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23 Provinces:
Anhui Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (安徽省文化和旅游厅) — Oversees Hui‑style architecture, Huangshan tourism, and opera preservation.
Fujian Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (福建省文化和旅游厅) — Promotes Hakka Tulou, maritime heritage, and Mazu culture.
Gansu Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (甘肃省文化和旅游厅) — Oversees Dunhuang heritage and desert tourism.
Guangdong Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (广东省文化和旅游厅) — Manages Cantonese culture and Greater Bay Area tourism.
Guizhou Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (贵州省文化和旅游厅) — Manages Miao‑Dong culture and karst landscape tourism.
Hainan Provincial Department of Tourism, Culture, Radio, Television and Sports (海南省旅游和文化广电体育厅) — Oversees tropical island tourism and cultural‑sports integration.
Hebei Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (河北省文化和旅游厅) — Oversees Hebei’s Great Wall heritage, museums, and cultural‑tourism development.
Heilongjiang Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (黑龙江省文化和旅游厅) — Manages Harbin’s ice‑snow tourism and Russian‑influenced heritage.
Henan Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (河南省文化和旅游厅) — Manages ancient cradle‑of‑civilization sites and Shaolin culture.
Hubei Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (湖北省文化和旅游厅) — Oversees Yangtze River culture and Wuhan’s cultural institutions.
Hunan Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (湖南省文化和旅游厅) — Promotes Zhangjiajie tourism and Xiang culture.
Jiangsu Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (江苏省文化和旅游厅) — Oversees classical gardens, canal culture, and major cultural cities.
The Jiangsu Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism has emerged as one of China's most active provincial-level cultural authorities in integrating digital humans into public cultural and tourism services, positioning Jiangsu as a national pacesetter for AI-driven文旅 transformation. Under the leadership of Party Secretary and Director Yang Zhichun (杨志纯) and Deputy Directors Qian Ning (钱宁), Li Chuan (李川), and Tuofeng (拓峰), the department issued the landmark Jiangsu Province "Artificial Intelligence + Culture and Tourism" Action Plan (2026—2028) in early May 2026, the first provincial-level action plan of its kind in China, specifying six major application scenarios and twenty key tasks that explicitly designate digital human livestreaming, digital human interaction, and intelligent agent workflows as core technologies for transforming the provincial cultural tourism industry. The department's flagship public service platform "Suxin You" (苏心游), upgraded in summer 2025, features the signature digital human "Susu" (苏苏) as its public-facing recommendation officer, while the Yangzhou-focused "Xia Yangzhou" (下扬州) mini-program—nationally recognized as the first intelligent service platform fusing AI cultural tourism large models with digital human technology—deploys digital characters "Yang Xiaoliu" (扬小柳) and "Yang Xiaoyang" (扬小杨) to provide voice guidance and electronic mapping services with particular attention to elderly travelers. Beyond consumer-facing applications, the department spearheaded the May 2024 launch of the nation's first provincial "Cultural Tourism Industry Brain" (文旅行业大脑), approved third-batch key laboratories such as the 3D Digital Art Presentation Technology Cultural and Tourism Key Laboratory in September 2024, and partnered with Jiangsu Provincial Department of Public Security and Department of Finance to jointly issue regulatory guidance in January 2025 governing commercial performances by digital human personas under the Regulations on the Administration of Commercial Performances. The department has also incorporated digital humans into major flagship events including the Grand Canal Cultural Tourism Expo, the "Shu Jian Su Yun · Home Door View Exhibition" provincial tour (where the "Susu" digital human announces museum activities), the Jiangsu Rural Tourism Festival, and the 2023 National Smart Tourism Development Conference held in Nanjing, demonstrating a sustained institutional commitment to embedding digital human technology across cultural heritage, tourism services, museum interpretation, and rural revitalization domains throughout the province.
Jiangxi Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (江西省文化和旅游厅) — Manages revolutionary heritage and porcelain culture.
