in cultural tourism. The day's symbolic figure has been directly reanimated as a conversational digital human in the 2025 Ningbo main venue's "Dialogue with Xu Xiake" installation, while provinces and cities have used the surrounding theme month to deploy digital recommendation officers and ambassador characters such as Yunnan's Caiyun, China Tourism News and China Telecom's Chang You Xiao Xin, Anhui's virtual Welcoming Pine, Guizhou's Unreal Engine and iFlytek Spark-powered Huang Xiao Xi, and Henan's holographic AI-driven Laozi at the Sanmenxia Yellow River Cultural Tourism Festival. Parallel programming has linked AIGC-generated municipal television hosts and digital live-streaming presenters on platforms such as Meituan to measurable tourism flows, and the 2026 Haidian sub-venue at Zhongguancun No. 1, featuring digital humans, AI cultural creation terminals, humanoid robotics, and naked-eye three-dimensional displays from Galbot and Tsinghua University's Interactive Media Research Institute, signalled a further structural integration of virtual beings into the operational fabric of Chinese cultural tourism. 

Smart City and Public Services: At the eighth Digital China Construction Summit (数字中国建设峰会), speaker Huang Jin (黄瑾) used the Smart Cities International Cooperation sub-forum to outline how multimodal large-model digital humans are being deployed in Chinese urban governance, citing the Guangzhou Baiyun (广州白云) district as a reference site where multimodal-understanding large models support municipal management functions and where a dedicated city-management digital human has been built to deliver public services more effectively to residents. Yixing in Jiangsu (江苏宜兴) was presented as a complementary case applying similar multimodal-understanding capabilities in combination with other systems for its own city-management workflows, indicating that municipal-grade digital humans are spreading across multiple provincial-level administrations as front-end interfaces for smart-city services.

Enterprise and Personal Digital Twins: In the enterprise software market, Coocaa AIOS (酷开AIOS) released its MVP version on 16 May with a focus on two core capabilities, employee digital alter egos and a closed-loop task system, designed to support lightweight SaaS deployment for small and medium enterprises as well as on-premises deployment for larger organisations, and explicitly framed by its developer as a move from carbon-based to silicon-based management within Chinese firms. On the consumer side, the inaugural Huaguoshan AI Salon (花果山下·悟AI沙龙) in Lianyungang (连云港) showcased grassroots applications of personal digital alter egos, including a participant who described using AI to generate a digital alter ego intended to accompany a child's daily growth, alongside other amateur builders who demonstrated AI-assisted application development and discussed safety boundaries for such systems.

Metaverse Platforms and Patents: The metaverse strand of China's virtual-being industry has continued to advance through industrial patents and venue-based deployments. Yuanguang Smart (远光智能), referenced in market discussions around the BK0776 virtual digital human sector index tracked on the Xueqiu (雪球) investment platform, has built a metaverse exhibition hall that combines a virtual park with digital-human guides for smart-park and 3D-showroom use cases. Beijing Vine Technology (北京青藤科技) has obtained a granted invention patent for a deep-learning-based method and system for generating metaverse digital humans, as well as an associated AIGC cross-media metaverse scene-generation patent enabling style transfer across media, both confirmed through filings recorded by China's National Intellectual Property Administration, signalling a steady accumulation of domestic IP in avatar generation and metaverse rendering.

The BK0776 Virtual Digital Human Sector Index on Xueqiu is a thematic index that tracks Chinese A‑share companies involved in the virtual digital human industry, including AI‑generated avatars, virtual idols, digital employees, and the technologies that support them—such as 3D modeling, motion capture, speech synthesis, and real‑time rendering. It serves as a market barometer for China’s fast‑growing digital human ecosystem, reflecting investor sentiment toward companies building or applying AI‑driven virtual characters across entertainment, e‑commerce, marketing, and customer service.

Xueqiu's Virtual Digital Humans concept index (BK0776) closed at ¥1,522.51 on May 15, 2026, essentially flat on the day and trading about 15% below its 52-week high of ¥1,795.99, with a total market cap of ¥4.54 trillion across 77 advancers and 91 decliners. News flow around the theme remains heavy: Guangzhou's IP Court awarded ¥4.95 million in damages in an April trade-secrets case involving virtual digital human technology, setting a notable precedent; CYTS (600138) has deployed iFlytek-powered digital humans at its Gubei Water Town scenic area for visitor inquiries and voice interaction; Yuanguang Software is combining digital twins with virtual human "guides" in smart parks and 3D showrooms; Tianyu Digital Tech (002354) supplies Tencent with digital human and marketing tech; New Media (300770) is co-building an XR Innovation Lab with iFlytek; and Tianxia Xiu (600556) is leveraging influencer infrastructure for TikTok's overseas livestream push. Retail investors on the platform are tying the theme to a broader "AI applications + AIGC" dual-engine narrative for 2025–2026, and constituent media and marketing names like Zhongshi Media, Yue Media, and Yinli Media rallied 9–10% on the day, though related funds show wide dispersion — Penghua's CSI Media Index fund is up ~21% while Shangyin's Tech Pioneer funds are down ~23% — reflecting that while commercial deployments in tourism, IPTV/XR, and enterprise applications are maturing, returns from exposure to the theme have been highly uneven. 

Regulatory and Ethical Contexts: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家互联网信息办公室) has opened public consultation on a draft Digital Virtual Human Information Service Management Measures (《数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法》), targeting unauthorised AI "face-cloning" and impersonation in virtual-human services and framed as the establishment of red lines for what regulators describe as "facial security." Coverage of the consultation has tracked a chain of responses extending from individual rights-defence cases and industry self-regulation efforts to the drafting of formal normative documents, indicating that the measures are expected to shape compliance obligations for Chinese digital-human service providers across livestreaming, cultural tourism, enterprise deployment, and consumer alter-ego applications.

May 17 News

Marketing and Livestreaming Commerce: Baidu (百度) introduced Baidu Yijing (百度一镜) at its annual conference as a digital-human Agent product positioned within founder Robin Li's (李彦宏) Digital Agent Architecture framework, alongside the general-purpose DuMate Agent and the coding Agent Miaoda. Baidu Yijing originated as a digital-human livestreaming tool but has expanded into digital-human video, real-time interaction, cross-border e-commerce assistance for Chinese merchants going overseas, marketing and advertising, and AI short dramas, with widely circulated Xiaohongshu demonstrations featuring an AI rendering branded "AI PAM" of fitness influencer Pamela Reif and explicit comparisons to livestream celebrity Luo Yonghao (罗永浩) under the framing of making digital humans "sell better than real people." NetEase (网易) is pursuing a parallel route in which its video business deepens domestic talking-head scenarios across general knowledge, finance, and news, prioritizes service to Chinese cross-border e-commerce merchants overseas, and plans to expand into brand marketing and short-drama scenarios in the second half of the year, with real-time interactive digital humans targeted for completion before the third quarter. Kuaishou (快手), through executive Liu Xiao (刘逍), is advancing the Nüwa Digital Human (女娲数字人) with multimodal scripts that drive host–product interaction and large-amplitude anthropomorphic motion intended to overcome the long-standing perception that digital streamers feel "fake," while its π Digital Employee (π 数字员工) now integrates merchant knowledge bases to thicken the supply side of its life-services business framed around "people, time, and space." SenseTime (商汤) has progressed since 2021 through static image perception, dynamic video analysis, data fusion, SKU large-model research, retail full-scenario perception, and a Digital Human Store Manager (数字人店长) capability, with deployment showcased through the Shaomai Gou (烧卖购) robot store that opened in Shanghai to bring offline retail under integrated robotic and digital-human operations.

Launched by Baidu at the Create 2026 conference, the DuMate Agent is a general-purpose AI assistant designed to transition from conversation to autonomous task execution. It functions as a central "agentic" hub that features screen perception, cross-platform synchronization, and the ability to operate software and process files through simple commands. By integrating specialized tools like Miaoda and Famou 2.0, DuMate spearheads Baidu's shift toward the "Agent Era," prioritizing productivity through Daily Active Agents (DAA) that can autonomously manage complex, multi-step workflows across both PC and mobile environments.

Miaoda is Baidu’s specialized no-code coding agent designed to transform natural language instructions into fully functional software applications without requiring any manual programming. By leveraging a multi-agent collaboration framework—where virtual "product managers," "coders," and "testers" work in tandem—the platform handles the entire development lifecycle, from frontend design to backend integration. Deeply embedded within the Baidu ecosystem, Miaoda aims to democratize software creation, allowing non-technical users to build custom tools and solve "long-tail" digital needs through simple, conversational commands.

Broadcasting and Cultural Tourism: Inner Mongolia Broadcasting and Television Station (内蒙古广播电视台) has launched the AI Benteng (AI 奔腾) intelligent media platform, deploying a digital human characterized internally as an "AI new colleague" whose presence reshapes editorial workflows through more intelligent material retrieval, ready-to-hand smart tools, and digital-human delivery on the news client side. The Suzhou Municipal People's Government (苏州市人民政府) has opened an AI video creation competition at the Huqiu Mountain (虎丘山) scenic area carrying a five-thousand-yuan gold prize, encouraging entrants to combine AI image generation, digital-human driving, special-effects enhancement, and audio synthesis to render the site's historical legends, core landmarks, and seasonal culture, including animating ancient pagodas to "open their mouths and speak."

Education: Shandong Tourism Vocational College (山东旅游职业学院) has trained a domain large model called Baize (白泽) on tourism-discipline data and built it on a hybrid local-core-plus-cloud-auxiliary architecture, organizing it into an eight-function matrix that includes intelligent teaching and Digital Human Micro-Lectures (数字人微课) aimed at the intelligent transformation of vocational education. At Hangzhou Chunhui Elementary School (杭州市春晖小学) in Zhejiang, the AI Intangible Heritage Indigo Dye (AI 非遗蓝染) practical course has children directing questions such as "where does the blue of indigo come from" and "why is it said that qing comes from blue yet surpasses blue" to a digital virtual human named Ranran (染染), who guides them through AI-assisted scientific exploration of the traditional craft.

Public Services and Industry Governance: Mobvoi (出门问问) presented its Xiaowen Mobile Digital Human (小问移动数字人) during National Intellectual Property Promotion Week, positioning a digital human as a public-facing interface for intellectual-property services. The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (中国信息通信研究院), under dean Yu Xiaohui (余晓晖), frames digital humans providing consultation services together with smart-glasses real-time translation and industrial humanoid robots entering factories as illustrative examples of AI's advancing application frontier. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (工业和信息化部), through Minister Li Lecheng (李乐成), has tied digital-human commercial application prospects to a manufacturing-based real-economy growth agenda, while the academy has separately initiated intelligent grading testing work for AI terminals to accelerate the implementation of a new national standard governing terminal intelligence.

Workplace and Consumer Avatars: A workplace phenomenon documented in April 2026 corporate chat groups involves screenshots of messages in which former colleagues introduce themselves as "the Digital Twin (数字分身) of departed employee XX" and invite questions, illustrating how individuals are leaving behind queryable representations after exit. Zhuang Renfeng (庄仁峰), deputy general manager of China Mobile Internet (中移互联网), has publicly framed such digital twins as instruments for higher individual efficiency and for steering social governance toward greater intelligence and convenience. Tencent (腾讯) is conducting internal testing of an AI post application on QQ whose feature set has extended into interactive scenarios including AI virtual avatars (虚拟形象), intelligent face-pinching (智能捏脸), and AI outfit-changing (AI 换装), with these capabilities aligned to Z-generation demand for personalized expression and reportedly becoming a new social topic among younger users.

Regulatory and Ethical Contexts: The Cyberspace Administration of China has released the Digital Virtual Human Information Services Management Measures (Draft for Comment) (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法（征求意见稿）) for public consultation, directly targeting AI "face-bumping" practices in which AI-generated virtual images closely resemble real natural persons and raising the question of whether such virtual likenesses infringe portrait rights. Within days of release the draft has triggered a chain of responses spanning individual rights protection, industry self-regulation, and the drafting of further normative documents, framing the regulatory question around AI-generated images that are visually similar to natural persons. Industry commentary surrounding Baidu's Digital Agent Architecture positioning further sharpens the framing by characterizing earlier offerings as "talking virtual images" rather than independently operating digital employees, arguing that genuine AI digital humans have been seriously undervalued and that capability and identity boundaries must be redrawn as digital humans, including the personal digital twins emerging in workplace settings, take on greater autonomous agency.

May 16 News

Healthcare: China Telecom Chongqing (重庆电信), the local branch of China Telecom, has partnered with district-level medical insurance bureaus and the Chongqing Municipal Medical Insurance Bureau to deploy a digital human as part of the city's smart medical insurance system, providing automated public-facing service in the medical insurance domain. In Shandong, Digital Human Technology Co., Ltd. (数字人科技), a Jinan-based company founded in April 2002 and listed on the Beijing Stock Exchange in December 2020, has filed a patent for data cache acceleration with intelligent scheduling intended to improve cache performance and system stability; the company positions itself as a leading domestic digital medicine enterprise built on "digital human body" technology and is part of broader medical-services applications of digital human technology, as seen also at the Shenzhen Cultural Expo where a digital human deployed within a Shandong cultural pavilion was used to integrate health consultation and one-stop registration and triage functions.

Cultural Tourism and Museums: Xi'an Museum (西安博物院) launched on 15 May the "Climbing into the World — XR Exploration of the Tang Pagoda" digital experience project at the Small Wild Goose Pagoda, billed as a national first, which combines online digital experience with on-site cultural displays and uses digital human guides alongside carved rubbings and historical documents to interpret the millennium-old pagoda for visitors during the 2026 International Museum Day in Xi'an. For Jiangsu's main International Museum Day event, the provincial cultural tourism digital human "Suxinyou Susu" (苏心游苏苏) was unveiled to represent province-wide attractions, with featured exhibits including Nanjing Museum's (南京博物院) "Wuhua Tianbao," a 3D digital restoration of the Da Bao'en Temple Glazed Pagoda, and the Yangzhou Grand Canal Museum (扬州中国大运河博物馆). The eleventh Nanjing Arts Institute (南京艺术学院) "520" Graduation Performance Carnival, jointly organized with the Gulou District People's Government, Jiangsu Broadcasting Corporation (江苏省广播电视总台), and Nanjing's cultural tourism authority, featured a digital human cross-time dialogue commemorating the 130th anniversary of the artist Liu Haisu's birth, along with an AI- and 3D-driven fashion design show. In Hangzhou, the Grand Canal Digital Future City (大运河数智未来城) uses a digital human as a greeter in its artificial intelligence exhibition hall as part of its smart information industrial park positioning. Cultural-sector reporting from Chongqing and Kunming also identifies virtual digital humans as a core component of emerging cultural service formats alongside short video, micro-dramas, livestreaming, cloud performance, digital cultural relics, AIGC creative tools and VR large-space immersive experiences.

Education: Wuhan Media Institute (武汉传媒学院), one of Hubei's first "transformation development" pilot universities, has added eight new undergraduate majors for 2026 enrolment, with intelligent audiovisual engineering and related programs designed to train composite-skilled talent in digital human and other key AI technologies. Hainan Vocational and Technical College (海南职业技术学院) has unveiled the "Lingxi Zhijing" (灵犀智境) project developed by its team of the same name, an exploration of cognitive-companionship "emotional-intelligent humans" using markerless motion capture, positioned as part of the wider industry shift from functional virtual digital human interaction to emotional interaction. Shandong Tourism Vocational College (山东旅游职业学院) has developed the "Baize" (白泽) large model on a "local core plus cloud assistance" hybrid architecture, which supports intelligent teaching and a digital-human-driven micro-course capability aimed at advancing vocational education. Hong Kong Educational City (香港教育城) presented a "One Person, One Digital Human" (一人一數字人) initiative at the Learning & Teaching Expo 2025, applying retrieval-augmented generation through interdisciplinary collaboration to deliver values education with personalized student digital humans. Qinghai Vocational and Technical University (青海职业技术大学) operates the "Qingfeng Liyun" provincial theoretical-propaganda studio, where a "Snow Leopard AI Digital Human" delivers narration on ecological protection and green-electricity development alongside Tu ethnic content.

Government Services and Public Administration: Guangdong's first government-services digital human in the industry and information sector, "Suixiaoxin" (穗小信), made its first appearance at the 10th Hua Jiao Hui in Guangzhou Huangpu, where it engaged with the polymer new-materials industrial cluster as part of Guangzhou's promotion of green petrochemicals and new materials. In Hebei, the Qiaodong District of Zhangjiakou has rolled out a digital human intelligent service system for government affairs that automatically performs data capture and form back-fill, reducing the average filing time to roughly 180 seconds. Fujian Expressway Group (福建高速集团), through its "Road-Chain Party Building" initiative, has automated toll-booth interactions using a robotic arm to deliver cards and a digital human to provide friendly reminders, cutting vehicle passage time at toll points to about 11.6 seconds. A Yangzhou public security branch in the Economic Development Zone has launched the "Jingxiaole" (经小乐) digital human, which integrates motifs from the local Liuhe Lighthouse landmark to deliver public-facing security-related interaction. The Jilin provincial highway operator has built a digital human livestreaming capability targeting 24-hour intelligent service and has partnered with the Jilin Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism to integrate 4A and 5A scenic-area information into a transport-plus-tourism mini-program covering cross-provincial cultural tourism broadcasts.

Livestreaming and Marketing: Baidu's (百度) Huibo Xing (慧播星) platform supplied the technology behind the digital human of entrepreneur Luo Yonghao (罗永浩), which has been cited as a high-profile example of the digital-human-as-agent thesis in which digital humans serve simultaneously as endpoints of AI-generated content and entry points for AI participation in commercial activity. Huibo Xing was also used to produce a news video about additional copper and silver resources at Tibet's Yulong mine, illustrating Baidu's penetration of news-video production with digital human presenters. Gaoyuan (Beijing) Cultural Communication Co., Ltd. (高原（北京）文化传播有限公司), the operator of a central key news website, showcased digital human technology providing high-expressiveness real-time interactive content for livestreaming, short video and metaverse scenarios at the Beijing International Science and Technology Industry Expo, presented as part of the Mentougou "Three Industry Valleys" initiative. China Telecom Guangzhou (广州电信) unveiled a "10G plus Token" product line aimed at empowering AI digital human applications, presenting the "10G Pioneer User" award to Guangdong Yufu Technology Co., Ltd. (广东裕富科技有限公司), a company that specializes in virtual host research and development and normalized AI livestreaming. In Hebei, Shijiazhuang's emerging "factory broadcast" model combines human hosts in studio with continuous digital human livestreams to market steel products and metal powders to cloud-based industrial buyers.

