Across the China-focused academic record summarized for 2020–2025, the “digital human” journey reads less like a linear march toward photorealism and more like a coordinated expansion into a full sociotechnical stack, where technical embodiment, platform economics, and legitimacy constraints evolve together: early work already splits into market-facing persona commerce, affective interaction research, and institutional or cultural deployments; the next phase treats facial realism, controllable animation, and low-latency capture as infrastructure for real-time use in e-commerce, entertainment, and simulation rather than as isolated graphics problems; subsequent years increasingly integrate reconstruction, speech/audio-driven performance, and system pipelines with parallel lines that measure audience perception, authenticity, persuasion, and social influence in China’s platform ecosystems; and by 2024–2025 the agenda looks mature in the sense that evaluation frameworks, datasets, Chinese-language real-time interaction, governance questions (rights, accountability, dispute handling), and explicit ethical scrutiny of emotionally persuasive design appear as first-class research concerns alongside fidelity and controllability.