The Jiangxi Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, a department-level (正厅级) constituent body of the Jiangxi Provincial People's Government that also carries the provincial Cultural Heritage Bureau (省文物局) designation, is the principal authority steering digital human deployment across Jiangxi's cultural tourism ecosystem and is currently led by Party Secretary and Director Mei Yi (梅亦). Its flagship initiative in this domain is the "Cloud Tour Jiangxi" (云游江西) digital cultural tourism integrated platform, formally approved by the Jiangxi Provincial Development and Reform Commission on 7 August 2025 with the department serving as the project unit, to be hosted on the provincial e-government cloud and architected around six functional modules of which digital human management (数字人管理) sits alongside an intelligent recommendation engine, organizational engine, user behavior analysis engine, knowledge base engine, and large model engine, jointly intended to optimize province-wide cultural tourism resource scheduling and provide data-driven scientific support for regulatory oversight and public service decision-making. Building on an earlier policy direction set by the 2022 "Hundred Cities, Hundred Nights" cultural tourism consumption season, which already called for cultivating digital content production capabilities including digital human tour guides and AR model creation, the department has progressively embedded digital humans into provincial flagship campaigns: the November 2024 "Poetry Tour Jiangxi" (诗旅江西) cross-media promotion centered on the Tengwang Pavilion scenic area's virtual "Wang Bo" digital human, which recites Tang dynasty verse to visitors, grades their own recitations, and performs guided commentary; and the 2025 "Joy Tour Jiangxi" (乐游江西) nationwide short video crowdsourcing initiative co-promoted with CCTV, which explicitly listed digital human videos alongside AIGC video, VLOG, and animation as accepted submission formats. The department further aligns its digital human work with national policy by implementing the five-ministry Metaverse Industry Innovation Development Three-Year Action Plan through XR guides, digital performance arts, and "cloud tourism" formats, and in June 2025 its officials publicly committed to advancing the "Digital + Cultural Tourism" engineering program by leveraging large models, AIGC, and digital humans as priority technologies for building Jiangxi into a culture and tourism powerhouse, with the Tengwang Pavilion virtual Wang Bo deployment cited in the department's March 2025 formal reply to Proposal No. 0377 of the 13th Jiangxi Provincial CPPCC as an exemplar of the province's virtual digital human application in scenic area service delivery.
Jilin Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (吉林省文化和旅游厅) — Oversees Changbai Mountain tourism and ethnic Korean cultural preservation.
The Jilin Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, headquartered at 1486 Renmin Street in Changchun and led since February 2023 by Director Sun Guangzhi (孙光芝)—a member of the 14th National People's Congress—with Deputy Director Jin Zhenlin (金振林) serving as the principal figure shaping the agency's AI and digital human agenda, has positioned itself as one of China's most aggressive provincial cultural-tourism authorities in deploying virtual humans as a regional branding instrument. On 2 February 2024 the Department launched what it and national media described as China's first ice-and-snow culture virtual digital humans, "Chuyi" (初一) and "Xuanlong" (玄龙), unveiling them in the inaugural virtual-human ice-snow promotional film 《长白天下雪，雪域见奇遇》 (Changbai Snow Falls, A Snowland Encounter) anchoring the new provincial winter-tourism IP "Changbai Tianxia Xue" (长白天下雪, "Changbai Tops the World in Snow"); the two characters—Chuyi cast as a benevolent snow deity and "powder-snow ambassador" and Xuanlong as a water-dragon guardian of the Changbai Mountain forests—were produced by Blue Universe (蓝色宇宙), the digital-human subsidiary of Shenzhen-listed BlueFocus Intelligent Communications (蓝色光标, 300058), using "three-dimensional ultra-realistic" (三维超写实) modelling with LiveLinkFace, FaceGood and FaceWare facial-capture rigs. The full-media campaign built around the two digital humans was selected in May 2024 by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism as one of the Top Ten National Tourism Promotion Cases of 2023 from more than 140 entries, giving the project significant national visibility. The Department then deepened the deployment from a marketing asset into an operational AI service: on 19 May 2025, coinciding with China Tourism Day, it launched the Intelligent Interactive Holographic Cabin (智能交互全息仓) at the Jilin Provincial Museum, in which Chuyi and Xuanlong are powered by an "AI smart-brain" stack combining mainstream Chinese foundation models—Baidu's ERNIE Bot (文心一言) and ByteDance's Doubao (豆包)—with a self-developed cultural-tourism vertical small model covering Changbai Mountain's four seasons, the formation of Jilin rime (吉林雾凇), and Korean-ethnic-village customs, enabling real-time bilingual AI guided-tour dialogue with visitors. In parallel, the Department co-launched on 17 March 2025 the "Zhihui Jilin · AI Empowerment Plan" (智绘吉林·AI赋能计划) and the People's Daily Online "Mengxuan Lingjing" (梦幻灵境) Changchun AI Exhibition Center, with Deputy Director Jin Zhenlin officiating, and it has integrated AI digital human conversation into the "One Phone, Tour Jilin" (一机游吉林) mini-program, which