2025 China Digital Human Industry Development Report

The "2025 China Digital Human Industry Development Report" (2025年中国数字人产业发展报告), an iiMedia Research industry report published in November 2025, presents China’s digital human sector as having moved beyond its earlier identity as an entertainment novelty and into a broader role as infrastructure for the digital economy, intelligent communication, cultural transmission, public service, and industrial upgrading. Its overall framing is expansive rather than narrowly technical. It starts by defining digital humans and outlining their main types and developmental stages, then places the industry within a larger national context shaped by policy support, local government implementation, digital economy growth, wider internet penetration, livestreaming expansion, and AI capability gains. The report’s structure is organized into five major parts: the background of industry development, current market conditions, city-level industry competitiveness, case studies of ecosystem development, and future trends. Its chart list shows that it combines policy review, macroeconomic context, adoption indicators, market-size forecasting, supply-chain mapping, investment activity, AI infrastructure, and city comparison into a single synthetic industry overview, rather than treating digital humans as only a media or marketing phenomenon.  

At the center of the report is a market narrative of rapid expansion. iiMedia presents the industry as one in which both the core market and the broader market driven by digital humans are rising together, which allows it to argue that digital humans are not only a product category but also a multiplier for related sectors. The headline numbers are used to support that claim: China’s core digital human market is placed at 33.92 billion yuan in 2024 and projected to reach 93.56 billion yuan by 2030, while the driven market is placed at 478.53 billion yuan in 2024 and projected to reach 1,046.86 billion yuan by 2030. The report interprets this as evidence that the industry is passing from a technology-verification phase into a stage of scaled application. It emphasizes that growth is not purely linear market expansion, but a structural shift in which digital humans begin to radiate value into adjacent industries and become a stable part of the broader digital economy. At the same time, it acknowledges that further progress depends on breaking through limits in perceptual computing and real-time rendering, and on improving rules around digital asset ownership, ethics, and governance.  

A notable feature of the report is the way it ties digital human growth to the surrounding technical and macro environment. It treats internet adoption as a foundational precondition, noting that China’s internet user base had reached 1.12268 billion by June 2025 and that internet penetration had risen to 79.7 percent. The implication is that digital humans now operate within a mature digital environment rather than at the margins of experimental media. The report also treats the AI stack as a critical enabler. It highlights the global AI chip market, which it says reached 63 billion US dollars in 2024, and the Chinese large-model market, which it says rose 108.1 percent year on year to 29.416 billion yuan in 2024, with further growth projected in 2025 and 2026. In the report’s logic, chips provide the computational foundation, large models upgrade interaction and generation capabilities, and mass connectivity supplies the user base and scenario density needed for commercial scaling. This lets iiMedia depict digital humans as the visible application layer of deeper advances in compute, models, data, and digital infrastructure.   

The report also devotes significant attention to industrial structure. Its industry chain map divides the sector into upstream, midstream, and downstream segments, showing digital humans as the outcome of a layered ecosystem rather than a standalone product. Upstream elements include hardware and software foundations such as chips, cloud services, graphics tools, and machine learning frameworks. The midstream focuses on technical providers, platforms, and production capabilities that assemble these foundations into digital human systems. Downstream is split across consumer-facing and enterprise-facing applications, with additional mention of government affairs. This is important because the report’s definition of the industry is quite broad: it encompasses virtual idols and digital employees, consumer platforms and public-service deployments, and both content-facing and function-facing use cases. The market is therefore described as a field in which concentration among leading firms coexists with increasing segmentation into specialized niches.  

Another major thread is geography. The report does not stop at a national market estimate but moves into a city competitiveness framework, presenting a 2025 China Digital Human City Development Index. In the ranking shown in the preview, Shenzhen is first with 92.92 points, followed by Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Hangzhou, with Wuxi in sixth place. This city-level framing suggests that iiMedia sees the industry as clustering in urban ecosystems where technology capacity, industrial base, policy support, and application rollout reinforce one another. Wuxi receives special attention because the report is tied to the 2025 China International Intelligent Communication Forum held there, and because iiMedia treats the city as an example of differentiated regional growth built on manufacturing depth and implementation strength. The city ranking element broadens the report from a market study into a regional development document, one concerned not only with firms and products but also with municipal competitiveness and local industrial strategy.  

The case-study section appears to push this applied, ecosystem-oriented perspective even further. According to the table of contents, the report examines CCTV.com’s virtual anchor Xiao C as a benchmark for mainstream media IP development and cross-domain application, Wuxi’s digital human deployment as a model of digital governance, the National Museum of Natural History’s digital human projects as examples of cultural tourism digitization and smart service, and CCTV’s digital factory approach as an AIGC-based production model. These examples indicate that the report is not interested only in commercial avatars for branding or entertainment. It wants to show digital humans operating across media, public administration, museums, cultural services, and industrialized content production. That broad scenario coverage reinforces its central claim that digital humans are evolving into general-purpose infrastructure for communication, service, and representation in both public and private domains.  

In tone and argument, the report is strongly developmental and strategic. It stresses momentum, ecosystem formation, and institutional maturation more than unresolved skepticism. Even so, it does not present the sector as frictionless. Its discussion of future direction indicates four broad trend lines: improvements in multimodal interaction and natural language understanding, continued declines in the cost of producing highly realistic digital humans, more developed compliance systems around data security and personality rights, and a shift in business logic away from homogeneous low-price competition toward deeper IP operations and closer integration with vertical industry scenarios. The ultimate goal, in the report’s own framing, is a sustainable commercial closed loop built through lower costs, higher efficiency, and stronger ecosystem coordination. In other words, the report portrays the next stage of the sector not as simple expansion in the number of digital humans, but as the consolidation of viable, governed, and scalable operating models across industries.  

Taken as a whole, this is a forward-looking industry synthesis designed to position digital humans as a maturing pillar of China’s AI-enabled digital economy. It is part market forecast, part ecosystem map, part city competitiveness study, and part scenario catalog. Its narrative arc runs from enabling conditions, to market expansion, to supply-chain formation, to regional competition, to applied case studies, and finally to long-range trend projection. The report’s emphasis on Wuxi, city rankings, industrial linkages, and institutional governance shows that it is not merely describing a technology category. It is trying to define digital humans as a strategic industry with national scale, local development implications, and cross-sector relevance extending from media and livestreaming to governance, museums, and enterprise service.