Broadcasting and Media: Hunan Broadcasting (湖南广电), through its Hunan Economics Channel (湖南经视) program "Jingshi News" (经视新闻), introduced two AI news anchors during the May Day holiday period, a deployment that prompted commentary likening it to the Hong Kong television drama "News Queen 2," in which a human anchor is "distilled" into an AI digital human that continues to deliver broadcasts. The episode is being discussed publicly as a cost-reduction tool for mainland media industry while also raising concerns about labor displacement and the psychological resonance of replacing human anchors with synthetic on-air personas.

Enterprise Security and Office Software: NSFOCUS Technology (绿盟科技) has released a Security Digital Human Platform anchored by its "Fengyun Wei" (风云卫) product, offering a family of role-specific digital humans including a security digital human, an energy-efficiency expert digital human and a process-documentation digital human, designed so that users can deploy autonomous operations functions without building from scratch; the platform is associated in industry reporting with cooperation alongside Uniview Technology (宇视科技) and the Digital Zhejiang program. Ruijie Networks (锐捷) has launched the Ruijie Security Cloud Office 4.0 upgrade, which an executive framed as a response to hybrid work, flexible employment and the proliferation of AI digital humans in the workplace, with virtual desktop infrastructure evolving from a pure office tool into an environment that serves both natural persons and digital humans. Endpoint (Shaanxi) Technology Co., Ltd. (端点（陕西）科技有限公司), a Xi'an-based high-tech enterprise, has positioned itself as a leading provider of AI digital human custom services for western China. Zhongchuangwang (Wuhan) Technology Co., Ltd. (众创网（武汉）科技有限公司) has been granted a patent titled "A Digital Human Q&A System," with authorization announcement number CN121658531B and an application date of February 2026, indicating ongoing IP development around conversational digital humans. In Nanjing, an OPC (One-Person Company) community has built the "Wisdom Jinling — Rongshu" (智慧金陵——融数) intelligent agent operation and scheduling platform at the Nanjing Science Plaza, integrating a digital human engine alongside vision large models as part of its core technology base for entrepreneurship support.

Telecommunications Infrastructure: China Unicom (中国联通) has completed the first Mobile AI high-quality experience network in the Greater Bay Area, capable of precisely identifying traffic from AI large models, digital humans and industrial intelligence, marketed in part as a way to eliminate signal congestion at large-scale concerts and similar events. China Telecom Guangzhou's "10G plus Token" launch likewise positions next-generation fixed and converged networks as the substrate for digital human livestreaming and related AI workloads in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

China Telecom Guangzhou launched the “10G + Token” (万兆+Token) bundle on May 15, 2026. It combines symmetric 10 Gbps ultra-high-speed broadband delivered via 50G-PON infrastructure, 5G-A, and FTTR tri-band Wi-Fi 7 with AI usage tokens that serve as credits for large language model inference and cloud AI services, including pre-installed models on enterprise AI cloud PCs. Premium packages include allocations such as 25 million tokens, targeting SMEs and households to provide accessible high-speed connectivity together with practical AI compute resources. The offering supports demanding real-time applications, such as AI digital human livestreaming, through its high-bandwidth and low-latency network capabilities as part of China Telecom’s broader strategy to integrate ultra-gigabit access with Token-based AI operations.

Legal and Regulatory Context: The Hangzhou courts, in releasing the eighth iteration of their business-environment program, have flagged frontier commercial disputes involving virtual digital humans, AI-generated "grass-planting" review notes, and data-product trade secrets, indicating that adjudicatory practice in Zhejiang is increasingly engaging with the legal status and rights surrounding digital human creations and adjacent AI-generated content. The Hunan Broadcasting AI news anchor case has similarly entered public discussion in Hong Kong commentary about labor, intellectual property and the ethics of "distilling" human broadcasters into AI digital humans for continuous on-air use.

May 15 News

Healthcare: 7×24-hour AI triage digital humans have begun deployment in Chinese hospitals, with Jiahu Technology (嘉护科技) profiled as a developer of AI guidance and registration digital humans designed to ease registration bottlenecks. These triage agents combine medical large models with professional medical knowledge bases and accept voice or text symptom descriptions from patients before routing them to the appropriate department, framed within commentary that the first decade of smart hospital construction concentrated on infrastructure while 2026 marks the genuine arrival of AI medicine and an extension of hospital digital service boundaries beyond on-site staffing constraints.

Government Services and Public Programs: Changji Municipal Government Services Center in Xinjiang has installed an AI digital human styled as a small police officer and named Xiaojing (小警) at the exit-entry window, where it operates inside a dedicated smart service zone alongside a smart booth, exit-entry record self-service inquiry terminals, self-service visa endorsement machines, and two-in-one self-service certificate issuance machines, all positioned within Changji's broader Internet-plus-government-services reform that also adds midday extended hours, holiday appointments, nationwide processing, and enterprise green channels. In Nanjing, the municipal government has adopted a "one district, one project" framework for technology-assisted disability work, with projects spanning autism rehabilitation, AI and digital human services, intelligent assistive device adaptation and rental, and home safety monitoring. Jiangsu has also launched the 2026 Chuangqingchun AI Plus Transportation Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition in Nanjing's Jianye District, offering a top single-project prize of 500,000 yuan and showcasing digital human outputs among AI-plus-transportation innovations.

Education: Hangzhou Chunhui Primary School has run a practical class titled AI Intangible Cultural Heritage Blue Dyeing, in which pupils interact with a digital virtual human named Ranran (染染), pose questions through the agent, use AI science experiment kits to run trials, and ultimately complete their own blue-dyed works. In Nanjing, an early-childhood education application called Ning Xiaozhi (宁小智) draws on nearly a decade of accumulated municipal preschool teaching resources as its underlying dataset and presents two digital human intellectual property characters, Rongrong (荣荣) and Pixiaoshou (辟小兽), built to combine a gentle nurturing presence with a livelier child-facing energy, and it was showcased as the sole preschool-education scenario in a national results exhibition representing Jiangsu at a global platform event.

Cultural Tourism: Maipu Cultural Tourism (麦扑文旅) appeared at the Poetic Painting Zhejiang exhibition area at the invitation of the Zhejiang Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, joining culture and tourism bureaus from Liangzhu, Fuyang, and Kaihua to demonstrate cultural-tourism digital intelligence through AI technologies. Jiangxi Haihun Cultural Tourism Development (江西省海昏文化旅游发展有限责任公司) is advancing immersive cultural-tourism projects in Nanchang in which XR experiences move beyond VR's tactile history toward time-space traversal. In Chengdu, a municipal cultural-creative procurement event released more than thirty digital cultural-creative product offerings focused on AR/VR and AI digital humans alongside one hundred culture-plus-technology demand items, where Sichuan INMO Technology (四川影目科技有限公司) demonstrated its AR glasses on site and AI digital humans together with naked-eye 3D and XR immersive spaces were highlighted as the technologies bringing museum artifacts out of display cases for visitor co-presence.

Entertainment and AI Film: Live-action short drama production starts in China have dropped sharply as major technology platforms enter what reporting describes as an AI video speed race, with the editorial framing that digital humans together with real performers and digitized scenes will form the basic model of the future film industry while large-screen cinema retains its role. ByteDance's Jimeng (即梦) and Kuaishou's Kling (可灵) are positioned as the AI video generation products most likely to capture the AI short drama opportunity, treated as the most natural application terrain for AI-generated video content. Separately, a feature film titled Life Happiness (《人生幸福》), written by Sun Hao and filed by Chongqing Bingpai Pictures (重庆冰派影业), has received shooting approval with a plot following five protagonists from different professions who converge to co-found an AI digital human company and navigate the technological and commercial pressures of the sector.

Livestreaming Platforms and Marketing: At the Create 2026 Baidu AI Developer Conference, Baidu (百度) founder Robin Li (李彦宏) announced that the company's AI digital human platform Baidu Hui Bo Xing (百度慧播星) had been rebranded as Baidu Yijing (百度一镜) and strategically upgraded to what the company describes as the world's first all-scenario multi-agent digital human platform, supporting digital human livestreaming, digital human video, and real-time interactive digital humans. Li positioned digital human intelligent agents as the visible form of agents in the AI era, capable of real-time feedback and conversational naturalness that delivers tasks with both efficiency and emotional value, and he proposed Daily Active Agents as a new measurement unit for the AI era, with Baidu's stated ambition being for digital humans to evolve from a livestreaming tool into broader productivity across e-commerce livestreaming, brand marketing, content creation, and public services. Frost & Sullivan (沙利文) ranked Baidu Yijing first in both digital human market share and product capability. At the regional services level, Tianjin Qiling Technology Development Partnership Enterprise (天津奇领科技发展合伙企业) is profiled as a local AI marketing services provider whose offerings include generative engine optimization services and digital human livestreaming solutions, with the company explicitly distancing itself from concept hype and emphasizing visible client value.

Regulatory Developments: The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Education, and two further ministries have jointly published the 2025 Metaverse Typical Case List containing 193 entries grouped into four categories defined as typical digital humans, typical products, typical parks, and typical standards, with coverage extending across industrial scenarios. In a parallel development, the Cyberspace Administration of China and four other agencies have jointly released 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), a regulation directly applicable to digital human and humanlike interactive deployments. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology also convened its 2026 audit work conference on May 13, with surrounding industry coverage referencing existing research on the commercial application outlook for China's virtual digital humans.

May 14 News

Cultural Tourism and Heritage: Shiyou Technology (世优科技) built an AI digital human of the educator Tao Xingzhi for deployment in Chongqing Hechuan, working with the Tao Xingzhi Research Association on what is framed as a deep restoration of the figure's thought rather than a simple visual replica. Shiyi Technology (视颐科技) installed a 98-inch digital human display in the lobby of the Xiamen Cultural Center, replacing traditional light boxes with a combined dynamic-video and intelligent-interaction model for visitors. A mobile AI digital human system has been deployed in Tibet to guide visitors through 75 years of Tibetan film history, navigating autonomously and avoiding obstacles along a preset route. Amap (高德) and Ali Public Welfare (阿里公益) launched the One-Click Smart Tour to Shengsi service, in which an AI digital human named Shengzai (嵊仔) functions as a tourism companion and as a public welfare expression of the Shengsi archipelago. Yingmu Technology (影目科技), Haiyi Hudong (海艺互娱), and Chengdu Xinglanxing Technology (成都星蓝星科技) presented cultural-creative digital human technologies in Chengdu, with AI digital humans carrying historical-figure IP, AR glasses supporting real-time translation across 261 languages, and XR immersive spaces. In Guangzhou, digital humans have been described as having matured into smart digital humans operating across online mini-programs, offline physical screens, and backend large models, serving as cultural tourism companions with individual personalities. Jiangsu Province's AI plus Cultural Tourism Action Plan for 2026 to 2028 sets out six application scenarios and twenty key tasks, supporting smart tourism brands such as Suxinyou (苏心游), Junda Suzhou (君到苏州), and Xia Yangzhou (下扬州), with digital human livestreaming and VR large-space deployments prioritized as new consumption scenarios. The March Third Bagui Carnival (三月三·八桂嘉年华) tourism brand event in Guangxi featured a digital human voice interwoven with live human singing during its opening ceremony.

Suxinyou, Junda Suzhou, and Xia Yangzhou are official government-backed "Smart Tourism" platforms designed to digitize the travel experience within China's Jiangsu Province. Operating primarily as WeChat and Alipay mini-programs, Suxinyou serves as the provincial-level hub for all of Jiangsu, while Junda Suzhou and Xia Yangzhou provide localized services for their respective cities, such as mandatory reservations for Suzhou’s classical gardens or AI-guided tours of Yangzhou’s historic districts. Together, these platforms act as digital gateways for tourists to book tickets, access cultural venues, and navigate local transportation and dining through authoritative, state-sanctioned channels.

Media and Broadcasting: Yanfu Daily Group (盐阜报集团) in Yancheng produced digital humans including the Su Super (苏超) Yancheng team goalkeeper Yan Zihang (严子航) and the Huai opera performer Xiao Xia (小夏), demonstrated in a holographic chamber for a visiting delegation from Xinyu City Media Center (新余市融媒体中心) in Jiangxi. Jinan Broadcasting Television Station (济南广播电视台) is training practitioners in digital AI anchor production for local news and exploring commercial revenue models built around digital humans. Shanghai Newspaper Group (上海报业集团) launched an AI-core-driven digital intelligence transformation strategy in which Eastern.com (东方网) partnered with China Telecom Shanghai (中国电信上海公司) to build the Shanghai Cultural Smart Cloud (上海文化智云) and to operate a scale-deployment system for digital human technology built on the Shangbao AI Super Platform's multimodal generation capability. Tianjin Daily (天津日报) reported that the Tianjin Wanhai International Overseas Comprehensive Service Center (天津市旺海国际海外综合服务中心) is equipped with an AI digital human system supporting real-time interaction across 53 languages to assist enterprises moving into foreign markets.

Shangbao AI Super Platform is an AI-driven super platform developed by Shanghai United Media Group (SUMG), a major state-backed media conglomerate in China that oversees prominent outlets such as The Paper (Pengpai News) and Jiemian. It integrates AI across the entire news workflow—including gathering, editing, fact-checking (via tools like Pengpai Mingcha), data analysis, multimedia production, and distribution—to modernize traditional media operations. Key capabilities include automated content generation and a matrix of over 70 digital human IPs (virtual anchors and presenters) for video and live broadcasting. In 2025, SUMG made significant optimizations to its digital strategy, positioning the platform as a prime example of how Chinese state media groups are aggressively embracing generative AI to remain competitive in the evolving news landscape, akin to big tech’s AI super apps but specialized for journalism and content ecosystems.

Livestream Commerce and Retail Automation: Baidu (百度) announced at Create 2026 in Beijing that its Huiboxing (慧播星) digital human brand has been upgraded to Baidu Yijing (百度一镜), described as the world's first full-scenario multi-agent digital human platform spanning digital human livestreaming, digital human video, and real-time interactive digital humans, with an overseas edition released and the DuMate mobile application launched alongside it. Industry analysis ranked Baidu Yijing first in two digital human categories at the time of the upgrade. Co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Baidu, Robin Li (李彦宏), characterized digital humans as visible intelligent agents that carry voice, expression, and movement, and forecast that global Daily Active Agents would exceed ten billion. SenseTime (商汤) opened a Shanhui (善惠) automated shaomai convenience store in Shanghai that has reached approximately 400 orders per day, drawing on prior work in static image perception, dynamic video analysis, data fusion, SKU large-model research, retail full-scenario perception, a digital human store manager, and a data governance framework.

Education and Smart Campus Programs: Tongji University (同济大学) had its Tongji University Smart Campus Digital Human project, built on its smart campus cockpit, selected as a 2025 Metaverse Typical Case in a joint announcement by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and the National Radio and Television Administration. The regional digital human image IP Gangxiaozhi (港小智) was deployed for extracurricular conversation at the 2026 World Digital Education Conference held in Hangzhou, alongside AI tablets used in smart classrooms and AI-driven personalized homework grading. Shandong Tourism Vocational College (山东旅游职业学院) presented its Baize (白泽) large model, which was included in the China Smart Education Development Report. iFlytek (科大讯飞) showcased its full digital education portfolio at the same conference, where a young product manager Ruhuiya Aili (茹辉亚·艾力) described workplace use of a personal digital alter ego as a way to compress the experience gap for early-career professionals. DianMao Technology (点猫科技) of Guangdong attended the conference for a third time, contributing AI tools directed at youth education digitalization. Tianjin Foreign Studies University (天津外国语大学) added two new undergraduate majors, one of which builds on virtual digital human research alongside its established economics, management, and foreign-language disciplines.

Government Services and Public Sector Deployments: Jincheng (晋城) in Shanxi introduced the AI digital human Jin Xiaomei (晋小美) to support the intelligent transformation of its government services, contributing to more than 930,000 items processed under the city's high-efficiency one-thing reform program. Xuhui District (徐汇区) in Shanghai launched the digital lecturer Xu Xiaoxuan (徐小宣) at the inauguration of an AI-enhanced grassroots theoretical propagation initiative, with the digital human framed as a new vehicle for science-and-innovation messaging at the community level. Hanfan (汉梵) in Tianjin operates digital human livestreaming and AIGC short-video production for enterprise clients alongside its generative engine optimization service. Beta Innovation Technology Hong Kong (贝塔创新科技香港) is building intelligent digital human applications alongside private AIGC content platforms and vertical industry models for business customers.

Entertainment and Content Production: Chuangyi Technology (创壹科技) in Changsha developed the OneStory AI platform, which generates storyboard scripts in one click and is positioning virtual human IP content production as an industrialized workflow. iQiyi (爱奇艺) established an AI artist library that has signed portrait rights for more than one hundred actors, allowing studios to substitute digital alter egos for on-set performances in exchange for one-time licensing fees. Jimeng AI (即梦AI) runs a presence mode used in an AI alter ego acting competition that lets users insert their likeness into short-form video scenarios. An animation program at a western Chinese university in Guiyang appeared in the production credits for The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, with students contributing AI-assisted concept design, intelligent coloring, dynamic storyboard generation, and digital human production. Hongli Culture (红鲤文化) received a strategic investment of tens of millions of yuan from the Nanning Digital Sports and Culture Fund to accelerate an esports-plus ecosystem aimed at ASEAN markets, structured around professional tournaments, industry-education integration, and a digital human platform.

Exhibitions and Trade Showcases: The Beijing Science Expo (北京科博会) drew more than 70,000 visitor experiences, including a holographic chamber that generated personal digital human alter egos performing costume changes after a brief on-site photo capture. The tenth China-Russia Expo (中俄博览会), held in Harbin from May 17 to 21 together with the 35th Harbin Trade Fair, features AI digital humans on its show floor alongside humanoid robots, dexterous hands, and inspection robots as part of a digital-economy showcase.

Healthcare and Elderly Care: Mashang Consumer Finance (马上消费金融) in Liangjiang New Area, Chongqing, had its smart elderly emotional companion digital human Peipei (裴裴) listed among the 2025 Metaverse Typical Cases. Nanjing's 36th National Disability Assistance Day launched a portfolio of projects covering autism rehabilitation, AI and digital human services, smart assistive device fitting and rental, residential safety monitoring, and integrated smart platforms, with digital humans positioned as a means of bridging accessibility gaps for people with disabilities.