the Department initiated and entrusted to Jishi Media (吉视传媒) and a leading OTA partner, linking 106 scenic spots, more than 5,000 accommodations and over 100 cultural venues with VR scenes and AI dialogue. Strategically, the agency's digital-human work has been institutionalised in higher-level provincial policy: the Jilin Provincial Government's Implementation Opinions on Accelerating AI Innovation and Development, issued in 2025, explicitly direct the upgrading of the "Changbai Tianxia Xue" virtual digital humans and the expansion of their guidance, interaction and application scenarios as a flagship "AI + Culture and Tourism" deliverable. Director Sun Guangzhi has reinforced this trajectory publicly, telling Tang-historian Professor Meng Man during the March 2025 NPC sessions that the Department would use AI digital humans to recommend Jilin's premium routes built around natural ecology and historical culture, while operational documents from the Department further indicate plans for a digital-human-driven micro-drama series 《粉雪记忆》 (Powder Snow Memories) and continued collaboration with China Unicom under a joint laboratory whose digital-human-led smart cultural-tourism projects were shortlisted in the National Data Bureau's 2024 "Data Element × Tourism" competition—together making the Jilin Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism a leading provincial case in China of a tourism regulator that has moved from commissioning a single branded virtual idol to operating an integrated AI digital human service layer across museum, mobile, and policy domains.
Liaoning Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (辽宁省文化和旅游厅) — Promotes coastal tourism, Manchu heritage, and industrial‑culture revitalization.
The Liaoning Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, headquartered at No. 45-11 Beiling Street, Huanggu District, Shenyang (reachable at 024-24866954), is the provincial-level competent authority for cultural affairs, public cultural services, heritage administration, and tourism governance across Liaoning in northeastern China, and in the digital human domain it operates primarily as a regulator, platform-builder, and convenor rather than a technology developer. Its flagship initiative is the Liaoning Smart Cultural Tourism Platform (辽宁智慧文旅平台), publicly unveiled at the 2023 Northeast Asia (Shenyang) Cultural Tourism Creativity Expo, where intelligent robots acted as narrator-guides explaining the platform to visitors, an early on-the-ground signal of the department's intent to mediate cultural-tourism services through anthropomorphic AI agents; the platform leverages cloud computing, visualization, and 5G to cover the full pre-trip, in-trip, and post-trip cycle through information lookup, online guiding, online booking, and public services, anchoring the "one mobile phone, tour Liaoning" (一部手机游辽宁) vision formalized in the September 2023 provincial policy "Several Policy Measures on Supporting High-Quality Development of the Cultural and Tourism Industry," which directs cultural-tourism enterprises to develop original digital cultural content using film, animation, gaming, esports, and digital technologies, with one-time subsidies of up to one million yuan for nationally recognized works and a 500,000-yuan reward for newly designated national-level smart tourism scenic areas. Under departmental coordination, two Liaoning entries were selected for the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's 2024 list of outstanding digital cultural-tourism innovation cases — the Liaoning Provincial Library's "Red Six Lands" Documentary Hall Smart Cultural Tourism Map, integrating 3D modeling and somatosensory interaction with VR, image, and voice modalities, alongside the Red Six Lands Pavilion Virtual Roaming System developed by Shenyang Siasun Virtual Reality (新松虚拟现实), in which, as a tourist testimonial described, an AR object-recognition table coupled with a two-dimensional map summons a photoreal digital human guide (逼真的数字人讲解) to narrate exhibits while users roam panoramic digital halls; Deputy Director Zhao Hui (赵辉) framed such deployments as part of technology-empowered new cultural-tourism scenarios offering visitors novel sensory experiences. The department also convenes industry-policy-academia dialogue on the digital terrain — its Science and Education Division (科技教育处), headed by Xie Zhonghua, hosted a September 2024 forum on "New Quality Productive Forces in Culture and Tourism" at Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, drawing in the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Communication University of China, and enterprises including Dalian Zhixiang Information and Dalian Botao Culture to discuss the rapid AI-driven conversion of cultural resources into data and assets — and continues to issue framework instruments such as the December 2025 "Several Measures of Liaoning Province on Cultural-Sports-Tourism Integration to Boost Consumption," adopted by the provincial standing meeting to implement central directives on consumption stimulus, within which municipal bureaus (most prominently the Shenyang Municipal Culture, Tourism and Radio-Television Bureau, which in February 2025 staged a DeepSeek-themed "AI + Cultural Tourism" training session foregrounding intelligent guiding, cultural activation, and precision marketing) and private operators deploy virtual hosts, AI livestreamers, and digital-human narrators across the Liaoning scenic-area network.
