Top 20 China Digital Human City Development Index in 2025

This iiMedia report, "Top 20 Chinese Cities in Digital Human Development Index by 2025" (2025年中国数字人城市发展指数20强), presents China’s 2025 digital human city landscape as a national competition shaped by three forces working together: technological capability, policy support, and the practical depth of real-world deployment. Rather than treating digital humans as a narrow entertainment novelty, the report frames them as a cross-sector urban industry now embedded in government services, e-commerce, finance, education, culture, and tourism. Its central argument is that city-level development is no longer defined only by whether a place has digital human companies, but by whether it can connect research, infrastructure, content production, commercial use, and public-sector application into a functioning ecosystem.  

Within that framework, the report’s ranking of the top 20 cities places Shenzhen first, followed by Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Wuxi, with Nanjing, Suzhou, Zhengzhou, Chongqing, Hefei, Chengdu, Xiamen, Wuhan, Fuzhou, Tianjin, Jiaxing, Jinan, Foshan, and Dongguan completing the list. The report uses these placements to tell a broader story about regional concentration, especially the dominance of the Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta, and Beijing-centered cluster. Shenzhen is described as the strongest overall city because of its complete full-stack chain from technology to content and application, while Beijing is associated with research institutes, standards work, and demand from state and central organizations. Guangzhou is positioned as a city where digital humans align closely with livestream commerce and exhibition infrastructure, Shanghai as a city linking AI industry, finance, international business, and cultural deployment, and Hangzhou as a city where digital humans are tightly integrated with platform commerce, events, and content-driven traffic conversion. Wuxi appears as an especially important secondary case because the report treats it as proof that a city outside the biggest first-tier centers can still rise through strong scenario implementation, computing support, and coordinated policy design.  

Methodologically, the report presents the ranking as a composite city development index generated through iiMedia’s proprietary CMDAS and iiMeval systems. It says cities are assessed across five dimensions: industry scale, policy support, media or communication visibility, economic potential, and application scenarios. The narrative significance of that model is that it does not reward only technical research or company count. It also rewards visibility, local market strength, and, importantly, scenario penetration. That is why the report emphasizes a “double-wheel” development pattern: one wheel driven by large-scale technological and industrial ecosystems, usually strongest in top-tier cities, and another wheel driven by deep localization of use cases. This helps explain why Wuxi receives special attention for application scenarios, and why the report repeatedly stresses that the future of the sector depends on moving beyond demonstration projects into routine, scalable deployment. 

The report’s substantive content is inclusive in the sense that it maps digital humans across a wide range of functions rather than reducing them to a single model. In public administration, they are presented as service guides, policy explainers, multilingual assistants, and governance-facing spokespersons. In commercial settings, they appear as livestream hosts, virtual brand representatives, and tools for digital retail conversion. In tourism and culture, they function as guides, performers, and city-branding assets. In education and finance, they are positioned as service interfaces and support agents. Across all of these uses, the report suggests that China’s digital human sector is shifting from a phase of visual novelty and technical showcase toward one of operational integration, where cities are judged by whether digital humans create measurable value for institutions, enterprises, and local economies.  

At the same time, the report is not purely promotional. Its deeper analytical layer, especially as reconstructed in the companion analysis document, implies that the ranking should be read as a directional industry signal rather than a fully transparent measurement. The five index dimensions are named, but the underlying weights and detailed calculations are not disclosed. That means the report is most useful for understanding how iiMedia sees the structure of the field: cities with strong tech ecosystems, active industrial policy, visible media presence, and deployable local scenarios rise to the top. The report therefore works best as a narrative map of where China’s digital human economy is clustering and why, not as a definitive scientific measurement of city capability. 

Taken as a whole, the original iiMedia report describes a sector entering a more practical and competitive phase. It argues that digital humans are becoming part of city development strategy, industrial upgrading, and public digitalization, and that the next stage of competition will depend less on novelty and more on standards, copyright confirmation, revenue-sharing systems, multimodal interaction, lower production costs, and stronger rights protection. Its overall picture is of an industry that is still uneven and partly driven by publicity, but clearly moving toward broader institutional use. In that sense, the report is not just a ranking of cities. It is a narrative about how China is trying to turn digital humans into a durable urban industry spanning technology, governance, commerce, and cultural production.  

1. Shenzhen — Guangdong

2. Beijing — Beijing Municipality

3. Guangzhou — Guangdong

4. Shanghai — Shanghai Municipality

5. Hangzhou — Zhejiang

6. Wuxi — Jiangsu

7. Nanjing — Jiangsu

8. Suzhou — Jiangsu

9. Zhengzhou — Henan

10. Chongqing — Chongqing Municipality

11. Hefei — Anhui

12. Chengdu — Sichuan

13. Xiamen — Fujian

14. Wuhan — Hubei

15. Fuzhou — Fujian

16. Tianjin — Tianjin Municipality

17. Jiaxing — Zhejiang

18. Jinan — Shandong

19. Foshan — Guangdong

20. Dongguan — Guangdong