Regulatory and Ethical Contexts: The Cyberspace Administration of China issued the Draft 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) in early April 2026 for public consultation, responding to AI face-swap infringement targeting ordinary citizens. AI virtual companion applications have come under regulatory scrutiny for explicit personas, suggestive dialogue, and induced storylines around early relationships and emotional entanglements aimed at minors, with resale-platform listings offering custom large-scale sexualized virtual personas for 13.14 yuan flagged as breaches of content safety. Chinese fan culture surrounding the K-pop group EXO produced a fan-generated thirteenth member known as King, sustained by AI imagery and narrative as a collective virtual idol illusion. Concerns have been raised that large-scale signing of actors' likeness rights for AI artist libraries provides one-time licensing payments while eroding long-term residual income for performers whose digital alter egos do not age, do not fall from public favor, and can be redeployed indefinitely.

May 13 News

Education: The Nanjing Municipal Electrochemical Education Hall (南京市电化教育馆) launched what has been described as China's first municipal-level preschool education intelligent agent platform, Ningxiaozhi (宁小智), built around twin digital human IPs named Rongrong (荣荣), characterized as warm-hearted and clever, and Pi Xiaoshou (辟小兽), characterized as brave and playful, between which young learners may freely switch. The platform draws on high-quality educational resources to deliver content across multiple terminals and was a focal exhibit at a Jiangsu provincial government press conference on the city's AI terminal industry. In Henan, the Zhengzhou Aviation Port District (郑州航空港区) presented its regional education digital human IP Gangxiaozhi (港小智) at the 2026 World Digital Education Conference in Hangzhou, where the figure served as an on-stage technology guide leading visitors through the exhibition and was paired in classroom practice with AI tablets for instruction and automated personalised homework grading. A joint accessibility-education event hosted by Wuhan Blind Children's School (武汉市盲童学校) brought together teachers from Chongqing Special Education Center (重庆市特殊教育中心) and Guangzhou Qiming School (广州市启明学校), with the Guangzhou team deploying a digital human styled as a Tang dynasty frontier-fortress poet that scored students' recitations and offered patient feedback, while AI intelligent agents acted as classroom judges. Tianjin Light Industry Vocational Technical College (天津轻工职业技术学院) integrated digital humans into its Five-Education base, where students don VR headsets to retrace the Jinggangshan revolutionary route and converse with digital human characters about traditional crafts. The Chinese Computer Federation Shenyang Branch held its CCF Charity Day and National Day for Helping the Disabled event at Shenyang Open University (沈阳开放大学), featuring a sign-language digital human interactive demonstration area alongside MR immersive experience zones. Party-member education and training programmes in Guangzhou have begun introducing AI digital human instructors to strengthen the interactivity and practical relevance of intelligent civic curricula.

Healthcare and Medical Training: Shandong University (山东大学), through its Institute for Digital and Intelligent Support (山东大学数智化支撑研究院), developed a high-definition digital human virtual anatomy table system that reconstructs a real human body into more than seventeen thousand anatomical layers, giving medical students a new modality for studying anatomical structures and procedures without the constraints of cadaver access. The system was demonstrated at the 2026 World Digital Education Conference as an example of how digital human technology can supplement traditional clinical instruction.

Financial Services and Public Governance: Postal Savings Bank of China (中国邮政储蓄银行) brought its Digital Employee (数字员工) into branch-level operations in Chongqing, launching the service at the Chongqing branch and opening the public-facing experience first at the Chongqing Direct Sub-branch, where the digital employee combines digital human rendering with natural language processing to deliver upgraded smart financial services and signals the bank's acceleration of technology-driven service innovation within the broader Digital Chongqing programme. At the grassroots governance level, Tianjin districts have introduced digital humans for community legal education together with drone patrols and other smart applications, with the stated goal of raising the rates at which neighbourhood issues are detected and resolved at the household level.

Cultural Tourism and Accessibility: Jiangsu provincial authorities issued a cultural-tourism transformation roadmap identifying six major AI application scenarios and twenty key tasks, explicitly listing digital human livestreaming, VR tour-guide robots, digital art, and digital animation as priority directions, alongside smart-tourism assistant applications branded Suixin Jiangsu (随心江苏) and Leyou Jiangsu (乐游江苏). In Gansu, the city of Qingyang built its China Computing Valley · Smart Qingyang (中国算谷·智慧庆阳) brand by deploying digital twin and AI digital human technologies inside its exhibition halls to create immersive viewing experiences for visitors to the regional computing-industry showcase. Piaofutong (票付通), a scenic-area ticketing system operator highlighted in a Fujian-anchored industry review, has integrated AI digital humans into attraction services so that hearing-impaired visitors can access the cultural depth of sites through accessible interpretation, alongside its work on dedicated channels for university students, veterans, and people with disabilities.

Retail and Livestreaming Commerce: SenseTime (商汤科技) advanced its retail strategy through SenseMartGo, an unmanned shaomai dumpling store concept run by its subsidiary Shangtang Shanhui (商汤善惠), with the first locations opening at Xinzhou Building, Baoshan Xinyefang, and Baoshan Binjiang Scenic Area in Shanghai, where digital human store managers are paired with SKU-recognition large models, full-scene retail perception, and data-governance capabilities under a plan to reach one hundred outlets by the end of 2026. According to a joint report by JD.com (京东) and iResearch (艾瑞咨询), top livestreaming merchants in China reached an eighty percent digital human broadcast rate in the first quarter of 2026, and in Laixi, Shandong, a village cadre nicknamed the Morel Mushroom Secretary (羊肚菌书记) ran what was described as a one-person company entirely through an AI digital human livestream. Huiboxing (慧播星) digital humans appeared as on-screen presenters in short news videos distributed by NetEase (网易) across Guangxi, Guizhou, and Ningxia contexts, with each clip carrying a watermark noting that the segment was produced using the Huiboxing digital human. Zhipu Huazhang (智谱华章) filed a patent for an audio-processing method intended to improve the real-time performance and overall quality of digital human livestreaming output.

Media, Broadcasting, and Production: Sichuan Daily Press Group (四川日报报业集团) developed the Chuanguan News Digital Reporter (川观新闻数字记者), and Chengdu Jiuzhou Electronic Information System (成都九洲电子信息系统股份有限公司) created an intelligent interactive digital human named Yuanqi (元启), both of which were named among the typical digital human cases in a Sichuan provincial showcase covering five entries. Sichuan IPTV (四川IPTV), a Chengdu-based new-economy enterprise that exclusively operates the provincial interactive network television service, has expanded into high-tech video creation that includes digital human production and has been developing content workflows on top of large-model technology. Xiechuang Data (协创数据) confirmed to retail investors that its holding subsidiary Fengyun Shijie Shanghai Digital Media Technology (蜂云视界（上海）数字传媒科技有限公司) operates an AIGC ecosystem platform whose remit explicitly covers virtual reality and virtual digital human business lines.

Enterprise Platforms and Open-Source Initiatives: Soul announced the full open-sourcing of its AI digital human technology as part of the run-up to its initial public offering, framing the move as the construction of an open technology ecosystem for the wider field. Qingdao Qianrui Shulian Information Technology (青岛千瑞数联信息技术有限公司) saw its customer-service digital human Xiaorui (小瑞) selected as a national-level typical digital human case, contributing to a wider Qingdao cluster of enterprises and industrial parks recognised on the national metaverse typical-case roster.

May 12 News

Entertainment and AI Short Drama: China's AI short drama sector is expanding rapidly while drawing public scrutiny over how virtual characters are produced, with a "face grading" industry chain emerging in which short drama production groups, social platforms, and city-level recruitment channels openly purchase portrait data from low-paid models and day-rate workers, and the harvested face datasets are then fed into AI models to generate digital human likenesses and AI short drama virtual characters. iQiyi (爱奇艺) has launched the Naduo Pro (纳逗Pro) AI artist library, which the platform says has already signed contracts with more than one hundred real performers whose portrait, voice, and physical features are licensed for the generation of AI digital avatars used in drama productions. The economic logic driving this build-out is that AI virtual performers require no acting fees and no scheduling coordination, lowering production cost while raising new copyright, ethical, and legal questions across the Chinese film and television industry.

Live Commerce and Digital Human Livestreaming: Chuangketu Digital Human (创客兔数字人) markets a digital human livestreaming system that supports fourteen broadcasting platforms and twenty livestreaming languages, with full-posture digital human avatars and a one-to-many architecture promoted as reshaping cross-border commercial interaction. Alibaba (阿里巴巴) showcased a parallel push at its annual Alibaba Day event, where the group unveiled the Qianwen AI digital human Qianwen Xiao Jiuwo (千问小酒窝) alongside Qianwen AI Glasses (千问AI眼镜), the Qianwen Office "one-sentence flower shop" agent, and exhibition zones for Huijing Wenyu (虎鲸文娱), Gaode (高德), HappyHorse, and HappyOyster. Within Alibaba's Taobao (淘宝), a new virtual fitting room has been built on proprietary 3D Gaussian real-person digital human technology with real-time rendering and spatial interaction, allowing users to create personalized digital human likenesses generated by the Qianwen large model (千问大模型) and run through a complete selection-and-virtual-try-on shopping flow, with Meitu Company (美图公司) cited as a participant in the broader ecosystem.

Cultural Tourism and Scenic Area Guides: The Jiangsu provincial government has released a three-year AI + Cultural Tourism action plan calling for digital human promotion, smart tourism guidance, museum digital twins, and cultivation of new performance formats, while Nanjing Tourism Vocational College (南京旅游职业学院) and Jiangsu Tourism Vocational College (江苏旅游职业学院) have already integrated AI into curricula and competitions, and the plan commits to introducing tour-guide robots, digital human livestreaming, and VR large-space scenarios into consumer cultural-tourism settings. An AI + Tourism industry development report for 2026 ("AI+旅游产业融合发展研究报告 (2026)") identifies information-guidance digital humans as the dominant form deployed at Chinese scenic spots, handling tour narration and intelligent customer service against a Chinese smart-tourism market projected to surpass 14.5 trillion yuan in 2025. iFlytek (科大讯飞) has deployed AI tour guide systems with high-fidelity virtual humans at the Hefei Science Museum (合肥科技馆) and more than twenty other venues, where the lightweight scan-to-use mode reduces on-site labor costs by roughly thirty percent and delivers personalized, "thousand-person, thousand-faces" cultural tourism narration. Xinjiang Institute of Technology (新疆理工学院) has had its Silk Road Aesthetic Education (丝路美育) metaverse digital human project selected for the 2025 National Metaverse Typical Cases list jointly published by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the National Radio and Television Administration, and two other central ministries, with the project counted as one of three Xinjiang entries on the national list and named as an exemplary digital human case.

Sports and Public Communication: The Sports General Administration of China (国家体育总局) Information Center has supported a Training Bureau reading festival initiative featuring the virtual digital humans Saike (赛克) and Xixi (西西), who guide viewers through the history, contemporary practice, scientific underpinnings, and youth-development dimensions of archery. The program is positioned as a "telling China's story" effort that uses sport as a bridge and virtual hosts as the narrative interface, illustrating how state sports agencies are integrating named virtual characters into official educational and cultural content.

Regulatory and Ethical Frameworks: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家互联网信息办公室) has drafted the Digital Virtual Human Information Service Management Measures (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法), released for public comment, which for the first time establishes a consent-and-authorization core mechanism stipulating that services involving a specific natural person's likeness may not be provided without that person's explicit consent. The same draft was the subject of episode three of the program Shanhai Yehua (山海夜话), which examined the legal positioning and governance boundaries of digital virtual humans through technical, platform, and judicial perspectives and identified gaps in the current algorithmic impact assessment regime. Across the Chinese entertainment press, commentary has also documented organized performer pushback against AI artist licensing, which covers the portrait, voice, and body of real performers for the production of AI digital avatars, even as Chinese platforms and agencies frame digital-avatar operation and account-splitting as a new revenue model rather than as a labor-displacing practice.

The third installment of Mountain-Sea Night Talks (山海夜话), held on April 23, 2026 and organized by the Alibaba AI Governance and Sustainable Development Lab (阿里人工智能治理与可持续发展实验室, AAG) together with policy and regulation working groups, was a deep-interpretation session focused on the governance and legal boundaries of digital humans, centered on the Cyberspace Administration of China draft titled 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）). The discussion framed the central question as how to fasten a safety belt onto digital virtual humans, meaning how to balance technological innovation with a compliant regulatory framework as the industry moves from an early period of unrestrained growth into a phase of formal oversight. The core legal debate examined liability allocation when a digital human produces erroneous output or causes infringement, specifically how responsibility should be divided among developers, operators, and end users, with substantial attention given to algorithm governance, accountability attribution, and the need for regulation that preserves incentives for innovation while controlling downstream harms. 

Expert and Research Digital Avatars: A national initiative is enrolling roughly five hundred doctoral students from key state laboratories in a "reverse distillation" program designed to explore higher-order human-machine intelligence, with their personal data spaces linked to the national trusted data space to form a cross-domain data collaboration network. Huang Gang (黄罡) has explained that within this framework, expert digital avatars serve as a way for enterprises operating trusted data spaces to efficiently access and operationalize the most current scientific research output of doctoral researchers, positioning the digital avatar of a domain expert as both a knowledge interface and an instrument of cross-institutional data exchange.

China’s national trusted data space is a state‑directed digital framework that enables secure, standardized, and highly regulated sharing of data among approved organizations, forming the backbone of China’s plan to build a unified national data market. It combines strict identity verification, usage‑control mechanisms, traceability, and government‑defined technical standards to ensure that data can circulate while remaining compliant with China’s cybersecurity and data‑governance laws. Unlike Europe’s more decentralized model, China’s approach is centrally coordinated by the National Data Administration, relies on designated operators (often major state‑owned or strategic enterprises), and is intended to support domestic AI development, industrial integration, smart‑city systems, and cross‑border data cooperation under the Digital Silk Road.

May 11 News

Government Affairs and Public Services: Linghou Digital (灵猴数字) has emerged as a multi-sector digital human provider servicing government affairs, cultural tourism, healthcare, e-commerce, and elderly care clients across Shaanxi Xi'an, Gansu Lanzhou, and surrounding regions, offering custom-tailored digital human products built around client-specific operational needs. In Jiangsu, the city of Lianyungang unveiled its dedicated talent-IP digital human Zhizunbao (智尊宝) at Nanjing University during a recruitment promotion event, where the avatar appeared as a "policy explainer" to brief audiences on local incentive frameworks. Sichuan's provincial Discipline Inspection Commission deployed a digital human named Yan Zheng (严正) as the on-screen presenter for the launch of the fifth "510 Integrity Culture Promotion Month," with the figure rendered in high-definition imagery occupying centre-screen during the opening. The Hainan Provincial Justice Department launched the AI legal-education digital human Hai Fan (海帆) on the official "Hainan Pufa" WeChat account on May 6, debuting around the question of how China's Constitution protects new-form workers including couriers and delivery riders. In Hebei, the Caofeidian Maritime Safety Administration (曹妃甸海事局) deployed a maritime-themed digital human called English Little Assistant (英文小助手) to address pain points in collision-avoidance oversight for foreign commercial and fishing vessels.

Cultural Tourism and Heritage: In Guizhou, an interactive digital screen at the "Duocai Guizhou Cheng" (多彩贵州城) complex near Longdongbao Airport in Guiyang allowed a foreign media exploration delegation to take group photographs alongside a Wang Yangming (王阳明) digital human while counting down to a launch event, framing the historical philosopher as a hospitality figure for inbound cultural-tourism visitors. The Shenzhen Gankeng Ancient Town (深圳甘坑古镇), reported in Hong Kong Commercial Daily as a destination handling close to one million visitors during the May Day holiday, has integrated an AI digital human modelled on the Tang poet Li Bai (李白) that debuted in early January 2026 and performs poetry recitation, stand-up comedy routines, and real-time dialogue with tourists. Xinjiang-focused media personality Li Dan (李丹) led a team using satellite imagery, AI tools, and a digital human named Xuelian Guniang (雪莲姑娘) to produce the cultural-image program Ruyuan Xinjiang (如愿新疆), positioned as a vehicle for conveying contemporary representations of the autonomous region. In Beijing, the "Taibao Baiwen" (台胞百问) digital human video series was rolled out across all major Chinese platforms as a specialized guide aimed at helping Taiwanese visitors and residents integrate into daily life in the capital.

Enterprise and Industry Deployments: A Guangxi regional bank led by Zhang Xiande (张先德) has built an intelligent dispatch resource base totalling 23 PFLOPS of computing power and brought a large-model middle platform and AI application platform online, into which it has implemented thirty-eight large-model use cases including virtual digital humans and AI intelligent assistants for branch and back-office operations. In Shandong, twenty cases were selected for the national metaverse typical-case list, with three involving virtual beings: Shandong Inspur Intelligent Production Technology (山东浪潮智能生产技术有限公司) contributed an AI digital human for the printing industry, Qingdao Qianrui Shulian Information Technology (青岛千瑞数联信息技术有限公司) contributed a customer-service digital human named Xiao Rui (小瑞), and Qufu Hengwei Water Conservancy Machinery (曲阜恒威水工机械有限公司) contributed a digital-twin intelligent operations system. At Alibaba (阿里巴巴) global headquarters in Hangzhou, the company's annual "Ali Day" gathering this year showcased its Wen AI (问AI) digital human alongside the Qianwen AI smart glasses and a product referred to as HappyHorse, with the venue framed as a large-scale AI experience site for employees and guests. A separately listed company trading under the name Digital Human (数字人) announced a planned dividend of 0.60 yuan per ten shares, signalling commercial maturity within the dedicated digital-human business segment.

Marketing and E-commerce: In Hebei, the provincial industrial-products e-commerce livestreaming initiative was launched featuring AI digital humans, virtual customer-service avatars, and cloud-based immersive factory environments designed to push Hebei manufactured goods into the national market through high-throughput streaming. Linghou Digital, beyond its government and tourism work, supplies full-domain marketing and AI digital human solutions to higher-education institutions for brand promotion, enrolment, and student-recruitment campaigns, positioning the digital human as a customer-acquisition asset. The Shandong-based AI short-drama industry has developed a deep supply chain in which face-data sets purchased at low cost are batch-loaded into AI models to manufacture digital human likenesses and virtual short-drama characters for serialised online content, with reporting indicating considerable scale in Jinan and surrounding cities.