Qinghai Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (青海省文化和旅游厅) — Manages Tibetan‑Mongol cultural regions and Qinghai Lake tourism.
Qinghai Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism is the provincial government agency responsible for culture, tourism, cultural heritage protection, and the digital transformation of the cultural-tourism industry across Qinghai Province in northwest China. Since launching its "Digital Culture-Tourism" (数字文旅) initiative around 2020 — including a department-led research mission to Hainan and Guizhou in December of that year to study smart-tourism best practices — it has positioned itself as one of the more digitally forward provincial culture-tourism bureaus, partnering with China Unicom to build the Qinghai Digital Culture-Tourism Big Data Platform (which integrated cultural venues, museums, intangible heritage, and tourism data and was later recognized in China's 2024 "Data Elements×" competition). In the digital-human space specifically, the department has moved from infrastructure to applied content: its 2025 Qinghai Cultural Tourism Carnival (Sept–Oct 2025) prominently featured digital-human ancient-modern dialogue short videos as part of its public-facing programming, and its "Microdrama+" Action Plan Implementation Scheme (issued 2025) explicitly encourages creators to adopt AIGC, VR, AR, and digital-human technologies to elevate the artistic expression and online reach of short-form cultural-tourism content. The department also operates an in-house Information Center — concurrently known as the Qinghai Ethnic-Language Animation Development Center (青海省民族语动漫发展中心) — which gives it native production capacity for multilingual avatar-based content tailored to Qinghai's Tibetan, Mongolian, and other ethnic audiences, making it a natural provincial buyer/deployer of digital-human solutions for tourism guiding, intangible-heritage storytelling, and bilingual visitor services.
Shaanxi Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (陕西省文化和旅游厅) — Manages Qin‑Han heritage and Silk Road culture.
The Shaanxi Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism is the provincial government authority overseeing cultural and tourism affairs in Shaanxi — a region anchored by heritage assets such as Xi'an, the Terracotta Warriors, and Mount Hua — and has positioned digital humans as a flagship vehicle in its broader push to build a "trillion-yuan-level" digital cultural tourism industry. In April 2023, the Department co-hosted the Shaanxi Digital Cultural Tourism Integration Development Forum, where Deputy Inspector Qiu Xuanluo (邱轩洛) unveiled "Chen Xiaoxiang" (沉小香), a digital human IP designed to represent Mount Hua, framing such avatars as a way to give "top-tier IPs new life in the digital world" and turn Shaanxi's cultural tourism into a hotspot for consumption, image-building, and economic uplift. The agency's strategy — articulated in official communications including a June 2025 piece on its portal (whhlyt.shaanxi.gov.cn) titled "Letting Chinese Technology 'Light Up' Chinese Stories" — explicitly groups virtual digital humans alongside domestic games and the metaverse as new carriers for narrating Chinese culture to younger, global audiences. The Department has continued operationalising this, co-organising the 2025 China Library Annual Conference in Yulin, which showcased a "Yulin Tourism Recommendation Officer" digital human built on a self-developed AI cultural-tourism large model that fuses cave-dwelling and book motifs and supports real-time conversational guidance to attendees, illustrating the Department's pattern of pairing landmark Shaanxi IP with conversational AI avatars to drive interactive, technology-enabled tourism experiences.
Shandong Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (山东省文化和旅游厅) — Oversees Confucian heritage and coastal tourism.
