In May 2023, Mingshui County’s digital-economy incubator was publicly described as beginning operations, and it was presented as quickly expanding into multiple business lines that included mobile outbound calling, e-commerce customer service, short-video promotion, human livestreaming, AI digital-human livestreaming, and creative design, with subsequent reporting detailing a physical buildout that included 10 human livestream rooms, one AI digital-human livestream display hall, dedicated AI livestream halls, an AI replication room, policy livestream rooms and halls branded around “Encountering Mingshui,” a county brand livestream room branded around “Impression Mingshui,” an agricultural-products exhibition hall branded around “Taoyuan Ming,” and multiple creative display areas, while also portraying AI digital-human livestreaming as a lower-cost, continuously runnable substitute for some standardized hosting work and as a way to meet platform duration requirements and capture fragmented time-slot traffic.
By August 15, 2024, local reporting described the Mingshui digital-economy incubator as hosting 17 resident enterprises and specified the facility configuration at that time as 10 human livestream rooms, one AI digital-human livestream display hall, two AI livestream halls, and one AI replication room, framed within a broader “AI+” push to support local industries and to commercialize county-level digital-economy capabilities.
On August 5, 2024, a Heilongjiang Daily report republished by major portals described the Baidu Intelligent Cloud (Heilongjiang) Digital Human Industrial Base in Daqing as a site where realistic digital humans were livestreaming on multiple platforms to sell products for local food-and-beverage merchants, and it reported that the base’s operations could be run with very limited staffing; the same report stated that the wider Baidu (Heilongjiang) digital-economy industrial-base project planned an “one base, three centers, one platform” structure, and it described the Daqing digital-human base as completing venue construction plus software-and-equipment installation by late March 2024 and beginning formal operations in early April 2024, with the base presented as covering five business directions: livestream e-commerce, cultural-and-tourism services, digital film and video, enterprise branding, and “digital employees,” and with the base’s manager describing a workflow in which a few minutes of preparation could generate a 1:1 likeness-style digital-human video output suitable for 7×24 livestreaming and broader uses such as virtual staff, virtual anchors, virtual idols, and digital customer service across sectors including e-commerce, finance, MCNs, telecom, interactive entertainment, and tourism.
On August 30, 2024, China Mobile announced that its China Mobile Intelligent Computing Center (Harbin) had been completed and officially put into operation, and company and mainstream reporting characterized it as the largest single-cluster intelligent computing center among domestic telecom operators, describing a single cluster with more than 18,000 AI accelerator cards and stated intelligent-computing capacity on the order of 6.9 EFLOPS, integrated tiered storage of about 150P, and an engineering emphasis on scaling a large single cluster using domestically produced network equipment; the same reporting presented the center as a computing foundation intended to support trillion-parameter model training, including capabilities such as large-scale parallel training, checkpoint-resume for training interruptions, AI task lifecycle management, and minute-level fault localization, alongside statements that China Mobile’s Jiutian model training had been carried out on the cluster in a stable and efficient manner.
On November 12, 2024, an official-local paper report described Mingshui as having built what it called the province’s largest AI livestream base, reiterating the incubator’s May 2023 operational start and providing a more expanded facility inventory than the August 2024 description, including 10 human livestream rooms, one AI digital-human livestream display hall, three AI livestream halls, one AI replication room, a policy livestream room and a separate policy livestream hall, a county-brand livestream room, an agricultural-products exhibition hall, and multiple creative display areas; the same report included merchant-attributed outcomes presented as individual cases, including one restaurant owner describing 711 livestream orders and another merchant describing using AI digital-human livestreaming since April of that year to increase exposure and revenue, and it described AI digital-human livestreaming as enabling continuous 24-hour operation and reducing staffing and operating costs compared with fully human-hosted livestreaming.
On February 28, 2025, Harbin’s Pingfang District Government Service Center introduced an AI virtual government-service assistant presented as a digital human named Pingping, with local reporting describing it as built on DeepSeek as its language-model “brain” and implemented through real-time 3D rendering and an expression-and-motion fusion approach intended to support multimodal, real-time interaction; the same reporting described the project team as organizing service processes and guidance materials and training the model with operational notes and experience summaries, and it stated performance and scope metrics as reported by the project narrative, including a claimed dialogue accuracy exceeding 90%, an initial pilot covering 94 livelihood-service scenario categories and more than 4,000 common questions, and a plan to progressively open 597 matters for use, alongside a stated intention to extend deployment beyond the service hall into community service stations and service sub-centers and to further integrate AI capabilities into frontline service workflows.