Media and News Production: Huibo Star (慧播星) digital humans have been adopted as on-screen narrators across multiple Chinese online news outputs in this reporting period, including video coverage of a snakebite emergency in Yunnan where a villager bitten by a king cobra was treated with antivenom airlifted from Kunming, video coverage of a custody case originating in Hong Kong that traced an infant's death and disposal back to the mother's fabricated kidnapping claim, and video coverage of a Shijiazhuang community clinic found to be stocking large quantities of expired medication. The pattern indicates that Huibo Star functions as a syndicated digital-human presenter layer used by Chinese news content producers to standardize delivery across socially sensitive video stories.

Cultural Events and Expos: At the twenty-eighth Beijing Science Expo, the Mentougou district presented its "Jingxi Theatre Valley" (京西剧谷) industrial cluster with a focus on ultra-high-definition digital audio-visual production, AIGC content generation, immersive interactive experiences, AI film and television creation tools, and virtual digital human technology, positioning the cluster as a science-and-creativity hub for the western capital. The same expo, which closed after drawing more than seventy thousand visitor experiences, allowed attendees to simulate drone flight, generate AI-assisted poetry and painting, and watch personalized digital human avatars of themselves perform a fashion-show "costume change" sequence, integrating the personal digital-human concept into a mass-participation science-communication setting.

Ethical and Legal Contexts: A netizen in Datong, Shanxi was placed under administrative detention by public security authorities after operating a livestream commerce stream that used an unauthorized digital human modelled on the likeness of Taiwanese political figure Zheng Liwen (郑丽文), illustrating the enforcement edge of mainland Chinese rules on the unauthorized use of a recognisable person's image to generate a virtual being for commercial purposes. A parallel report from Qilu Net detailing the AI short-drama "face-grading" supply chain in Shandong raised governance concerns about the trade in low-priced facial datasets that are subsequently used to manufacture digital human personas and virtual short-drama characters without clear consent, framing the practice as an emerging compliance and identity-rights risk within China's virtual-being industry.

May 10 News

Healthcare: In Guangdong Province, an AI digital alter ego programme deploys tier-three hospital physicians as digital twins at the grassroots level, drawing on a diabesity reversal protocol that addresses Type 2 diabetes accompanied by weight gain to deliver precision services to adolescent patients and to relieve the burden of chronic disease prevention in primary care settings. China Telecom (中国电信) and Fujian Provincial People's Hospital (福建省人民医院) have jointly introduced the digital alter ego "Xiaoji" (小吉), an intelligent medical spokesperson that fuses artificial intelligence with Traditional Chinese Medicine cultural elements and is positioned as able to listen, speak, and articulate medical principles, with the stated aim of making quality care more readily accessible across the network.

Entertainment: At the opening ceremony of this year's China Science Fiction Convention, the AI virtual host "Huanhuan" (幻幻) walked onto the stage in humanoid form, an embodiment that organisers used to mark how science fiction concepts have crossed into operational reality at major industry gatherings, with veteran science fiction figure Wu Yan (吴岩) framing the shift from earlier debates over how to keep science fiction alive to current discussions about where the industry is heading. Mango Excellent Media (芒果超媒), through its Mango TV unit, has reaffirmed its long-running media-technology portfolio that includes the virtual host "YAOYAO," an AR celebrity co-shooting interactive system, an interactive video platform, and IMGO, while signalling continued investment in interactive video standards alongside planned blockchain-based digital collectible products. (While users interact with the app branded as "Mango TV," IMGO (often stylized as imgo) represents the underlying technical infrastructure and the specific software ecosystem developed by their subsidiary, Hunan Happy Sunshine Interactive Entertainment Media.)

Hunan Happy Sunshine Interactive Entertainment Media (湖南快乐阳光互动娱乐传媒有限公司) is the Changsha-based operating entity of Mango TV (芒果TV), the online video streaming platform of Hunan Broadcasting System and a flagship asset of state-owned listed group Mango Excellent Media. Anchored in the Malanshan Video Cultural Creative Industrial Park, the company has positioned digital humans as a core front-end technology supporting its broadcast, variety, and IP-driven entertainment business, building an in-house R&D track that has produced an extensive Chinese patent portfolio in the digital human field covering automatic 3D digital human modeling from two-dimensional keypoints, driven animation and dynamic comic generation, AI-interactive digital human video synthesis, cloud-edge integrated 3D generation, virtual character display, multimodal emotion recognition, and digital human livestreaming. On the production side it formalized a strategic partnership with Unilumin Group (洲明科技) in August 2022 covering virtual production, LED volume shooting, and the integration of digital human and related frontier technologies into broadcast and film workflows, and on the policy side its metaverse-oriented intelligent interactive content platform was selected for the Hunan Province Digital New Infrastructure 100 Landmark Projects list published by the Hunan Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology in April 2025, embedding the company within Hunan's provincial strategy to build out a complete virtual human and metaverse industry chain ecosystem around Malanshan. 

Tourism: Liye Ancient City in Longshan County of the Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture in Hunan Province launched a "technology plus history" experience during the 2026 May Day holiday, anchored by 3D virtual humans projected within a white light curtain, with the majority of visitors reporting that the technology rendered history into a tangible image. The 2025 Metaverse Typical Cases list, jointly announced by the Office of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Office of the National Radio and Television Administration, comprised 193 selected projects, within which Guangxi Lvfa Yuanjing Cultural Tourism Development (广西旅发元境文化旅游开发有限公司) was recognised for its AI digital human "Xiaojing" (晓境) and Hunan Meichuang Digital Technology (湖南美创数字科技有限公司) for its VR immersive product. Xinjiang contributed three selected entries including a digital human art appreciation massive open online course, while the Mita City Metaverse Park within the Jinsha Beach Tourism Resort in Heshuo County operates as the largest metaverse park in Northwest China across more than three thousand square metres of digital space, weaving virtual and physical experiences together. Shanxi Zhisheng Media Technology (山西智胜传媒科技股份有限公司) was likewise selected from Shanxi Province for its virtual digital human "Qingniao" (青鸟), used to support cultural and tourism applications.

On August 3, 2025, the Heshuo Jinsha Beach Mita City Metaverse Park (和硕金沙滩迷塔城元宇宙乐园) officially opened within the Jinsha Beach Tourism Resort in Xinjiang, marking a significant milestone in the region's high-quality development. Spanning over 3,000 square meters, this immersive facility—the largest of its kind in Northwest China—utilizes cutting-edge VR, AR, and MR technologies to blend virtual and physical realities across themed zones like "Boundless Navigation" and the "Fantasy Light Realm." Developed in collaboration with Shanghai Shiji Mita Culture Technology, the park aims to revolutionize local cultural tourism by offering interactive digital experiences, dome theater screenings, and "phygital" entertainment that bridges the gap between traditional sightseeing and the digital future.

Marketing: Longgang Wanda Plaza in Shenzhen launched the "MAY Good Life Festival" interactive scene with an AI digital human variety show, an AI smart styling mirror, and a giant smiling-face light installation, contributing to a holiday footfall of more than 920,000 visits across the district. Monster Intelligence (怪兽智能), through its generative engine optimisation platform, markets an AI digital human matrix that converts written copy into presenter-style short videos with a single click, supports continuous twenty-four-hour multi-platform live streaming, allows the digital human to answer audience questions automatically against an enterprise knowledge base, and enables multi-language cross-border broadcasting, positioned as a distinctive capability for brands competing in the AI search era around platforms such as the Doubao (豆包) generative search service operated by ByteDance (字节跳动). China Mobile Migu (中国移动咪咕) integrates an AI alter ego intelligent agent into its AI Business Card product, which targets service industries, marketing teams, and merchants with around-the-clock automated business consultation and AIGC private-domain marketing material generation, positioned alongside an emerging AI Wang Pu (旺铺) account offering for storefront operators.

Enterprise: CRRC Group (中国中车) saw its digital employees "Che Xiaozhao" (车小赵) and "Che Xiaozhang" (车小张) selected within the 2025 Metaverse Typical Cases under the typical digital human category, marking the rolling-stock manufacturer's deployment of branded synthetic staff in customer-facing and corporate communications roles and reinforcing the group's digital service and brand-communication capabilities. (CRRC Group is a massive Chinese state-owned enterprise and the world’s largest manufacturer of rail transit equipment.) GRG Banking (广电运通) was recognised in the same national list for its front-desk service digital human, classified as a typical digital human case and illustrating the migration of synthetic characters into reception and self-service banking touchpoints. Shanxi Pengfei Group (山西鹏飞集团有限公司) was also included on the same list with its explanation and training digital human project, extending the reach of synthetic characters into visitor-reception and workforce training contexts.

Research: Soul App, through its dedicated artificial intelligence unit Soul AI Lab, has released the open-source model SoulX-LiveAct as a real-time digital human generation framework targeting long-form stability and real-time inference. The release introduces Neighbor Forcing as an autoregressive condition-propagation mechanism aligned with the diffusion step, alongside the ConvKV Memory mechanism intended to mitigate degradation in extended generation, with restructured video memory management said to support hour-scale stable real-time output and to address the industry's demand for sustained synthetic-character video generation, complementing the same platform's earlier voice large model that enabled real-time voice calls with virtual humans for cross-dimensional dialogue. A joint research team comprising the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (香港科技大学), Zhejiang University (浙江大学), the National University of Singapore, and additional Hong Kong-based collaborators has produced a "talking AI alter ego" system (EgoLife), advancing audio-driven synthetic-character generation across institutions in Greater China and Singapore. Yoozoo Network (游族网络) and People's Daily Online (人民网), through their jointly established AI Interaction Corpus Laboratory, have released the inaugural batch of an "embodied interaction corpus dataset" providing high-quality training data for embodied intelligence and virtual digital human interaction capabilities, while concurrently launching a mainstream-values corpus ecosystem alliance.

Yoozoo Network (游族网络), a Shanghai-listed Chinese gaming and interactive entertainment company best known for mobile and online titles based on properties such as the Three-Body Problem and Game of Thrones, has in recent years repositioned itself as an active participant in China's digital human and embodied AI ecosystem, leveraging its accumulated behavioural data from large-scale virtual interaction scenarios. The company has built a publicly visible digital human strategy around partnerships with state media and AI infrastructure providers, most notably its collaboration with People's Daily Online (人民网) to co-establish the AI Interaction Corpus Innovation Laboratory, which in May 2026 released the first batch of its Embodied Interaction Multimodal Corpus Dataset, a high-quality training resource spanning twenty sub-scenarios across three principal domains of tour guiding and retail guidance, household service, and gaming and virtual digital humans, with synchronised hardware-triggered annotation across action, expression, language, and alignment. Yoozoo Network frames this work through what its Director and Chief Strategy Officer Fu Kun (傅焜) describes as a tripartite training framework linking corpus, digital humans, and robots, intended to support deployment in cultural services, smart cultural tourism, and urban space management, and grounded explicitly in the mainstream value corpus ecology promoted by People's Daily Online to ensure social responsibility, cultural coherence, and ethical compliance in machine behaviour. The company has additionally signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Yuncong Technology (云从科技) targeting AI large model research for the gaming industry, and has developed in-house tools including Yoo action, a markerless motion-capture pipeline for digital human animation using AI-driven hybrid deformation skeletal binding, alongside the large-model-based AI social product Party Yoo, positioning Yoozoo Network as a hybrid entertainment-and-infrastructure player whose virtual being activity sits at the intersection of game content production, embodied intelligence research, and state-aligned corpus governance. 

Ethical Contexts: The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (智源研究院) hosted the third instalment of its "Mountain Sea Night Talk" series focused on the Digital Virtual Human Information Service Management Measures (Draft for Comments), examining the legal positioning and governance boundaries of digital virtual humans through technical, platform, and judicial perspectives, and observing that the legislation does not attempt a precise definition of digital humans but instead enumerates their characteristics and service scenarios in order to bring them within the existing internet governance regime. The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家网信办) is preparing further rules to comprehensively regulate digital virtual human services across the full lifecycle, complementing the second-phase "Qinglang" special action that targets misuse of digital virtual human technology in live streaming and image creation, AI-generated "digital swill" content, fabricated information, and the dissemination of violent or vulgar material. A strict public statement has prohibited the unauthorised production and dissemination of digital human videos depicting Go grandmaster Nie Weiping (聂卫平), highlighting the personality-rights and identity-protection issues that synthetic likenesses raise around well-known figures. A 315 consumer-protection feature has documented the use of AI-generated virtual personas including faux experts, mothers, and origin-region operators in live-streaming sales, where the synthetic identity tags are deployed to lower consumer vigilance and induce trust in misleading promotions. ("315" refers to the 315 Gala, also known as the Wan Hui, an extremely influential annual consumer rights television program in China.) A litigation summary discussed within the same governance forum described a case in which a defendant edited an original video, replaced certain information, and tagged the modified content with the names of other virtual digital humans, raising consumer-confusion and copyright concerns at the intersection of intellectual property and synthetic-character ecosystems.

May 09 News

Healthcare: Shanghai First People's Hospital (上海市第一人民医院) introduced a health digital human named Gongji Xiaoyi (公济小壹) to serve as a personalized in-pocket guide for patients navigating its facility. The avatar provides directional navigation between departments and service windows, walks users through the steps required to complete appointments, conveys preparatory medical instructions such as fasting requirements ahead of tests, and routes patients to the next stage of care after consultations conclude.

Entertainment and Performance: A fully holographic digital recreation of Teresa Teng (邓丽君) staged a live performance in Zhengzhou, Henan, demonstrating the use of holographic digital-human technology to revive iconic figures for stage shows. In broadcast media, the Huibo Star (慧播星) digital human presenter has been used to narrate video news segments, including coverage tied to international sporting events such as World Cup broadcasting matters. Within municipal cultural marketing, Wuhan launched a crayfish-themed AI digital-human mascot named Qian Bao (钳宝) for its small lobster consumption season, anchoring five consecutive days of themed concerts, fashion-style parades, interactive experiences, robotic creative shows, and an original crayfish theme song.

Marketing and Livestreaming Commerce: Pozhen Food Corp. (朴珍食品有限责任公司) in Wuchuan County, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, established an AI digital-human livestream studio staffed by virtual broadcasters, deploying a multi-platform, multi-account matrix to drive seamless livestream sales of livestock products. In Yinchuan's Xingqing District, Ningxia, an AI digital-human host conducted a livestreamed job fair on May 7, 2026, walking candidates through salary structures and benefits in real time as the online complement to a hybrid offline-online recruitment event. The Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area Administrative Approval Bureau in Yizhuang formalized a pre-matched business category called the OPC+ Digital Human Creation Company Package, allowing one-person digital-human content creation companies to obtain business licenses in roughly thirty minutes. Yunnan Tourism Co., Ltd. (云南旅游股份有限公司), based in Kunming's Panlong District, traded up 0.84 percent on roughly 32.06 million yuan of volume on the strength of investor interest tied to its virtual digital human and virtual reality concepts.

Yunnan Tourism Co., Ltd. (云南旅游股份有限公司; SZSE: 002059), a comprehensive tourism enterprise headquartered in Kunming and positioned as an "all-region tourism integrated service provider" with core assets including the Kunming World Horticultural Expo Garden, has positioned itself within the digital human space through its tourism-culture-technology business segment, where it is actively researching and developing virtual digital humans, intelligent robotics, and intelligent voice interaction technologies as part of its innovative "Cultural Tourism Interactive Performance Intelligent Robot System" (文旅互动表演智能机器人系统) project, which aims to enable real-time conversational digital humans for smart services and performances within cultural tourism scenarios; according to its 2025 specific-target A-share issuance prospectus and disclosures through early 2026, the company is channeling raised funds toward frontier technology research to elevate the creative and technological dimensions of its tourism projects, and as a result has been classified by financial data terminals under the "virtual digital human" (虚拟数字人), "metaverse" (元宇宙概念), "VR/virtual reality," and "AIGC" concept sectors—further reinforced by its parent group China OCT (Overseas Chinese Town), whose Happy Valley subsidiary launched the AI digital human "Joey" (乔伊) on the Huacheng tourism platform—although the company's digital human initiatives remain largely at the R&D and pilot-application stage amid a challenging financial backdrop, with 2025 revenue reported at RMB 351 million, down 36.96% year-on-year. 

Education and Cultural Heritage: The Macau Education and Youth Bureau (澳门教青局) introduced AI digital humans for the first time in 2026 into its lecture series Come Recognize Chinese Scientists' Spirit Short Lectures, presenting figures such as the Two Bombs Heroes nuclear and missile scientists to high school students at Macau-Portuguese High School in observance of the May Fourth Spirit. In Zhejiang, a red revolutionary ideology course at Hangzhou No. 2 High School Baima Lake Campus debuted a digital teacher named Binbing (滨兵), modeled with AI techniques and voice synthesis on Zhejiang model retired soldier and War of Resistance veteran Chen Jili. A Tao Xingzhi AI digital human has likewise been deployed for historical education programming in Chongqing's Heyang district. Hangzhou's education equipment exhibition showcased AI digital-human reading guides paired with smart blackboard interaction and precision teaching tablets within "AI+ Creative Thinking Classroom" and "AI+ Student Development" programs. Zhejiang Business & Technology Institute (浙江工商职业技术学院) operates a Micro-Academy product-education integration program with the Wuxiang Town government of Ningbo's Yinzhou District and Zhejiang CRRC Electric Bus Co., Ltd. (浙江中车电车有限公司), built around a digital-human broadcasting studio that links livestream environments with competition stages. The Silk Road Beauty Education Metaverse Digital Human Project (丝路美育) in Xinjiang, recognized in the national 2025 Metaverse Typical Cases and endorsed by the Ministry of Education's online-education arm, applies digital humans to aesthetic education and to the innovative expression of Chinese traditional culture. The Wuhou Temple Museum in Chengdu features a Little Zhuge Liang (小诸葛) digital character developed in connection with Sichuan Chuantou Zhixing Digital (四川川投智胜数字), while Shanxi Zhixing Media Technology Co., Ltd. (山西智胜传媒科技股份有限公司) in Taiyuan operates a Blue Bird (青鸟) virtual digital human positioned as a national metaverse case study in cultural empowerment. Guangxi Lvfa Yuanjing Culture and Tourism Development Co., Ltd. (广西旅发元境文化旅游开发有限公司) in Nanning runs the Xiao Jing (晓境) AI digital human for tourism promotion, including coverage of the Mount Luyou First Antler Harvest Festival, and the company's work was named to the 2025 Metaverse Typical Cases. Within the 2026 Digital China Innovation Competition's digital culture-and-tourism track finals in Longyan, Fujian, twenty-two teams competed under the theme of new variables in cultural tourism, with digital humans integrated into the Fujian Vision Smart Travel (福见智游) culture-and-tourism large-model platform built on a proprietary, compliance-oriented dataset.