The Shandong Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism is the provincial-level government agency overseeing cultural and tourism affairs across Shandong, and has emerged as one of China's more proactive provincial bodies in embedding digital humans into the cultural-tourism stack. It signaled this direction in September 2022 by launching its "Cultural Tourism China Metaverse" (文旅中国元宇宙) initiative, which included dedicated sub-tracks on digital humans, digital twins, and AR/VR/XR, and has since institutionalized vendor selection through its "Digital and Intelligent Cultural Tourism · Co-creating the Future" (数智文旅·共创未来) technology achievement recommendation catalog — recent 2026 inductees include Suzhou Kuyue's full-chain 60-fps no-wearable motion-capture digital human interactive solution and Shandong Digital Culture Group's five-product matrix in which digital humans sit alongside metaverse and digital-twin offerings. The Department also acts as the provincial gateway for the national Ministry of Culture and Tourism's "AI+" pilot programme, with cities such as Jinan permitted to recommend up to two pilot cases (covering digital human/robot guides, AI itinerary planning, ticketing, interpretation and crowd monitoring) up to the provincial level. Deployments are already operational rather than purely experimental: digital human tour guides were rolled out across the province's 200 monitored scenic areas during the 2026 May Day holiday — a period in which those sites received 26.15 million visitors and 1.27 billion yuan in revenue — and the Department co-hosted the 3rd Jinan International Biennale ("Human Intelligence Era," Dec 2024 – April 2025), which included an interactive "Lu Yun" (鲁韵) installation that generated personalized digital humans for visitors as a vehicle for promoting Qi-Lu culture. This activity sits within a broader provincial ecosystem in which Shandong added more than 76,000 new metaverse- and virtual-human-related enterprises in 2024, tying Zhejiang for second place nationally.
Shanxi Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (山西省文化和旅游厅) — Manages ancient temple preservation and historic city tourism.
The Shanxi Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism has positioned itself as one of China's more active provincial-level tourism authorities in deploying digital humans as a core pillar of its "digital intelligence + culture and tourism" (数智+文旅) strategy. Its flagship initiative came in March 2023, when it unveiled the province's first hyper-realistic virtual digital human, "Qingniao" (青鸟, "Blue Bird"), at the Digital Culture and Tourism Brand Innovation Conference in Taiyuan — an event guided by the Resource Development Department of the national Ministry of Culture and Tourism and co-hosted with the Taiyuan municipal government, with Qingniao itself developed by Shiyou Technology (世优科技) in partnership with Zhisheng Media (智胜传媒) to serve as Shanxi's official virtual tourism ambassador and "star promoter." The department has since broadened the program well beyond a single avatar: in August 2024 it released the first batch of provincial "Digital Cultural Tourism Innovation Cases," and by September 2025 it had showcased twelve flagship cases featuring assets such as a Hua Mulan 3D hyper-realistic digital human, the Tianlongshan Grottoes digital restoration exhibition, the Shuozhou digital cloud experience hall, and the digital revitalization of Dingxiang Hongfu Temple, alongside a "Digital Intelligence Empowering Cultural Tourism Co-Creation Plan" coordinated with sister provinces and new-media platforms. The department has also leaned into adjacent trends — partnering with AR vendors (such as Shi+AR / 视+AR at the 2024 conference), designating smart scenic areas, and capitalizing on the Black Myth: Wukong tourism surge — framing digital humans not as standalone novelties but as IP-building tools that, together with VR/AR experiences and digitized heritage sites, are meant to reposition Shanxi's dense stock of ancient architecture, grottoes, and murals for a younger, tech-native travel market.
Sichuan Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (四川省文化和旅游厅) — Promotes Sichuan cuisine, panda tourism, and Tibetan‑Qiang regions.