On April 1, 2025, a financial-sector outlet reported that the Agricultural Development Bank of China’s Daqing branch produced what it described as the first “Agricultural Development digital human” promotional video within its Heilongjiang system and named the digital human Nong Xiaofa, attributing the production to the head office’s MHP virtual digital-human platform and describing intended use in customer-facing service publicity across multiple channels such as social media platforms and in-branch promotional screens; the same report described the digital human’s image as built through high-precision modeling and described configurable delivery parameters such as tone, actions, and language style to match different business scenarios while maintaining consistent branding.
On May 21, 2025, Heilongjiang Daily reporting republished on the Heilongjiang provincial government site described a 1:1 “real-person recreation” digital employee named Xiaoying presented by Heilongjiang Qishi Technology Development Co., Ltd. (黑龙江起时科技发展有限公司) at the 34th Harbin International Economic and Trade Fair, portraying Xiaoying as functioning as an on-site guide through touchscreen-initiated conversational Q&A, with the report emphasizing high-detail hair and natural facial expressions, a high-definition display, fluent dialogue, and the framing of the system as a continuously available assistant in the exhibition setting.
On June 12, 2025, an article carried by Heilongjiang News (published on Tencent News) described the Harbin Pingfang District Government Service Center’s virtual digital-human assistant “Pingping” as already in use there, characterizing it as built on the DeepSeek model and presented through real-time 3D rendering for interactive government-service consultation, and reiterating the same deployment scope that had been reported earlier in February 2025: coverage of 94 livelihood-service scenario categories and more than 4,000 common questions in its initial phase.
On September 16, 2025, a report published by Suihua Dongbeiwang described Mingshui County’s county-level digital-economy push as including an “AI livestream base” component and the use of AI “digital twins/digital-human”-style tools for livestream-related activity in the county’s digital-economy development work, presented as part of investment attraction and industrial promotion rather than as a measured adoption study.
On November 11, 2025, Suihua Dongbeiwang reported that the Mingshui County Internet Service Center used an AI digital-human livestream format to conduct an online policy-and-theory briefing, describing the approach as combining livestream interaction with on-demand viewing and emphasizing continuous availability (described as 7×24) enabled by the AI digital-human delivery system.
On December 18, 2025, SASAC’s official English-language site published a China Mobile update that explicitly referenced Harbin in the company’s national AI-infrastructure buildout, stating that China Mobile had established intelligent computing center nodes including in Harbin and that its total intelligent-computing scale had reached 61.3 EFLOPS, framing this as part of broader “AI+” progress and network-wide capability upgrades rather than a Heilongjiang-only initiative.
On January 23, 2026, the Harbin Economic and Technological Development Zone (Pingfang) government site published an “innovation application case” introduction for the virtual digital-human government-service assistant “Pingping,” describing it as operating on an evolving government-service knowledge base and stating that by the end of 2025 it was planned to be applied across 597 government-service items, alongside a stated direction of deeper integration between online and offline service channels.
[Feb 2026]
2025
May 27, 2025: Qishi Technology Development Co., Ltd. – Digital human “Xiaoying” served as a tour guide at the 2025 Harbin International Economic and Trade Fair, featuring lifelike 1:1 digital recreation with vivid facial expressions and interactive touch screen capabilities.
March 1, 2025: DeepSeek (via Harbin Pingfang District Government) – AI-powered virtual government service assistant “Pingping” was officially deployed at the Harbin Pingfang District Government Service Center, featuring real-time 3D rendering and advanced facial expression synchronization.
February 28, 2025: DeepSeek (via Harbin Pingfang District Government) – The deployment date when “Pingping” was officially launched at the government service center.
2024
August 6, 2024: Baidu – Digital humans were actively live streaming on various platforms at the Baidu Intelligent Cloud (Heilongjiang) Digital Human Industrial Base in Daqing, promoting local restaurant products with only two staff members managing the entire operation.
April 20, 2024: Agricultural Development Bank of China (ADBC) Daqing branch – Launched Heilongjiang Province’s first “Agricultural Development Digital Human” named “Nong Xiaofa” using the headquarters’ MHP Virtual Digital Human Platform for customer-facing promotional services.