Government and Public Services: In Taijiang District, Fuzhou, the province's first 3D police digital human, Rong Xiaoan (榕小安), has gone on duty powered by a large language model. The Guangzhou Municipal Bureau of Industry and Information Technology (广州市工业和信息化局) introduced the Sui Xiaoxin (穗小信) industry-and-IT policy digital human to interpret policy for more than 150 enterprises during a cluster connection event in Huangpu District's Sino-Singapore Knowledge City. In Karamay, Xinjiang, the municipal Likban (立克办) services app embeds digital humans across its more than three thousand government service items. Tianjin authorities pair digital humans with unmanned drone patrols to deliver legal publicity, raise problem-detection rates, and improve law-enforcement efficiency. National recognition flowed in through the 2025 Metaverse Typical Cases program led by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology with three sister departments, which selected cases across the categories of interactive terminals, technical tools, and industry applications, with Jiangsu province contributing eighteen selected cases (including three featuring the Tian Tian Shu Ying (天天数影) digital human product), Shandong contributing more than ten, and additional selections from Xinjiang, Guangxi, and other regions.

Tian Tian Shu Ying (天天数影) is a China‑based AI platform that specializes in generating short e‑commerce videos using realistic digital humans and a large library of ready‑made product footage. It is developed by Suzhou Caicaikan Technology (苏州财采看科技) and is widely used by Douyin creators who want to produce product‑promotion content quickly without filming. The platform offers automated editing modes, customizable AI presenters, and access to thousands of consumer‑goods video materials, making it a streamlined tool for AI‑driven content creation. Its primary and most reliable access point is the official site: shuying.tiantianhub.com

Financial Services: GRG (广电运通) developed a Front Desk Service Digital Human selected for the national 2025 Metaverse Typical Cases and deployed across more than ten financial institutions, including China Construction Bank (建行), Agricultural Bank of China (农行), Gansu Rural Commercial Bank (甘肃农商), Shanghai Bank (上海银行), and Guangdong Rural Credit Cooperatives (广东农信). The same multimodal, intelligent-device-based platform is being extended into government affairs, medical insurance counters, hospital service points, and other public-facing scenarios.

Enterprise and Industrial Operations: Shandong Inspur Intelligent Production Technology Co., Ltd. (山东浪潮智能生产技术有限公司) developed an AI digital human tailored to the printing industry that earned national recognition in the 2025 Metaverse Typical Cases, while Qingdao Qianrui Shulian Information Technology Co., Ltd. (青岛千瑞数联信息技术有限公司) was honored in the same program for its customer-service digital human. Bijie Power Supply Bureau (毕节供电局) self-developed Baodian Weishi (保电卫士), Guizhou's first power-grid digital employee dedicated to power-protection operations. Sichuan Yifang Smart Technology Co., Ltd. (四川易方智慧科技有限公司) in Chengdu was likewise recognized nationally for a digital-twin-based, large-scale transportation and culture-tourism metaverse platform. Industry commentary out of Jinan, Shandong has further grouped digital-human livestreaming alongside smart cultural-creative output and other AI applications as new business modes that previously required high-end hardware and specialized expertise but are now broadly accessible.

Technology Industry and Research: Silicon-based Intelligence (硅基智能) holds 32.2 percent of China's digital-human intelligent-agent market, positioning it as the dominant player in the sector. Xingfu Technology (星蝠科技), based in Nanjing, Jiangsu, focuses on lightweight virtual digital humans, AI digital-human research and development, and customized digital-human creation services for enterprise clients. Shiyou Technology (世优科技) has partnered with the Peking University School of Scientific Intelligence (北京大学科学智能学院) to launch a Digital Human Training Joint Laboratory alongside an AI Agent Joint Laboratory marking the institute's first anniversary.

Ethical and Regulatory Contexts: Shanxi Datong cyber police, under the oversight of the Public Security Bureau Cyber Police Bureau, placed an individual surnamed Xing in administrative detention after the suspect generated an unauthorized AI digital human resembling Chinese Nationalist Party Chairman Zheng Lihao (郑丽文) and used the synthetic likeness to conduct livestream sales across a multi-platform, multi-account matrix, an act treated as identity misappropriation and fraudulent solicitation. In a separate intellectual-property judgment, a court in Changsha, Hunan ruled that the image of a virtual digital human can be protected under Chinese copyright law, finding that an individual surnamed Sun infringed reproduction and information-network-dissemination rights by selling the unauthorized virtual digital human model Tianyu Zhi Chu (天妤之初) on a model marketplace operated by a local Changsha technology company. Heilongjiang's Suiling County is meanwhile pursuing a four-hundred-million-yuan digital-industry hub centered on animation, line-art, and texturing work that supports digital-human production pipelines, illustrating the geographic broadening of the supporting ecosystem.

May 08 News

Broadcasting and Short Video Entertainment: Hunan Economic Television (湖南经视) has placed the AI anchors Shengsheng (声声) and Shuangshuang (双双) into prime-time rotation on the Jingshi News program, with the human presenters moving off-screen as the synthetic anchors take the lead read. In Shanghai, MCN agencies have been adopting digital human performance and intelligent editing into the production stack of vertical short dramas, with one operation reporting a compressed post-production cycle on a sixty-episode series from three weeks to five days and a labor-cost reduction of roughly forty percent. The same techniques have driven a controversy known colloquially as AI face-stealing (AI 偷脸), in which performers record short clips that are then reused as personalized AI digital humans assigned to extras, supporting characters, or leads in subsequent productions, prompting public discussion about consent, personality rights, and the structural change that AI digital human generation has introduced into how on-screen identity is produced.

AI face-stealing (AI 偷脸) refers to the unauthorized capture and generative reconstruction of a person's facial likeness for use in synthetic video, most often as a controllable digital human asset deployed in AI short dramas, livestream commerce, and short-form video advertising. The practice emerged as a grey-market by-product of China's AI short drama (AI 短剧) boom, where production houses bypass talent fees and endorsement contracts by having AI directly borrow a top star's face to draw traffic and revenue at near-zero marginal cost. High-profile cases have driven the issue into the mainstream, including Yi Yangqianxi (易烊千玺), whose likeness was inserted without consent into AI-generated short dramas, and Dilraba (迪丽热巴), who prevailed in a portrait rights action that led Douyin (抖音) to remove roughly 530,000 offending videos. The supply side is openly commercial, with e-commerce shops selling "AI image" packages from around 16.8 yuan to several thousand and reported full face buy-outs for AI drama use at roughly 1,500 yuan per face, a pricing structure that leaves ordinary citizens, body models, and lower-tier performers with limited practical recourse against downstream misuse. The regulatory response sharpened in April 2026, when the Cyberspace Administration of China (国家互联网信息办公室) released draft measures on digital virtual human information services explicitly framed against this disorder, while the China Broadcasting Television Society Performers Committee (中国广播电视社会组织联合会演员委员会) issued a parallel industry statement drawing red lines against unauthorized AI face-swapping and voice cloning, and Douyin published its own AIGC rules banning unauthorized face-swap and voice imitation content. Within the broader digital human field, AI face-stealing has become the defining negative case shaping portrait rights, voice rights, and the emerging doctrine of digital personality (数字人格) protection, and it is steadily pushing the industry away from unlicensed scraping toward formal digital human avatar authorization arrangements, exemplified by the contract under which Chongqing Tinger Media signed six real-world internet personalities and actors to license their likenesses, voices, and motion data for use in future AI-generated productions. 

Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and the National Metaverse Showcase: Guangxi Lvfa Yuanjing Cultural Tourism Development (广西旅发元境文化旅游开发) developed the AI digital human Xiaojing (晓境), which the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and the National Radio and Television Administration jointly recognized as a typical digital human case in the 2025 Metaverse Typical Cases list of one hundred ninety-three national entries spanning digital human, product, park, and standard categories. The Dazu Rock Carvings Research Institute (大足石刻研究院) leads the Cloud Tour Dazu Rock Carvings project, which combines digital twin reconstruction with digital virtual human guides and produces a millimeter-precision rebuild of the heritage site rendered at 8K resolution with real-time ray tracing. Mt. Tai scenic area (泰山景区) launched an AI digital human for visitor-facing services during the May Day 2026 period as part of Shandong's broader holiday tourism rollout, which also included the deployment of 500 lightweight climbing-assist robots at core points such as Zhongtianmen. 

Government and Public Services: The Suzhou municipal authorities (苏州) launched the AI digital human Zheng Xiaoyi (政小易) inside a multimodal government service hall, supporting an AI plus chat-while-handle service mode that covers eight categories of public business including labor dispatch registration and first-hand housing certification. Jilin Expressway (吉林高速) assembled a development team for the Jixing Gaosu AI digital human (吉行高速AI数字人) and used the avatar to host livestreamed traffic-clearance and travel-information services during the May Day holiday, framing the deployment as part of a longer roadmap for smart-mobility upgrades on the provincial highway network. The two cases together illustrate how local governments and state-owned operators are adopting digital human front ends as a layer between citizens and conventional service workflows, with both initiatives positioning the avatar as the public face of an underlying AI-driven service backend.

Enterprise and Workplace Avatars: China Mobile (中国移动) presented Lingxi (灵犀) at the Digital China Construction Summit through its Hangzhou research center, demonstrating a workflow in which a user uploads a single selfie and selects gender, age, and clothing style to generate a personalized 3D digital twin paired with a gender-matched voice, marketed as a consumer-facing personal avatar service from a state telecommunications operator. A parallel workplace pattern documented across Chinese enterprise reporting describes the distillation of co-workers, ex-partners, and public figures including the well-known education consultant Zhang Xuefeng (张雪峰) into AI alter egos by ingesting Feishu (飞书) chat logs, DingTalk (钉钉) documents, and work email archives, with the same digital twin pipeline beginning to enter film and television production as a substitute for real actors whose schedules, condition, and fee negotiations would otherwise constrain a shoot.

Fraud, Impersonation, and Likeness Misuse: Organized fraud rings operating across Chinese short-video platforms have mass-produced AI domineering CEO digital humans aimed at older audiences, with the synthetic figures delivering scripted affectionate messages around the clock to extract money and emotional commitment from elderly viewers and prompting public-interest commentary about technology being weaponized against vulnerable populations. The Datong cyber-police in Shanxi (山西大同) detained a man surnamed Xing for running unauthorized livestream commerce using an AI digital human modeled on Kuomintang chairwoman Cheng Lifen (郑丽文), classifying the conduct as identity fraud and warning that AI generation does not confer legal immunity. In a separate matter, the family of Go grandmaster Nie Weiping (聂卫平) issued a public statement declaring that no organization or individual has been authorized to produce, use, or distribute digital humans, AI virtual likenesses, or simulated voice content based on him, signaling rising assertion of personality rights against unauthorized synthetic reproductions.

Regulatory and Judicial Developments: The Cyberspace Administration of China released the Digital Virtual Human Information Service Management Measures (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法征求意见稿) in 2026 as the first national regulatory instrument addressed specifically to digital virtual humans, complementing the parallel cybersecurity standard on AI generated synthetic content and signaling a move toward a dedicated rules layer for this category of entity. The Beijing High People's Court (北京市高级人民法院) reported its 2025 intellectual property protection results and highlighted a typical case confirming that virtual digital human likenesses qualify for protection under copyright law, with the dispute centering on the virtual digital humans Tianyu (天妤) and Zhichu (之初) jointly produced by four entities. Courts have additionally clarified in related rulings that the personality rights of natural persons extend to their virtual likenesses and that AI-generated images expressing personalized user choice and arrangement may individually qualify as protectable works, establishing a developing legal architecture in which both the rights of represented persons and the authorship interests of digital human creators are recognized within Chinese law.

May 07 News

Healthcare: Fuling Hospital Affiliated to Chongqing University (重庆大学附属涪陵医院) launched the "Fu Doctor" (涪医生) AI consultation assistant, a dedicated digital human built on the DeepSeek (深度求索) large language model paired with the hospital's proprietary medical knowledge base. The deployment is positioned as a full-process, multi-modal, single-stop intelligent care service rather than a back-office tool, anchoring the assistant in a named hospital identity for front-end patient interaction. The case illustrates the migration of digital humans into clinical-facing roles at named medical institutions in inland China.

National Metaverse Typical Cases: The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (工业和信息化部), Ministry of Education (教育部), Ministry of Culture and Tourism (文化和旅游部), and National Radio and Television Administration (国家广播电视总局) jointly published the 2025 National Metaverse Typical Cases list of 193 entries, divided into interactive terminals, technology tools, and industry applications. Beijing accounted for thirty cases, Sichuan placed third nationally with seventeen entries spanning Chengdu, Mianyang, Luzhou, and four other prefectures, and Chengdu alone contributed eleven cases that ranked the city first among sub-provincial cities. Chengdu Jiuzhou Electronic Information System (成都九洲电子信息系统股份有限公司) entered the list with the intelligent interactive digital human "Yuanqi" (元启), and Sichuan Daily Press Media Group (四川日报报业集团) was recognized for the Chuanguan News digital reporter. Chengdu Du Fu Thatched Cottage Museum (成都杜甫草堂博物馆) contributed the intelligent examiner "AI Du Fu" (AI 杜甫) as a heritage-oriented digital human, while Jiangsu province placed twelve entries on the list including the digital human "Tian Tian Shu Ying" (天天数影). Sunwoda (欣旺达) was recognized for its Sunwoda Industrial Metaverse Platform that incorporates digital human components within an industrial setting.

Broadcasting and News Anchoring: Hunan Jingshi Channel (湖南经视) formally deployed AI digital human anchors "Sheng Sheng" (声声) and "Shuang Shuang" (双双) on the flagship "Jingshi News" program, moving human anchors off-camera and into supporting roles while the digital humans took the prime-time broadcast slot. Subsequent commentary across Chinese media flagged persistent factual errors in AI-driven broadcast output and drew comparisons to a Hong Kong drama plotline in which a former female anchor and a deceased male anchor were reconstituted as AI digital humans for continued reporting. The case marks the migration of digital humans from supplementary news segments into core anchor positions at provincial-level broadcasters.

Tourism, Culture, and Festival Marketing: Hangzhou (杭州) hosted the "Thousand Years Wuyue · AI Hangzhou" themed program over the May Day holiday, with the Wensan Digital Life District deploying digital human interactions to integrate browsing, play, learning, shopping, and photography in a single experiential venue, and the city reported 16.96 million visitor arrivals during the holiday under a science-plus-tourism positioning. Wuhan (武汉) elevated the AI digital human "Qian Bao" (钳宝) as the central IP of its crayfish festival, with a dedicated music video, a theme song running across screens, and robotic dance performances staged to fuse food culture with technology display. Harbin Science Palace (哈尔滨科学宫) reopened a renovated exhibition hall featuring digital humans, painting robots, motion-sensing spatial installations, and brain-test interactives inside a metaverse large-space experience zone, anchoring digital humans within a public science-popularization context. A Tao Xingzhi AI digital human was deployed in Hechuan, Chongqing, framed as a way to bring the historical educator's pedagogy into active classroom and exhibition delivery through a recognizable named character.

Banking and Enterprise Customer Service: Bank of Shanghai (上海银行) accelerated deployment of a bank-wide AI platform that already includes more than one hundred agents, an "Intelligent Number Inquiry" assistant, and a "Financial Customer Service Digital Human," with AI specialist staffing projected to grow to two hundred personnel over three years. Across the wider banking sector, the 2026 spring recruitment cycle introduced a digital virtual human as the first interview screener for graduate applicants, generating both a structured human-machine interaction format and a parallel concern about candidates using AI tools to answer AI interviewers. Gaoxin Talent (高新人才), a Xiamen-based human resources firm, established a Shanghai entity to scale replication of digital human practice into enterprise services, university talent training, and industrial enablement.

Live Streaming, Tourism Operations, and Public Affairs Communications: Jilin Expressway (吉林高速) operated AI digital human live broadcasts during the May Day holiday in coordination with Changchun cultural-tourism operators at destinations such as Spring Capital West and Sakura Island, and announced formation of a dedicated Jixing Expressway AI digital human live broadcasting development team for sustained intelligent upgrade. HuiBoStar (慧播星) digital humans were used to deliver short-form video commentary on the Hong Kong police adoption of domestically produced submachine guns and on the Shanxi authorities' response to disorder around the Xuankong Temple scenic area, indicating reuse of a single digital human platform across distinct public-affairs and law-enforcement narratives. Huawei Cloud (华为云) was identified as the core ecosystem partner whose marketplace hosts a digital human broadcasting service that has served more than two hundred local enterprises in Tianjin since 2018, locating digital human distribution within a major domestic cloud provider's commercial channel.

Public Security and Police Training: Changsha Railway Public Security Bureau Shaoyang North Station (长沙铁路公安处邵阳北所) held a thematic monthly session on artificial intelligence in grassroots railway policing, drawing on the Shenyang Railway Public Security Bureau AI digital human as a reference case for how policing units are operationalizing digital human resources in day-to-day public security work. The session combined national AI strategy guidance, central railway public security policy, and the digital human deployment as a training reference, signaling a transition of digital humans from media production into internal training and capability-building inside law enforcement bureaucracies.

Industry Platforms and Open-source Development: Xiangxin Technology (相芯科技), founded in 2016 and incubated from the CAD and Computer Graphics National Key Laboratory at Zhejiang University, was named on the 2026 Zhejiang Unicorn Enterprise Series Ranking and the 2026 Hangzhou Unicorn and Quasi-Unicorn Enterprise List, with a founding team drawn from Microsoft, Apple, and Huawei alumni and a business focused on digital humans and image special effects. Soul (Soul App) advanced its initial public offering process around an AI-driven reconstruction of its digital human application ecosystem, including an open-source release of a fourteen-billion-parameter real-time digital human model intended to address the trade-off between high-fidelity output requiring expensive H800 cluster infrastructure and lower-cost configurations that produce facial freeze and visual breakdown. Cloud Strike Network Technology Hebei (云袭网络技术河北有限公司) filed a patent titled "Virtual Human Interaction Method and Device Based on Dynamic Strategy Adjustment," publication number CN121979378A, with an application date in 2025, indicating continued patent-level activity around virtual human interaction logic outside the major platform players.