The Sichuan Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, led since late 2024 by Director and Party Group Secretary Chen Guanghao (陈光浩), who concurrently serves as Deputy Director of the Provincial Propaganda Department, is the provincial-level government authority responsible for cultural, heritage, and tourism affairs across Sichuan, and has become one of the most active provincial culture-and-tourism regulators in deploying digital humans as instruments of policy, branding, and industry development. The Department anchors its digital human strategy to the "Anyi Sichuan" (安逸四川) provincial cultural-tourism brand, one of the four international cards alongside "Land of Abundance," "Panda Home," and "Ancient Shu Civilization," and its flagship digital human "Anyi" (安逸) — a panda-shaped "time-space companion digital human" built on a cultural-tourism large model — was unveiled at the 2024 Sichuan Digital Cultural Tourism Development Conference held in Ya'an in September 2024, where it engaged in real-time on-stage dialogue with a human host and was thereafter rolled out by the Department's affiliated Sichuan Culture Hall as an AI mascot whose promotion and scenario expansion is now a line item in the Department's published 2025 budget. Beyond "Anyi," the Department has co-sponsored or guided a steady stream of historical-figure digital humans deployed across the province's cultural-tourism scenarios, including the Li Bai digital human launched in 2023 with CCTV.com under the "Reading Li Bai, Touring China" (读李白游神州) campaign, the "Su Shi Q&A" (苏轼问答) digital human shown by Sichuan state-owned cultural enterprises at the 20th Shenzhen ICIF, the online "Zhuge Liang" interactive digital human launched April 2025, the Du Fu digital human deployed at Du Fu Thatched Cottage Museum during the 2025 National Day–Mid-Autumn holiday (where the introduction of the figure correlated with a 58.81 percent year-on-year increase in visitor reception), and an AI digital-human Li Bai featured in the 2025 "Ten Thousand People Appreciate the Moon" Mid-Autumn ceremonies in Jiangyou and the Mianzhu International Wine Expo. The Department serves as guiding authority for the Visual Fusion Scene Experience Technology Innovation Center of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism (视觉融合场景体验文化和旅游部技术创新中心), established August 2023 in Chengdu's Wuhou District with Chuantou Digital Technology as host unit and Sichuan University as co-construction partner, which lists AI cultural-tourism large models, virtual-real fusion interactive experiences, and "virtual-real symbiosis" digital twins among its five core application domains and produced the original "Anyi" panda digital human. The Department also operates within a broader policy architecture that explicitly elevates digital humans: it is a co-signatory of the Sichuan Provincial Metaverse Industry Development Action Plan (2023–2025), which targets idol avatars, digital-human performers, hosts, narrators, and game characters as priority application scenarios, and is one of twelve departments behind the Sichuan Cultural and Tourism Industry Chain Special Work Plan, which designates the digital culture industry as one of ten priority sectors. Through annual flagship convenings such as the Sichuan Digital Cultural Tourism Development Conference and the Sichuan International Travel Expo (the 11th edition held in Leshan in 2025 featured XR immersive experience and digital-human interaction in the Leshan pavilion), and through co-organized industry events including the 2024 Sichuan Cultural Tourism Market Integration Development Promotion Activities and the 2025 China (Chengdu) Animation and Game Consumption Season, the Department has positioned digital humans as a cross-cutting tool for non-heritage transmission, scenic-area interpretation, historical-figure storytelling, smart-tourism governance, and provincial brand projection both domestically and to overseas audiences.
Taiwan Tourism Administration, Ministry of Transportation (交通部觀光署) — Taiwan’s Tourism Administration (MOTC) manages scenic areas, tourism policy, and international marketing.
The Tourism Administration, Ministry of Transportation and Communications is Taiwan's central government agency responsible for domestic and international tourism policy development and execution, with its official ambassador being OhBear, a cartoon Formosan Black Bear that has increasingly served as a vehicle for the agency's digital human and AI-driven visitor service initiatives. Under Director-General Chen Yu-hsiu (陳玉秀), the administration has positioned digital transformation as a central pillar of its tourism strategy, framed by the administration as the operational core of the Lai administration's "Tourism National Team" concept. At the 2024 Tourism Industry Digital Expo held December 3, 2024 at Taipei 101's ATT 4 Recharge venue, the opening ceremony was led by the 3D digital avatars (數位分身) of Minister of Transportation Chen Shih-kai (陳世凱) and then-Director-General Chou Yung-hui (周永暉), who guided attendees on an immersive virtual tour of Taiwan's thirteen national scenic areas and their representative animal mascots, with accompanying music co-produced by AI and human musicians and incorporating Indigenous elements. The agency expanded this approach at the 2026 Taipei Smart City Expo from March 17 to March 20, 2026, where the "Taiwan Tourism Digital Pavilion" deployed the OhBear AI Assistant (喔熊AI小幫手) to plan two-day, one-night personalized itineraries, alongside AI fortune-stick interpretation tied to five-element personalization, AI-generated scent and beverage profiling, immersive 3D naked-eye bird-watching displays, nineteen virtual cycling routes, and real-time AI multilingual translation for international visitors. Beyond exhibitions, the administration has operationalized AI-mediated visitor services through its AI Smart Counter (智慧櫃台) real-time translation system, first installed at Songshan Airport's tourist service center and at the Yehliu Visitor Center within the North Coast and Guanyin Mountain National Scenic Area, delivering English, Japanese, and Korean voice translation through a dual-sided transparent screen over 5G to support the agency's post-pandemic target of 12 million international arrivals. Director-General Chen has also publicly framed scenic-area assets as convertible "digital assets," pointing to the Tourism Administration's joint Digital Modeling and Twin Application Infrastructure Project (數位建模與雙生應用基礎建設計畫) with the Administration for Digital Industries, under which Yehliu's iconic Queen's Head and Princess rock formations have been converted into high-precision 3D models licensed to the gaming industry. In international markets, OhBear has been adapted into emerging digital and AI-adjacent formats, including a naked-eye 3D billboard unveiled in Times Square on November 24, 2025 as part of the Waves of Wonder campaign and an AI-powered photo booth at the Los Angeles Travel & Adventure Show 2026 that generated personalized Taiwan travel scenes for visitors as a digital keepsake. Collectively, these activities position the Tourism Administration as one of Taiwan's most visible public-sector deployers of digital human, digital twin, and generative AI technologies in a destination-marketing and visitor-services context, with its mascot-driven brand architecture providing a coherent narrative wrapper for what is in practice a multi-vendor, cross-agency stack of AI translation, 3D capture, virtual reality, and avatar-based ceremonial communications.
Yunnan Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism (云南省文化和旅游厅) — Oversees multi‑ethnic cultural preservation and eco‑tourism.
The Yunnan Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism has functioned as the principal governmental sponsor and coordinating authority behind Yunnan's digital human initiatives in cultural tourism, positioning the province as an early experimental site for virtual ambassadors, metaverse platforms, and large-model applications in the sector. In April 2022 the Department issued guidance on optimizing the cultural and tourism business environment that explicitly referenced digital humans and NFT-based digital assets as targets for development in urban management and public services, providing an early policy basis for subsequent deployments. On May 19, 2022, coinciding with China Tourism Day, the Department launched "Caiyun" (彩云) on its official Douyin account as the province's first virtual digital cultural tourism promotion officer (数字文旅推荐官), marking Yunnan's debut entry into branded virtual-being promotion. Under the Department's guidance, Yunnan's first cultural-tourism metaverse platform "Departing for Fun Yunnan" (出发趣云南) was unveiled in Dali in May 2023, followed in July 2023 by the launch of "AI Tour Yunnan" (AI游云南), described as China's first provincial-level tourism destination large-language-model application scenario, developed by Yunnan Tengyun Information Industry Co., Ltd. (云南腾云信息产业有限公司) in partnership with Tencent. The Department also oversaw the "Cultural Tourism Metaverse" (文旅元宇宙) project built by the Yunnan Provincial Cultural Center on the Yunnan Public Culture Cloud, which combines AI, digital humans, and cloud rendering to enable multi-user digital identity interaction, debuting at the China-South Asia Expo in August 2023. More recently the Department has partnered with Yunnan Unicom (云南联通) on the "Cultural Tourism Digital Human" and related "AI Time Door" cultural-relic AIGC interactive products showcased at China Unicom's 2024 digital intelligence cultural-tourism event in Kunming, where the Department's first-level inspector Chen Shuyun (陈述云) attended, and at the 2026 Digital China Innovation Competition, where the Unicom-Yunnan cultural tourism project providing services to the Department won nine awards. During the 2025 Spring Festival the Department also supported an AI-empowered "Intangible Cultural Heritage" Spring Festival program featuring a digital human counterpart of Bai ethnic singer Dapo Maji (达坡玛吉) performing alongside her physical self, illustrating the Department's continued use of digital humans as instruments for both tourism promotion and intangible cultural heritage activation.