Education and Training Infrastructure: Nanjing (南京) hosts the Nanjing Digital Human Training Base, positioned for students interested in digital human technology, and the Nanjing Self-Media Maker Academy, which is referenced within rankings of self-media training organizations covering digital human production for short-video and broadcast use. These institutional layers, taken together with the Tao Xingzhi AI digital human in Chongqing Hechuan, indicate a build-out of vocational and higher-education channels feeding the national digital human industry rather than reliance on isolated corporate training programs.

Trade and Marketing Outreach: Digital Human Technology (数字人科技) participated in the Canton Fair (广交会) and reported attracting more than five hundred visiting clients during the event, positioning digital human production and integration services as an export-oriented offering and connecting the technology directly to inbound foreign procurement channels rather than to domestic consumer platforms alone.

The Canton Fair (广交会), formally the China Import and Export Fair (中国进出口商品交易会), is the country's largest and longest-running trade exhibition, held biannually in Guangzhou and structured across three phases that successively spotlight advanced manufacturing, quality home goods, and lifestyle products. Its engagement with digital humans began at scale at the 136th session in October 2024, when the organizers introduced Xiaohui (小惠), the fair's first official virtual digital human, deployed as a bilingual Chinese-English digital host who appeared on outdoor screens along the Pearl River walkway at Area D and on the newly launched Canton Fair App to deliver forum announcements, exhibitor guidance, and event briefings. Subsequent editions have deepened this integration, with the 137th session in April 2025 featuring a service robot zone alongside AI digital human applications in foreign-related legal consultation services and tax outreach (the Guangzhou tax bureau's AI host Sui Xiaoying, 穗小颖), and the 138th session in October and November 2025 inaugurating a Smart Healthcare zone where high-definition virtual anatomy tables and three-dimensional digital human dissection systems drew significant international buyer interest. By the 139th session in April 2026, multilingual interactive AI digital human displays had become a standard tool for exhibitors targeting cross-border buyers, with companies such as Guangxi Guancheng Electronics (广西冠成电子) using AI digital human all-in-one machines to attract purchasers from the United Arab Emirates, India, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia, while Shandong Digital Human Technology Co., Ltd. (山东数字人科技股份有限公司) appeared as a recurring VIP exhibitor across multiple sessions showcasing virtual anatomy and 3D printing product lines, and the Ministry of Commerce's "Time-Honored Brands at the Canton Fair" (老字号走进广交会) initiative used AI Encyclopedia digital humans to narrate heritage brand stories to global audiences. 

Regulatory and Ethical Contexts: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家网信办) 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, requiring that digital human content be labeled as such and that the use of another individual's face for modeling obtain that individual's separate consent before deployment. Actor Wang Jingsong (王劲松) publicly described unauthorized AI use of his face for digital human content, stating that even members of his family could not distinguish the AI-generated imagery from authentic footage of him. The Nie Weiping (聂卫平) studio issued a formal statement opposing unauthorized AI digital human videos of the Go grandmaster created without family authorization or legal license, framing the abuse as a deliberate exploitation of celebrity likeness through digital human pipelines. Commentary from Liu Xingliang (刘兴亮) characterized digital humans, also termed virtual humans, as an inevitable consequence of the disruptive technological movement around AI, situating the category as software-generated fictional or human-form characters within an emerging product class subject to active state regulation.

May 06 News

Entertainment and Short Drama: The Chinese AI-driven short drama sector continued to expand with new creator-economy tooling and platform-level pushes that drew significant public reaction. A post-2000s creator based in Ningbo entered the AI-generated animated drama space without a formal background, producing several breakout titles and using digital humans as round-the-clock livestream hosts to promote local products such as bayberries, seafood, and ancient-village tourism. iQiyi (爱奇艺) generated widespread backlash after proposing at a world-stage industry conference an "AI Artist Library" in which digital humans would replace human performers, with critics extending the controversy to broader concerns about AI-generated celebrities. Coverage of the underlying "face-lending" workflow—structurally analogous to the artist-library model—described creators recording short videos, uploading their likeness, and generating a personalized AI digital human that short-drama producers can later summon to fill extra, supporting, or lead roles. Douyin Group (抖音集团), through executive Li Liang, denied rumors that its short-drama platform Hongguo (红果) would begin charging users, with related industry coverage referencing established research traditions on virtual digital human commercial applications in China.

Broadcasting and News Production: Hunan Broadcasting System (湖南台) formally launched an AI digital human anchor that quickly trended on social platforms, with critics drawing parallels to a Hong Kong drama plotline in which deceased and departed presenters are "distilled" into AI digital humans to continue reading the news, and citing concerns about automated output reaching tens of millions of items per hour without effective oversight. Shanghai Media Group (上海广播电视台) showcased six young employees discussing how AI digital human avatars are now embedded in the team's video production pipeline, with the unit's coverage during the Two Sessions reaching over 2.2 million reads across platforms including the official Shanghai Release account. Provincial and municipal news outlets across Shanxi (山西), Hunan (湖南), and Hebei (河北) used the Huibo Star (慧播星) digital human platform to deliver press-conference and case-update video reports on subjects including the Hanging Temple scenic-area scalper crackdown, the Liuyang fireworks-factory explosion that left 26 dead and 61 injured, and the execution of a defendant convicted in a five-victim land-dispute homicide.

Music and Live Performance: Singer Xu Liang (徐良) staged a nostalgia-themed concert that paired pixel-styled QQ Show virtual avatars with on-screen Windows 7 boot sounds, QQ message chimes, and the TTPlayer interface, supplemented by wired-headphone-shaped glow sticks designed to evoke the MP3-era listening environment. Tingchao Pavilion Media (听潮阁传媒) ran a "break-the-dimension" themed music festival in which AR technology bound nearly 70 performers, including artists Zhao Taiyang (赵太阳) and Cui Shiba (崔十八), to dedicated virtual avatars on stage, structuring the show around past, present, and future segments with synchronized light, sound, and avatar interaction.

Pixel-styled QQ Show virtual avatars are customizable, low-resolution cartoon personas used in QQ Show, a feature of Tencent QQ developed by Tencent in the early 2000s, designed with pixel art graphics similar to early video game sprites; users could assemble identities through selectable clothing, hairstyles, and accessories, often purchased through microtransactions, and display them across chats and social spaces as a visual stand-in for themselves, representing an early form of virtual identity expression that prefigured later virtual beings by introducing persistent avatars and virtual fashion economies, while remaining technically simple and non-realistic. 

Tencent QQ is a Chinese instant messaging platform developed by Tencent and launched in 1999, originally modeled on early desktop chat services but quickly expanding into a multi-function social ecosystem; it allows users to send text, voice, and video messages, share files, join group chats, and maintain persistent online identities through user profiles and avatars such as QQ Show, and over time it incorporated additional services including online gaming integration, music, blogging, virtual goods, and digital economies, making it one of the foundational platforms in China’s internet development and an early example of how communication software can evolve into a broader social and virtual identity environment.

Virtual Streamers and VTuber Ecosystem: A retrospective on AcFun (A站), the video platform acquired by Kuaishou (快手) for approximately 570 million RMB, reported that the platform's VUP (virtual streamer) section had stagnated to the point that even a top-tier virtual streamer such as 1001Project earned monthly tips and gifts roughly equivalent to the salary of a junior engineering employee at a major Chinese technology company. A separate Chinese-language YouTube clip circulated under the label "Reserve Actor Digital Human Zhou Xiaoyu" (儲備演員 數字人 周曉喻), illustrating the persistent niche presence of synthetic-character performance content moving outward from Chinese-language platforms.

Cultural Tourism and Heritage: NetDragon (网龙) presented a digital cultural-tourism solution at a Digital China Summit exhibition that combines gamified narrative with digital humans to repackage Fujian (福建) heritage and tourism resources into reusable immersive experiences. Shandong (山东) deployed digital human tour guides during the May Day holiday across more than 200 scenic areas, with the Confucius Museum (孔子博物馆) staging a "Confucius Code: Confucius's Travels through the Vassal States" exhibition; the province reported roughly 26.15 million visitor entries and 1.27 billion RMB in revenue. In Macau, broadcaster TDM (澳廣視) reported on an AI digital human reconstruction of a deceased physicist used to deliver nuclear-science popularization through conversational interaction. The Taiwan Institute for Information Industry's Digital Transformation Research Institute (資策會數位轉型研究院) served as a strategic and architectural partner on the "Digital Lee Teng-hui Special Exhibition," integrating a digital virtual human with voice recognition and retrieval-enhanced semantic search to reconstruct a major political figure as an interactive cultural artifact.

Education and Knowledge Work: Chenmai Technology (诚迈科技) released what it described as China's first "985 Student Computer" for the K-12 market, preloaded with mainstream textbook editions including People's Education Press and Jiangsu Education Press materials, supporting parental remote management of usage time, and embedding an AI digital human study assistant. iFlytek (科大讯飞) chairman Liu Qingfeng (刘庆峰) delivered a session for the Liaoning Provincial Party Committee Theoretical Study Center Group attended by more than 5,000 participants, demonstrating multimodal virtual humans, smart glasses, and other applications across education, healthcare, and office contexts. Commentary on a knowledge-distillation workflow described corporate projects that ingest the chat logs and work documents of departed employees into AI models to generate digital clones reproducing their communication style and professional capabilities, a practice characterized in commentary as a form of "digital necromancy" (数字招魂术).

Government Services and E-Government: A China Telecom (中国电信) Yunnan branch team led the regional deployment of large-model AI applications including a government-affairs digital human, the Rainforest Enterprise Connect (雨林企事通) platform, and the Mohan (磨憨) Overseas Labor Management Platform, addressing border-region administrative service gaps. China Mobile (中国移动) executive Zhao Dongming (赵东明), chair of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei AI Alliance and lead of the "Zhao Dongming Digital Human AI Model and Craftsman Innovation Workshop," received a National May 1 Labor Medal for technical assistance work helping enterprises develop virtual digital humans and vehicle upgrade-and-replacement recommendation engines. Reports on Fuzhou (福州) and Yichun (伊春) highlighted the continued use of AI digital humans in municipal e-government to accelerate administrative responsiveness, with Fuzhou's program situated within flood-prone Min River basin governance work.

Patents and Technology Development: Yunxi Network Technology Hebei (云袭网络技术河北有限公司) filed a patent application titled "Virtual Human Interaction Method and Device Based on Dynamic Strategy Adjustment," published as CN121979378A, advancing techniques for adaptive virtual human dialogue behavior. Nanjing Nanshu Digital Industry Group (南京南数数字产业集团有限公司), founded in 2019 and headquartered in Nanjing, filed a patent for a "Multi-Agent Digital Human Resource Optimization Method and System Based on Computing Power Dynamic Scheduling," targeting orchestration of distributed digital human agents under variable compute supply. Hefei Intelligent Voice (合肥智能语音) submitted a patent application covering a human-computer interaction method that constructs intent abstraction from current input, prior interaction history, and the present relationship state between the user and a virtual avatar while preserving personal data privacy.

Fraud, Misuse, and Ethical Concerns: Veteran actor Wang Jinsong (王劲松) publicly described having his likeness scraped to produce digital clones used in counterfeit-medicine sales and other online fraud schemes, with the resulting outputs reportedly indistinguishable from him to his own family members. Technology and business outlets analyzed a recurring "virtual human stock recommendation" scam built around a fictitious "Beijing Circle Rich Young Master" persona used to lure retail investors into fraudulent securities tips. Researcher Liu Yongmou (刘永谋) published commentary examining the implications for performers in an era when digital clones break the time-and-space limits of high-traffic, high-commercial-value top-tier actors, while parallel reporting characterized AI dialogue interfaces as functioning like "cyber succubi," generating concern over the emotional dependency such systems can cultivate.

Liu Yongmou (刘永谋) is a Wu Yuzhang Distinguished Chair Professor at Renmin University of China (中国人民大学), a second-grade professor and doctoral supervisor in the School of Philosophy, and a researcher at both the National Academy of Development and Strategy and the AI Governance Research Institute, where he serves as chief expert on a National Social Science Foundation Major Project, with primary research foci in the philosophy of science and technology and in science, technology, and society. Within the digital human discourse, he is one of the most visible Chinese philosophical voices on the long-term anthropological stakes of virtual being technology, having argued in a widely circulated April 2026 36Kr interview that the future of the human body will most plausibly take the form not of cyborgs or digital humans but of "robots" — outwardly humanlike beings whose body and soul have both been mechanized — a position that reframes digital humans as one waypoint in a broader trajectory of human machineification. His recent monograph 《智能革命后的世界：AI技术与人类社会的命运》 (The World After the Intelligence Revolution: AI Technology and the Fate of Human Society) and earlier 《元宇宙陷阱》 (The Metaverse Trap) develop this critique, with the latter framing the metaverse's underlying technological rebellion as a "death of truth" that destabilizes identity and selfhood across virtual worlds, a formulation that has been picked up in subsequent Chinese academic work on metaverse digital human typologies. In a February 2026 Tencent News essay co-authored with Wang Liangjia (王亮家) on the machineification of humans in the AI era, he warned that excessive attachment to digital humans and AI companions risks blurring the virtual and the real, intensifying real-world social avoidance, and ultimately atrophying human-to-human communicative capacity as machines redirect users' social energy toward customizable simulated relationships. He has also engaged the digital immortality question directly, arguing in 2023 commentary that supporting digital permanence implies a new understanding of life itself, and his April 2026 Sohu piece "AI时代人文学最大任务是安顿人心" (The Greatest Task of the Humanities in the AI Era Is to Settle the Human Heart) positions Chinese humanistic scholarship — rather than engineering or regulation alone — as the discipline most responsible for navigating the existential disorientations introduced by digital humans, AI companions, and the broader intelligent revolution. 

Policy and Industrial Programs: Inner Mongolia (内蒙古) higher education authorities approved 53 new undergraduate program placements, including a digital humanities specialization and elder-care service management offerings designed to address regional service-economy needs and fill curricular gaps within the autonomous region. Henan (河南) provincial policy reinforced Zhengzhou (郑州) as the core node of a multi-point micro-short-drama industry cluster, encouraging the systematic application of AIGC, VR/AR, and digital humans across creation, production, and distribution stages of short-form video content.

May 05 News

Regulatory and Ethical Contexts: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家互联网信息办公室) released a draft of the Administrative Measures on Information Services for Digital Virtual Humans (《数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法》征求意见稿) for public consultation, addressing the rapid expansion and recurring abuses of the sector. The Hangzhou Internet Court (杭州互联网法院) issued a parallel ruling that an original virtual digital human likeness qualifies as a work of fine art under the Copyright Law, extending dual protection through both personality rights and intellectual property. A separate controversy emerged when leading mainland actors Yang Yang (杨洋), Xiao Zhan (肖战), and Jackson Yee (易烊千玺) issued a collective statement denouncing unauthorised AI clones of their personas, citing violations of the Civil Code's personality-rights provisions and the Personal Information Protection Law's safeguards on sensitive personal information, and asserting their right to demand cessation of infringement, formal apology, and compensation. Local enforcement has also tightened, with reports indicating that Chongqing has imposed stricter qualification reviews on AI service companies and removed three categories of providers from eligibility to deliver digital clone services.

Cultural Tourism: During the May Day holiday, several provinces foregrounded digital humans as anchors of immersive heritage experiences. The Chang'an Twelve Hours themed district (长安十二时辰主题街区) in Xi'an integrated XR, robots, digital humans, and AI to fuse intangible cultural heritage with Tang-dynasty styling, with cultural ambassador Li Yuanyuan describing the deployment to visiting tourists from across Shaanxi. In Yongshou County under Xianyang, the Sophora Flower Fairy (槐花仙子) virtual digital human originally introduced in 2024 was upgraded into a narrative IP through the AI cultural tourism animated drama Sophora Fragrance Like Snow, A Letter Across Millennia (《槐香如雪，一信千年》), shifting the character from static image display to humanised storytelling at the Sophora Flower Tourism and Cultural Consumption Season. Fuzhou West Lake Park became one of the most-visited digital cultural tourism sites in Fujian during the holiday, combining AI-driven 3D face-changing performances of Min Opera, holographic digital humans, and humanoid robots to revitalise intangible heritage for younger audiences who could step in front of a camera and select a role without applying any makeup.

Broadcasting and Media: Television operators expanded their use of synthetic anchors with mixed public reception. Hunan Television (湖南台) drew widespread criticism after deploying AI digital human anchors that viewers compared to a plotline from the Hong Kong drama News Queen 2 (《新闻女王2》), in which a former presenter and a deceased male anchor are distilled into AI replicas to continue broadcasting, and Beijing Television (北京台) was reported to have followed a similar approach. NetEase circulated political commentary on Lai Ching-te's overseas itinerary using the Huiboxing (慧播星) digital human, illustrating the platform's adoption for opinion programming. State broadcaster CCTV's segment Anchor Tries a New Job (《主播体验新岗位》) featured the Xiaozhi (小智) digital clone developed by Zhongye Jingcheng (中冶京诚) Digital and Intelligent Technology, which assists hosts in completing digital twin modelling tasks and accompanies them through new on-air responsibilities.

Enterprise Applications: Industrial and corporate adoption of digital clones is broadening beyond marketing into operational management. A Chongqing manufacturing firm has begun using AI clones of its founder to assist team decision-making, onboard new hires, and answer business queries on a continuous basis, presenting the technology as a way to free leadership from routine matters and concentrate attention on strategy. The provider Zhifu (智赋) markets a product known as the AI Zhi Ji Ren that turns user prompts into a personalised digital clone (数字分身) capable of generating brand content around the clock and tracking trending topics for exposure. iFlytek (科大讯飞) chairman Liu Qingfeng (刘庆峰) demonstrated smart glasses and multimodal virtual humans before an audience of more than five thousand at a theory study session of the Liaoning Provincial Committee, showing concrete applications across education, healthcare, and office work. China Mobile (中国移动) presented the Lingxi Home Intelligent Agent (灵犀家庭智能体) at the ninth Digital China Construction Summit, with personalised digital human customisation features developed at the company's Hangzhou Research and Development Centre that allow households to access a tailored interactive experience through the Move Love Home (移动爱家) interface.