Zhejiang Provincial Department of Culture, Radio, Television and Tourism (浙江省文化广电和旅游厅) — Manages Jiangnan heritage, water‑town tourism, and cultural‑media development.
The Zhejiang Provincial Department of Culture, Radio, Television and Tourism is the provincial-level administrative body responsible for cultural affairs, radio and television regulation, and tourism development across Zhejiang Province, operating through its official portal at ct.zj.gov.cn. In the digital human domain, the department functions primarily as a policy coordinator, project sponsor, and supervising authority rather than a technology developer, and it has integrated digital human deployments into its broader push to advance smart tourism and digital cultural consumption in the province. In a November 2024 formal response to a Zhejiang Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference proposal, the department articulated a policy line favoring application of digital human and blockchain technologies in the tourism industry, setting a target of cultivating at least twenty provincial-level smart tourism immersive experience spaces by 2027 and committing to integrate augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence into scenic areas, resort districts, and cultural venues. The department was named alongside the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Radio and Television and counterpart provincial broadcasting regulators in the National Radio and Television Administration's November 2024 approval of ten major virtual reality and virtual digital human application demonstration projects. It guided Wasu Media (华数传媒) in the November 2024 launch of the "Poetic Painting Zhejiang" cultural tourism preferential card, a project that bundled scenic-area access across more than one hundred sites with digital human AI capability platform integration. The department co-hosted the Yangtze River Delta Performance Trade Fair alongside cultural and tourism authorities from Anhui, Shanghai, and Jiangsu, where AI digital human products for cultural tourism performance were featured. In August 2025, it jointly organized with the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee Propaganda Department and the China Academy of Art a retrospective exhibition marking the 110th anniversary of painter Mo Pu, which incorporated digital human generation among its curatorial techniques. Party Group member and Deputy Director Li Xinfang (李新芳) represented the department at the November 2025 "Digital Future" immersive cultural tourism supply-demand matchmaking event in Hangzhou, while Deputy Director Chen Rufu (陈如福) and International Exchange Division Deputy Director Liang Bing (梁兵) engaged with the Xianghu International Friendly Service Center, which provides twenty-five-language inquiry and AI digital human response services for foreign visitors around the APEC period. In January 2026, two Ningbo cases including Minghe Ancient Town's 3D digital human interactive applications were selected for the provincial digital cultural tourism list curated under the department's authority, reflecting its continuing role in identifying and elevating exemplary digital human deployments within Zhejiang's cultural tourism sector.
04 Municipalities:
Municipality: Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism (北京市文化和旅游局) — Oversees national‑capital cultural institutions and heritage sites.
Municipality: Chongqing Municipal Commission of Culture and Tourism Development (重庆市文化和旅游发展委员会) — Manages mountain‑city tourism and Yangtze River culture.
Municipality: Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism (上海市文化和旅游局) — Oversees creative industries and international tourism.
Municipality: Tianjin Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism (天津市文化和旅游局) — Manages port‑city heritage and cultural districts.
05 Autonomous Regions:
Autonomous Region: Guangxi Department of Culture and Tourism (广西壮族自治区文化和旅游厅) — Promotes Zhuang culture and karst landscapes.
Autonomous Region: Inner Mongolia Department of Culture and Tourism (内蒙古自治区文化和旅游厅) — Oversees grassland culture and Mongolian heritage.
Autonomous Region: Ningxia Department of Culture and Tourism (宁夏回族自治区文化和旅游厅) — Oversees Hui culture and desert tourism.
Autonomous Region: Tibet Department of Culture and Tourism (西藏自治区文化和旅游厅) — Manages Tibetan Buddhist heritage and plateau tourism.
Autonomous Region: Xinjiang Department of Culture and Tourism (新疆维吾尔自治区文化和旅游厅) — Manages Silk Road tourism and Uyghur cultural heritage.
02 Special Administrative Regions:
SAR: Hong Kong Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau (香港文化体育及旅游局) — Oversees Hong Kong’s cultural development and global tourism strategy.
SAR: Macau Cultural Affairs Bureau & Tourism Office (澳门文化局 / 旅游局) — Manages Portuguese‑Chinese heritage and entertainment tourism.