Zhifu (智赋) and Zhipu AI are completely separate entities: Zhifu operates as a small-scale AI consultancy focused on workflow automation and SME digital transformation using existing tools, whereas Zhipu AI is a major Chinese foundation model developer originating from Tsinghua University, known for its ChatGLM models and participation in China’s large language model ecosystem alongside companies such as Baichuan Intelligence and MiniMax, making Zhifu a service-layer integrator and Zhipu AI a core AI infrastructure provider with no direct relationship between them. 

Liu Qingfeng (刘庆峰) is the founder and chairman of iFlytek (科大讯飞), the Hefei-based speech and cognitive AI company listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange under code 002230.SZ, and is among the most prominent industry voices shaping China's digital human discourse. Born in 1973 and trained at the University of Science and Technology of China, he has served multiple terms as a deputy to the National People's Congress, giving his pronouncements on artificial intelligence unusual policy weight. Under his leadership iFlytek has built the Spark (Xinghuo, 星火) cognitive large model into a foundation for digital human deployment, layering speech recognition, ultra-realistic synthesis, multimodal vision, emotional semantic understanding, and personalized memory into avatar-driven products. Liu has personally fronted the company's signature digital human demonstrations, including the Digital Einstein and Digital Li Bai recreations performed alongside the robotic dog Xiaoxi at iFlytek's annual gala, and the multimodal interactive avatar Xiaofei (小飞) unveiled at the 2025 1024 Developers Festival, which he has framed as evidence that AI is no longer a simple application but a feeling, embodied companion capable of moving through real physical space. He has consistently positioned virtual digital humans as digital employees, health assistants, and virtual teachers across education, healthcare, and customer service, predicted that companion robots will enter Chinese households within roughly three years, and tied digital human development to a broader argument for fully autonomous and controllable (自主可控) full-stack Chinese AI infrastructure, a posture sharpened by iFlytek's placement on the US Entity List in 2019 and reinforced through his repeated calls for domestic compute and model sovereignty. 

China Mobile Hangzhou Research and Development Centre, formally China Mobile (Hangzhou) Information Technology Co., Ltd. (中移（杭州）信息技术有限公司) and abbreviated within the parent group as Zhongyi Hangyan (中移杭研), was established in March 2014 as a wholly-owned first-tier subsidiary of China Mobile Communications Co., Ltd. and is positioned as one of three principal research arms of the China Mobile Group, with a headquarters campus in Hangzhou's Future Sci-Tech City and branch offices in Chengdu and Beijing, and it operates externally under two complementary identities, the technical name above and the consumer-facing China Mobile Smart Home Operations Center (中国移动智慧家庭运营中心), or Smart Home Center (智家中心) for short, which is the brand under which it conducts its digital human and household intelligent agent work. By the 2025 recruitment cycle the centre exceeded 2,300 staff with master's degree holders above seventy per cent and personnel classified as digital talent above ninety per cent, and within the Group it is the operational owner of the Lingxi Home Intelligent Agent (灵犀家庭智能体), originally developed under the working name Xiaoyi Steward (小移管家) and unveiled at the 2024 China Mobile Global Partners Conference as a unified household AI entry point built on the Jiutian (九天) foundation model with a digital intelligent persona supporting emotionally inflected and colloquial interaction, a single wake word and consistent visual identity across large, medium, and small screens, and adaptation to terminal forms ranging from television gateways and the Move Love Home (移动爱家) application to cloud PCs and smart speakers, which by November 2025 had crossed one hundred million served households and had been re-architected as an end-to-end smart-brain system featuring voiceprint identification for per-member personalisation and a digital human module aligned across text and audio modalities that delivers situation-appropriate empathic response, including spoken consolation and ambient lighting adjustment in reaction to detected user affect, with this same agent layer extended at the ninth Digital China Construction Summit in Fuzhou in April 2026 to govern the newly released Lingxi robot family in humanoid and quadruped formats, making the Hangzhou centre the principal vertically integrated locus inside China Mobile for digital human research, training, persona design, household deployment, and embodied extension into service robotics. 

Retail and Small Business: Smaller consumer-facing operators are integrating digital humans into shopfronts and learning products. In Suzhou's Xiangcheng District, the cafe operator Geiwu Renwen (给物人文), led by chief executive Yang Xiaolong (杨晓龙), has built interactive digital human exchanges that reportedly draw particular enthusiasm from children visiting the venue, distinguishing the shop from conventional coffee outlets. In Nanjing, former Meituan employee Xu Qiao founded the Zhishi Yiyou (智师益友) platform in early 2024, deploying AI digital humans for the rapidly expanding AI training market and positioning the venture within Jiangsu's so-called trillion-yuan track of youth-led businesses. An OPC operator working out of the OPC Cloud Innovation Labo (OPC云创Labo) in Ningbo has stabilised a digital human livestream workflow that runs continuously so long as electricity holds, and the founder reports active information sharing with fellow entrepreneurs who relocated from Hangzhou and Shenzhen.

Community Governance: Local authorities are testing digital humans as front-line interfaces for residents. In the Xincheng community of Wanli Subdistrict in Dalian's Jinpu New District, an AI digital human named Wan Xiaoli (湾小礼) operates around the clock inside a residents' WeChat group, responding to issues raised by community members and serving as a public-facing service channel produced by the Liaoning Newspaper Media Group (辽宁报刊传媒集团), the parent of the Liaoning Daily.

Entertainment: Live music continued to integrate synthetic performers into mainstream stages. The Emperor Entertainment Group (英皇娛樂) twenty-fifth anniversary all-stars concert at Kai Tak in Hong Kong featured a virtual human band performing the song Upward Light (《向上的光》) in collaboration with UNIQ member Li Wenhan, Angela Hui, Cindy Yuan, and You Changjing, blending established human performers with synthetic ensembles in a flagship Cantopop and Mandopop production reported by CCTV News.

May 04 News

Tourism: Sichuan Zhisheng Smart Travel (四川智胜慧旅) filed a patent for a personalized companion travel method built on digital human twin technology, creating a traveler-specific digital human twin agent that delivers continuous and intelligent guided experiences in smart tourism contexts. In Yangzhou, the Canal Three Bay scenic area police station debuted Wan Zai (湾仔), a virtual cartoon mascot designated as the station's official police-affairs publicity ambassador, displayed on the large LED screen at the station entrance and now functioning as a tourist photo spot. In Fuzhou, West Lake Park (西湖公园) operated as a flagship digital cultural tourism site over the May Day holiday, presenting AI Min Opera 3D face-changing performances and holographic digital humans, with hyperreal AI holographic digital humans serving as cultural guides who narrate intangible cultural heritage stories. In Shenzhen's Longgang District, Ganpit Ancient Town (甘坑古鎮) staged a competition among its Digital IP team for promotion-ambassador roles and rolled out an upgraded MR Tang Dynasty experience for the May Day period, building on the digital human characters that gained traction at New Year. At the 139th Canton Fair in Guangzhou, Gaoyun Cultural Tourism (高云文旅) unveiled the Guangdong Old Brand AI Encyclopedia Digital Human (广东老字号AI百科数字人), a digital human application designed to present traditional Guangdong heritage brands to international buyers and visitors.

Healthcare and Accessibility: Shandong Digital Human Technology Co., Ltd. (山东数字人科技股份有限公司), among the first companies listed on the Beijing Stock Exchange and headquartered in Jinan, concentrates on the digital medicine field and emerged as a standout exhibitor during the May Day exhibition cycle that highlighted Shandong's digital industry overseas appeal. Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. (华为技术有限公司) filed a patent titled Method and Equipment for Displaying Digital Human Sign Language, which generates a first action-parameter sequence for the digital human's signing motions and renders the sequence at a controlled display speed in order to deliver real-time sign language translation services to users with hearing impairments.

Education: Chongqing Hanhai Ruizhi Big Data Technology Co., Ltd. (重庆翰海睿智大数据科技股份有限公司) filed a patent under publication number CN121961800A, with an April 2026 application date, for a virtual digital human course generation system and method aimed at automated production of educational content delivered through digital human instructors. Guomai Culture (国脉文化) disclosed in earnings communications that it is actively exploring short drama and virtual digital human formats as part of a broader push into digital culture and AI applications. Seventeen higher-education institutions in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region received approval to add fifty-three new undergraduate program placements for the 2025 academic year, with a digital human specialization placed among the twenty programs categorized as filling previously absent disciplines. Youdao (有道), in remarks delivered by chief executive Zhou Feng (周枫) at Tsinghua University, profiled the company's education AI lineup, which uses virtual image avatars to construct immersive language-learning environments and which deployed the Xiao P Teacher (小P老师) mathematics question-and-answer model in 2024 for science-discipline reasoning training. Guangzhou University's Liwan Research Institute (广州大学荔湾研究院) integrated virtual digital humans, new media technology, short video, and film-and-television creation as the four core elements of its university-locality collaborative innovation framework branded as the Guangzhou model.

Broadcasting: Hunan Broadcasting and Television (湖南广电) put AI-driven digital human anchors into news operations, with Hunan Economic Television (湖南经视) following with its own AI anchor deployment, a rollout that drew public commentary on Sina concerning the visual styling of the generated faces. A news report covering the emergency audience evacuation at the Tianjin Bubble Island Music Festival (天津泡泡岛音乐节) was produced using a digital human supplied by Huiboxing (慧播星), illustrating how third-party digital human technology is being embedded directly into Chinese newsroom video workflows for breaking-event coverage.

Marketing and Hardware: AI digital human all-in-one livestreaming kiosks were profiled in connection with the emerging occupation of AI digital human anchor trainer, with reporters speaking product prompts into the microphone of such a kiosk and watching the on-screen digital human anchor immediately deliver fluent and expressive selling-point introductions with synchronized facial expressions and body language comparable to a real human livestream seller, and human AI trainers were credited with injecting soul into these systems by tuning behavioral and emotional response patterns to support more authentic commerce performance. Chuto Technology (触拓科技) released a new model of the CHUTO AI digital human full-screen all-in-one machine, marketing the device's high-fidelity rendering of digital human eye and facial expression detail without blur and citing a 350cd/m² brightness level suitable for high-traffic deployment environments such as hospital lobbies.

Automotive: Coverage of the 2026 Beijing Auto Show, held April 24 through May 3, framed the event as an in-cabin AI showcase, with attention to virtual human conversational interfaces inside vehicles, and commentary distinguished gimmick electronic-pet virtual human chitchat from productivity-grade AI features such as automated parking and anti-cut-in assistance. Pateo Connect+ Nanjing (博泰车联网（南京）有限公司) filed a patent under publication number CN121961620A, titled Virtual Digital Human Interaction Method, Apparatus, Equipment, Storage Medium and Product, which is aimed at intelligent recommendations during the test-drive process by deploying a virtual digital human as the in-cabin interaction interface.

Smart City and Trade Promotion: China Xiong'an Group Digital City Technology Co., Ltd. (中国雄安集团数字城市科技有限公司) launched a Super Digital Human (超级数字人) intended to anchor a city-level AI architecture, presented under Hebei Province's results showcase at the 9th Digital China Construction Summit. The same summit, which opened in Fujian's Fuzhou on April 29, featured an on-site digital human creation interactive demonstration in connection with FAW Group (中国一汽), which used the summit to introduce a data-driven enterprise management restructuring case. During the 2026 Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Guizhou Visit (2026年香港企業家貴州行), Hong Kong Federation of Small and Medium Business executive vice chairman Zeng Chongrui (曾崇瑞) cited digital human technology as a concrete example of high-quality AI tools that he said many Guizhou enterprises had not yet fully adopted, framing closer Hong Kong–Guizhou cooperation as a vehicle for closing information and policy gaps in AI deployment.

Super Digital Human (超级数字人) is a commercial positioning term that has emerged in the Chinese digital human industry to denote a higher-tier, productized variant of the generic digital human category, distinguished less by any single technical specification than by the bundle of capabilities and use-case framings that vendors attach to it. Whereas digital human is the umbrella term covering all virtual or AI-driven human-form entities, ranging from 2D talking-head broadcasters and lip-synced presenters to 3D photoreal avatars and virtual idols, "super digital human" typically refers to integrated, end-to-end systems marketed as one-stop solutions for 24-hour unmanned livestreaming on Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu, as exemplified by GitHub-distributed toolkits such as sugarbeby's Super-Digital-Human repository and by SaaS offerings from OEM source factories such as Huitun AI (灰豚AI数字人). The label is also applied to enterprise and platform-grade pipelines, most prominently Alibaba Cloud Bailian's "super digital human" workflow, which chains Tongyi Wanxiang 2.2-S2V with Qwen-TTS, Qwen-Image, and IMS intelligent editing into a fully automated content-generation chain. In a separate register, the term marks anchor-IP-grade or celebrity-equivalent ambitions, with JD Cloud Yanxi (京东云言犀) publicly debating whether a "super digital human" host comparable to Dong Yuhui (董宇辉) is achievable, while Wuzhi Bang (屋凸邦) deploys "super digital human" as the technological core of always-on lead generation for the home renovation sector, and Tencent-affiliated JieYu (界域) MR glasses use the label for AI-driven cross-spacetime digital identities supporting voice cloning and personality customization. At the upper end of the spectrum, the term tilts toward what some vendors call a 数字生命体 (digital life form), as in the Zhejiang-exhibited AINIA 4.0版超级AI数字人, and toward city-level governance, as in the Xiongan New Area Group's "super digital human" supporting government, industry, and citizen services unveiled at the Ninth Digital China Construction Summit in Hebei. In sum, "super digital human" functions as a marketing and tiering layer positioned above digital human, signaling productization, multimodal integration, persistent operation, IP-bearing personality, and commercial or governmental scale, rather than naming a stable technical class of its own.

Social Platforms and Governance: Following the popular reception of Moltbook, the AI avatar (AI分身) social application space in China saw invitation codes for SecondMe and Elys spread through user groups, with reporting from PingWest (硅星人) describing how, once inside, users observed AI avatars exchanging biting commentary on a plaza-style interface in what is being framed as an early avatar-to-avatar social model. Tsinghua University School of Journalism and Communication professor Chen Changfeng (陈昌凤), in remarks reported by China Science and Technology Net citing Xinhua News Agency, addressed unresolved governance challenges around AI avatars, observing that current law cannot clearly identify the responsible party when an AI avatar makes a workplace error, and the same coverage flagged the proliferation of agents such as Open Claw (开放之爪) as part of the same regulatory gap.

Chen Changfeng (陈昌凤) is a professor and doctoral supervisor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Tsinghua University, where she has served as Executive Vice Dean and emerged as one of mainland China's most cited communication scholars on digital humans, generative AI, and the ethics of human-machine coexistence. She also serves as founding chair of the Asia-Pacific Communication Alliance (APCA), a position she was re-elected to in 2021, and helped launch the school's Metaverse Culture Lab in April 2022, which has become a leading academic platform for digital human and robotics research among Chinese universities. Her widely circulated 2022 article in the journal Journalism and Writing (新闻与写作), titled "How Humans and Machines Coexist: Structural Transformations in Communication and the Lag of Ethics" (人机何以共生：传播的结构性变革与滞后的伦理观), is routinely treated as a foundational Chinese-language reference for analyzing virtual digital humans and social robots as new communicating agents, and it is supplemented by a growing body of related work on the role conflicts and ethical risks of digital humans, on AIGC value alignment co-authored with Zhang Meng (张梦), on AI as infrastructure for intelligent journalism co-authored with Yuan Yuqing (袁雨晴), and on the conceptual passage from Homo sapiens to "digital persons" (从"智人"到"数字人"). In public discourse she has become a recognizable figure for the proposition that humans must stand at the frontier of new technologies and adopt an iterative mindset, a stance she has illustrated by personally performing AI-composed pieces such as "Chengdu in March" (《三月的成都》) at the 11th China Internet Audio-Visual Conference in 2024 to demonstrate how AIGC and digital human technologies can extend rather than replace human creativity. Her 2025 commentary on the "Wind that Misses You" Wuzhen tourism phenomenon further extended this line of thought into the experiential register, examining digital experience halls where visitors interact with generated versions of themselves and converse with their future selves, while her broader research agenda continues to anchor Chinese scholarship on the interplay among digital humans, algorithmic ethics, posthumanist communication theory, and the governance challenges raised by virtual agents in journalism, cultural tourism, and everyday mediated life. 

May 03 News

Cultural Tourism and Heritage: Yongshou County (永寿) in Shaanxi Province launched what is described as the province's first county-level AI cultural tourism comic drama, "Locust Fragrance Like Snow, A Letter Spanning a Thousand Years" (《槐香如雪，一信千年》), extending an earlier initiative from the 21st Locust Flower Festival in 2024 in which the county debuted Shaanxi's first county-level rural revitalization virtual digital human, "Locust Flower Fairy" (槐花仙子). The Jiangxi Cultural Tourism Expo opened in Nanchang with an integrated attraction combining an AR "time-travel eye," an AI digital human, and a living-exhibition format for intangible cultural heritage, presenting heritage content through interactive virtual-being mediation. Guangxi Science Museum (广西科学馆) in Nanning installed an AI digital human of nuclear physicist Deng Jiaxian (邓稼先) as a permanent science-communication exhibit intended to transmit the historical legacy and ethos of Chinese scientists to museum visitors.

Automotive and Personalized Travel Companions: Pateo Connect+ (博泰车联网), through its Nanjing-based entity, filed a patent titled "Virtual Digital Human Interaction Method, Device, Equipment, Storage Medium and Product" (publication number CN121961620A), describing a virtual digital human system that delivers intelligent recommendations to drivers during the test-drive process inside a connected vehicle. Sichuan Zhisheng Huilv (四川智胜慧旅), a Chengdu-based travel-technology firm founded in 2016, filed a patent for a personalized companion-travel method built on digital human twins, designed to provide tourists with a continuous, intelligent guide-companion experience that persists across legs of a journey rather than being limited to single touch points.

Education, Curriculum, and Animation Pipelines: Hanhai Ruizhi (翰海睿智), formally Chongqing Hanhai Ruizhi Big Data Technology Co., Ltd., filed a patent (publication number CN121961800A) in April 2026 for a "Virtual Digital Human Course Generation System and Method," targeting the automated production of digital-human-led instructional content for online education. Shanxi Xinhua (山西新华) integrated AIGC, digital humans, and virtual production into its 2026 AI Animation Design major, restructuring its curriculum so that students train across the full pipeline from traditional animation craft to AI-driven character generation and synthetic-character production for the animation industry.

Accessibility and Multimodal Interaction Patents: Huawei (华为) filed a patent titled "Method and Equipment for Displaying Digital Human Sign Language" (publication number CN121967769A), describing a system in which a digital human renders real-time sign-language interpretation on screen to serve hearing-impaired users across consumer devices. Zhuoyue Zhiyun (卓越智运), formally Shenzhen Zhuoyue Zhiyun Technology Co., Ltd., filed a patent for a sequence-control and human-computer interaction method based on multimodal AIGC digital humans, addressing how generative-AI-driven digital characters can be coordinated and made responsive across multiple input and output modalities during interaction sessions.

News Production and Public Events: Huibo Star (慧播星) was credited as the digital human production platform used by Kankan News Knews (看看新闻Knews) to generate a news video covering the dismissal of a Shanxi judge involved in a misconduct case, illustrating ongoing adoption of AI-anchor technology in Chinese broadcast news workflows. Jiangdu District in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province, deployed an AI digital human as the full-program host of its "four-end driving the digital-intelligent economy" promotional event, where the virtual host carried the show alongside laser-holographic dance performances as part of the district's positioning of itself within the regional digital economy competition.

May 02 News

Healthcare: Tencent Health (腾讯健康) and Yimai Yangguang (一脉阳光) jointly launched the Doctor-Buddy solution, branded internally as the "doctor AI avatar" or "医生AI分身," which packages a clinician's medical-imaging experience into a deployable digital persona for hospitals and imaging centres. The system fuses Tencent Health's AI engineering capabilities with Yimai Yangguang's clinical imaging expertise, and is positioned as a scalable model in which a sustainable AI avatar is built for every functional role inside a medical institution rather than as a single-purpose chatbot, addressing what both partners frame as the operational difficulty of bringing healthcare AI into routine clinical practice in mainland China.

Government and Community Services: In Shenzhen's Longgang District, Jihua Sub-district (吉华街道) recorded in its official 2025 year-end summary and 2026 work plan that it had run a pilot in which an AI digital human assisted with more than forty psychological-consultation sessions for residents and helped flag four early-warning risk cases, with the deployment integrated into the Sub-district's broader "Shen Ping'an" social-governance system that processed over 1,100 conflict cases. Silicon Intelligence (硅基智能), the Nanjing-based company founded by Sima Huapeng, was profiled within Yangtze River Economic Belt coverage as having industrialised roughly 80,000 digital humans positioned as a "silicon-based labor force," with deployments now extending into government live-streaming studios where the avatars deliver public-facing announcements and policy explainers.

Jihua Sub-district in Shenzhen ran a small pilot in 2025 in which an AI-powered virtual character was used to hold more than forty mental health check-in conversations with residents, and during those conversations the system flagged four people as being at risk and needing follow-up. The official write-up does not say which company built the system, what it is called, where it was set up, how residents accessed it, or what happened to the four flagged cases, and the Chinese wording suggests these were informal supportive chats rather than formal therapy sessions, most likely run by community staff as a first line of contact rather than by mental health professionals. The pilot sat inside the Sub-district's wider social stability and dispute resolution work rather than its health programs, and the Sub-district has now committed to expanding the service in 2026. The most likely provider, though not officially named, is a Longgang-based company called Jianchengxingyun (健成星云), at jianchengxingyun.com, whose virtual psychological assistant Nanxi is built for exactly this kind of community-level screening and early-warning work, but without confirmation this remains an educated guess. 

Shenzhen Jianchengxingyun Technology Co., Ltd. (深圳市健成星云科技有限公司) is a Shenzhen-based AI mental health vendor that deploys anthropomorphic digital humans as the user-facing layer of a clinically validated psychological assessment and intervention workflow, distinguishing itself from entertainment-oriented virtual being companies. Its Xingyun Xingkong (星云星空) cloud platform pairs the proprietary PsyLLM clinical psychology large model, filed with the Cyberspace Administration of China and validated by the Guangdong Provincial Mental Health Center at 92 percent accuracy, with multimodal emotion recognition and a cast of named digital humans including the assessor Xiaoyun (小云), the customer-service agent Xiaoxing (小星), and the AI counselor Nancy (南希), who conduct roughly twenty-minute semi-structured psychological interviews. The same characters are embodied in hardware as the Xingzhiyou (星智友) AI Mental Wellness Room and an AI Psychologist all-in-one machine, deployed across schools, universities, military hospitals, and public security psychological assessment programs, framing the digital human as a regulated clinical interface rather than a media or commercial avatar. 

Smart Mobility and Smart Campuses: Tencent Smart Mobility (腾讯智慧出行), led by vice-president Zhong Xuedan, is reframing the in-vehicle cabin around full-scenario AI agents and embedded digital humans rather than legacy voice assistants, with the agent layer pitched as a new "soul" for the cockpit and the in-car digital human acting as the perceptible interface for that agent stack. In the same coverage, Shiyou Technology (世优科技) is identified as the supplier of an AI digital human all-in-one appliance that is becoming a standard fitting for smart-campus build-outs across Chinese schools, where the unit functions as a full-scenario interactive assistant capable of guiding students, presenting curriculum content, and serving as a fixed-location virtual being on campus.

Tourism and Cultural Industry: At the 9th Digital China Construction Summit, Unilumin (洲明) presented its "LED plus AI" solution in which multimodal generative pipelines drive customised digital humans that act as branded spokespersons, fully comprehending business content and serving as the on-screen face of the customer brand, with senior officials from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism (文化和旅游部) visiting the booth for a guided demonstration. At the same summit, Pofutong (票付通) staged an immersive zone built around a "data plus AI" tourism stack, including AI customer service, AI accompaniment guides, digital human sign-language interaction for accessibility, and intelligent commercial-decision tools, all positioned as components of a unified product matrix covering full-journey tourism scenarios.

Broadcasting, Live Performance, and Content Creation: The 2026 CCTV Spring Festival Gala (央视春晚) again folded robots, large AI models, and digital humans into its televised production, with virtual performers contributing to what the broadcaster framed as a fusion of thought, art, and technology on the most-watched stage in mainland China. In Guangzhou, the studio Lingshi Space (灵视空间) has opened a 4D Gaussian splatting volumetric capture facility aimed at XR and digital human content, positioning the venue as infrastructure for avatar-driven entertainment formats and immersive concerts. In Hangzhou, a so-called virtual-singer base has aggregated roughly five thousand virtual singers drawn from a range of professions, who use professional motion-capture stages and recording rooms to construct their personal virtual personas and then publish performances on short-video platforms. The ByteDance generative-video product Jimeng AI (即梦AI) is driving an adjacent consumer trend through its "appearance mode," in which users build an AI avatar of themselves and stage scripted comedic scenes circulated under tags such as the AI avatar acting competition.

Patents, Capital Markets, and Industry Positioning: Hangzhou Qiuguo Plan Technology (杭州秋果计划科技) has secured a Chinese invention patent under publication number CN121353562B, originally filed in December 2025 with the China National Intellectual Property Administration, covering a method and corresponding electronic device for generating virtual digital humans. On the listed-company side, Zhongqingbao (中青宝) is being tracked by mainland investors under a concept basket that explicitly groups virtual digital humans with theme parks, the digital economy, lottery, and tourism hotels, while Fengshang Culture (锋尚文化) is similarly bracketed under cultural-media, IP-economy, virtual digital human, virtual reality, and metaverse concepts in trading commentary. Chuangye Heima (创业黑马) has confirmed in investor communications that its principal Web3.0 business line is a metaverse digital human accelerator, casting the firm as an early services-side platform for new digital human ventures in China's startup ecosystem.

Ethical and Regulatory Contexts: Mainland Chinese commentary has crystallised around the figure of the AI actor, defined as an AI-generated virtual digital human able to simulate a real person's appearance, facial expressions, and voice and now appearing in film, television, and gaming productions, with the debate centring on impacts to the careers of human performers and on the legal handling of synthetic likenesses. A parallel state-aligned analysis of AI compliance boundaries focuses specifically on the AI avatar, raising the questions of where training data may legitimately be sourced and to what extent it may be reused, how intellectual property protection should be reinforced, and how regulators should treat the fact that such systems can extract a person's tacit work experience, communication style, and decision-making logic into a transferable digital persona. Together these strands shape the current Chinese policy conversation on personality rights, professional displacement, and data governance for virtual beings.

May 01 News

Cultural and Philosophical Discourse: Public commentary in Chinese cultural-affairs media has raised the question of whether human creativity retains a unique edge in an era when artificial intelligence can compose poetry and virtual humans can star in dramatic series, with industry practitioners arguing that genuine originality and emotional expression still reside in human creators rather than in synthetic performers. Adjacent to this thread, Mercedes-Benz China (梅赛德斯-奔驰中国) executive vice president for autonomous driving and connected-vehicle research and development Wang Xin contributed to a domestic industry roundtable on physical AI by arguing that as artificial intelligence enters the physical world a virtual human would need to possess emotions, including the capacity to feel fear, in order to interact meaningfully with reality.

Enterprise AI Assistants: Alibaba (阿里巴巴) has rolled out a digital human persona named Qianwen Xiaojiuwo (千问小酒窝), introduced as an ecosystem-level visual identity for its Qianwen (千问) artificial intelligence assistant. Public information indicates that this avatar is intended to appear not only inside the Qianwen application but across the broader Alibaba AI ecosystem, functioning as a unified personality interface rather than a single product mascot. From a competitive standpoint within the native AI application category, the move is framed in market commentary as a delayed but deliberate benchmarking effort, signaling the company's intent to anchor its consumer-facing AI presence around a coherent humanoid identity rather than disembodied chatbot interactions alone.

Entertainment and AI Short Drama: Alibaba (阿里巴巴) has begun a closed beta of HappyHorse, also released under the Chinese name Happy Horse (快乐马), a video generation system that reportedly produces a short clip in roughly three minutes and targets short-drama and manga-drama practitioners, television commercial production teams, and AI film makers as its core clientele, with industry observers anticipating a future bifurcation between digital human and live-action production along with the broader digitization of scenes. iQIYI (爱奇艺) has signed 117 performers into an AI artist library, while parent company Inkeverse Group (映宇宙) has been described in capital-market commentary as expanding into virtual human livestreaming and AI short-drama formats. Weng Dongdong, a visiting professor at the Central Academy of Drama (中央戏剧学院) and researcher at the Beijing Institute of Technology (北京理工大学) school of optoelectronics who tracks the evolution of digital humans and AI-driven film and television, has observed that manga drama and short drama production has now largely shifted into AI-driven workflows, with conventional live-action short drama work shrinking as a result. A parallel market for AI portrait authorization has emerged in which short-drama production houses sign performers to multi-year contracts at rates as low as 200 yuan (circa $30 USD) per year per actor in order to license their faces for use as AI digital human actors. The same virtual likeness can be redeployed at low cost across apocalyptic, suspense, and revenge subgenres and even cross over between productions, as exemplified by Xuebao Studio (雪宝工作室), which created the AI child performer Qin Yuwei (秦雨薇) for the series Naituan Taihou Sansui Ban (奶团太后三岁半).

Inkeverse Group (映宇宙), listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under code 3700, is a Beijing-headquartered Chinese internet company that rebranded from Inke Hudong Group (映客互娱集团) on June 15, 2022, with chairman and chief executive Feng Yousheng (奉佑生) announcing a strategic pivot toward the metaverse and an expanded portfolio spanning livestreaming, social networking, online dating, and micro-dramas. At the rebranding launch the group unveiled its proprietary digital spokesperson Yingying (映映), a virtual digital human custom-developed by Zhongying Niannian (中影年年) and positioned as the brand-facing avatar across corporate communications and consumer-facing campaigns. Yingying appeared at ChinaJoy 2023 demonstrating real-time AI-driven digital avatar generation and on-screen interaction with attendees, and in March 2023 was named to the inaugural roster of digital residents of Guangzhou's Haizhu District, receiving a digital citizenship certificate. The group has since layered AI livestreaming, AI social, AI music, AI script, and AI operations onto its digital human strategy, and reported 2023 revenue of 6.84 billion yuan with net profit growing 337.8 percent year on year. 

Industry Infrastructure and Production Studios: The 2026 Optical Valley AI Short Drama Industry Development Conference, held in Wuhan, was framed around the Optical Valley (光谷) cluster's now end-to-end coverage of the AI short-drama production chain from script generation through virtual human creation, with several local enterprises pivoting from delivering finished works to licensing their underlying capabilities. In Beijing, the Beijing Digital Human Base (北京市数字人基地) hosted the Chaoyang OPC entrepreneurial-ecosystem symposium on the afternoon of April 27, 2026, under the guidance of the Chaoyang Park Management Committee. In Guangzhou, the Lingshi Space (灵视空间) volumetric video studio, built on 4DGS capture technology, has been launched with a stated focus on extended-reality content production. The 2026 China Central Television Spring Festival Gala (央视春晚) continued its emphasis on integrating thought, art, and technology by populating its stage with robots, large AI models, and digital humans as showcase elements of frontier production.

Optical Valley (光谷), formally the Wuhan East Lake High-Tech Development Zone in Hubei Province, has emerged as a notable digital human cluster within central China. The municipal government has positioned the zone as a national pilot district for the intelligent agent "avatar economy" (分身经济先行区), with one-person companies and AI-augmented small firms identified as a primary innovation force. The most visible local digital human venture is Shuming Technology (数命科技), founded by Luo Biwen (罗弼文), whose team relocated from Silicon Valley to Optical Valley and built the company around digital human products including a multilingual museum guide deployed at the Yichang Museum, with reported revenue growth from 200,000 yuan to 200 million yuan and full-stack AI workflows in which nearly every employee operates a digital twin. The Wuhan Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (武汉人工智能研究院), known as WAIRI (武智院) and led by Wang Jinqiao (王金桥), incubated the digital human "Xiao Chu" (小初) on its Zidong Taichu (紫东太初) trillion-parameter multimodal large model. Hubei provincial culture and tourism authorities introduced the digital human "Chuchu" (楚楚) at the inaugural East Lake Forum (东湖论坛) held at the Wuhan Science and Technology Convention Center in October 2023. The TCL Wuhan Industrial Research Institute, based in Future Tech City within Optical Valley, has filed multiple patents covering AI-driven and human-driven virtual digital human technology applied to interactive fitness scenarios. Tencent (腾讯) hosted its ecosystem technology summit in Optical Valley in November 2021, where Chief Scientist Zhang Zhengyou (张正友) presented work on rapid digital human generation from short selfie video. Hubei Mobile (湖北移动) opened the province's first "AI Smart Wave" themed flagship business hall in Optical Valley in 2026, featuring AI digital human reception, AI smart glasses, and large-model-powered companion products as part of a broader retail rollout. 

Journalism and Public Information Services: Guangming District Convergent Media Center (光明区融媒体中心), based in Shenzhen, has introduced its first AI digital reporter, Guang Xiaoxuan (光晓萱), with a clean and capable visual design intended to convey both professional rigor and a youthful presence, and the character interacts with audiences through expressive facial animation and emotional cues with the explicit goal of overturning conventional perceptions of digital characters. In a different civic context, the Shaanxi county of Foping (佛坪) has deployed an AI digital human assistant for tourism and government service that provides intelligent question answering, route planning, policy consultation, and cultural-science explanation, offering round-the-clock availability and supporting interaction in the local Foping dialect.

Regulation and Cyber Civilization: The Cyberspace Administration of China (中央网信办) has issued the Interim Measures for the Administration of Artificial Intelligence Personified Interactive Services and has released draft Measures for the Administration of Digital Virtual Human Information Services for public consultation, framing both texts as part of a sustained effort during the year to strengthen institutional supply around new AI technologies and applications. These measures form the regulatory backdrop to the 2026 China Cyber Civilization Conference, scheduled for May 19 and 20 in Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, where a dedicated subforum on artificial intelligence empowering cyber civilization construction is set to examine technological evolution, innovative development, and safety governance, with Guangxi officials including Chen Yijun describing how digital humans and intelligent creation tools are becoming deeply embedded in everyday life and online communication. Separately, public commentary has argued that the spread of "employee digital avatars," including documented cases in which a departed staff member is trained into an AI digital human to continue handling assignments and an open-source community trend of distilling colleagues and even mentors into reusable AI Skills, must operate within firm legal boundaries to protect personal rights and labor relations.

Cyber civilization (网络文明) is the dominant Party-state vocabulary in China for constructing a healthy, ideologically aligned online environment, and digital humans have emerged as one of its most politically endorsed instruments. The annual China Cyberspace Civilization Conference serves as the flagship venue for this convergence, with the 2026 edition set for Guangxi on May 19 and 20 and the 2025 Hefei edition explicitly elevating digital humans as carriers of rural revitalization and cultural rejuvenation. Provincial governments have commissioned themed digital humans as branded mascots, including Guangxi's Liu Sanjie (刘三姐), Shandong's Wenwen (文文), Henan Nanyang's Wan Xiaomei (宛小美), and Suzhou's pioneering 2022 cyber civilization digital human, while operational deployments such as the Jingzhou Municipal People's Procuratorate's hyperrealistic anchor Jing Xiaojian (荆小检) extend digital humans into law popularization, anti-fraud outreach, and public-service communication. A parallel discursive and regulatory layer, exemplified by the China Human Rights Network essay on digital development rights by Wang Xigen and Duan Yun and a China Youth Daily commentary calling for refined transparency standards, situates digital humans within an evolving Cyberspace Administration of China regulatory architecture, confirming that cyber civilization functions as the central political grammar within which the Chinese digital human industry now operates. 

Technology Providers and Platforms: Xiangxin Technology (相芯科技) has been profiled in mainstream media coverage as a digital human capability provider serving more than twenty industries including finance, government affairs, party building, education, and new retail, with reported reach across more than three thousand client organizations and a presence in over two hundred countries and regions. On the listed-company side, Zheven Interactive (浙文互联) has reported continued investment in virtual human, AIGC, automotive metaverse, and cultural-tourism metaverse business lines as part of a digital-culture strategy supported by technological enablement. In the open-source layer, Soul AI Lab, the research arm of the Chinese social platform Soul, has released SoulX-LiveAct, framed as an architectural advance designed to address persistent bottlenecks in real-time digital human production such as instability over extended generation runs, high GPU memory costs, and gradual drift in fine details.