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Cultural Tourism and Heritage: In Nanning, the 2026 "Guangxi Sanyuesan - Bagui Carnival" opening ceremony featured the digital human "Liu Sanjie" at a "One-Click Tour of Guangxi" experience zone, greeting visitors and performing antiphonal singing with Dong ethnic communities at the Minge Lake Fengyu Bridge. In the same festival's judicial outreach area, the legal-aid digital human "Zhuangzhuang" operated as an on-site legal advisor, handling general queries from visitors. The Guangxi Department of Commerce (广西商务厅) used a digital human to announce benefit details for the accompanying "33 Consumption Festival" at Nanning's Tingzi Wharf. In Sichuan, Chuantou Shuke (川投数科), a provincial state-owned enterprise benchmark, introduced the "Anyi" digital human as the public face of what is presented as Sichuan's first cultural-tourism large model, leveraging Chengdu's cultural-tourism resources. In Jiangsu, Nanjing Shanglu (南京商旅), operator of the Qinhuai Scenery attraction, reported that digital human guide narration and VR immersive experiences remained a core revenue line, contributing to 2025 operating income of roughly 202 million yuan. In Wuhan, an "AI cultural relics name card" product uses NFC "touch" activation to surface digital human narrators drawing on content from more than three hundred museums worldwide, including the Hubei Provincial Museum and Beijing's Palace Museum, and has reportedly sold over 1.3 million copies overseas. At the Wuhan Guanggu "AI Smart Tide" themed mobile business hall, AI digital humans are showcased alongside an AI Go-playing robot and AI glasses in a consumer-facing technology retail environment.

Reading and Publishing Campaigns: Shanghai Xinhua Media (上海新华传媒) launched "Xiao YUE," an AI digital human whose visual design is modelled on a scroll, at the 2026 city-wide reading week opening held at the Shanghai Book City Fuzhou Road store, where the virtual host introduced the group's "365 Readers" brand and the "Book Scroll Millennium" special exhibition tracing three thousand years of written Chinese. Xiao YUE continues to appear across Xinhua Media outlets as the persistent face of the year-round reading push. In Haikou, the Hainan Provincial Reading Week that opened on 20 April programmed "Digital Human Co-Reading" story sessions alongside a "Reading Flash - Hainan Slow Listening" digital reading flash event, positioning virtual hosts as continuing reading companions rather than single-event novelties.

Ideological and Patriotic Education: In Hunan, the Shaoshan Municipal Party Committee Propaganda Department has embedded the AI digital humans "Shaoxiaohong" and "Shaoxiaofeng" into the "My Shaoshan Trip" red-themed research-and-study programme for primary and secondary students, using holographic projection to recreate revolutionary scenes while the two virtual hosts guide pupils through ideological lessons. Sunshine Life Insurance (阳光人寿) deployed an AI digital human virtual instructor through its Jiangxi branch during the 15 April National Security Education Day series, training staff on topics including phishing email identification and customer data confidentiality, with the Hebei and Guangdong branches using comparable AI-generated materials for password security and information security education. In Hong Kong, Chung Hwa Christian Church Ming Yin Academy (中華基督教會銘賢書院) unveiled a digital human version of its principal, allowing students and teachers to interact with the avatar as part of a school-wide embrace of AI tools.

Enterprise Workforce and Employment Applications: A gaming and media company in Shandong attracted national attention after reportedly training AI digital humans on the chat records, work documents and decision-making habits of departed employees so that the virtual replacements continued to occupy the vacant workstations, a practice publicly dubbed "AI succeeding the resigned." In Tianjin's Sino-Singapore Eco-City, a deployed digital human supports jobseekers by automatically parsing resumes and matching open roles based on applicants' education, skills and stated preferences. Hunan provincial authorities used digital humans as simulated interviewers at the "Smart Gathering Xiaoxiang - Talent Gathering Hunan" 2026 provincial recruitment action, giving young candidates mock-interview practice before on-site employer rounds. Hunan Bank (湖南银行) published a public bid-candidate notice for its 2025 digital human system construction project, signalling procurement of a bank-wide virtual service layer. The "Colleague.Skill" (同事.Skill) project, profiled widely in Chinese technology coverage, builds digital clones of working professionals by ingesting their outputs and simulating their operational patterns, with a live competition held in Guangzhou at which contestants publicly "distilled" digital clones on stage, including one submission from a hearing-impaired engineer working in financial-industry software development.

Platforms, Products, and Commercial Vendors: Alibaba (阿里巴巴) publicised a "Hello World" new-product event scheduled for 22 April using a cherry-blossom-themed promotional poster built around an AI digital human figure, widely interpreted across Chinese and Hong Kong financial media as a preview of a consumer-facing virtual being tied to the launch. JD.com (京东) released a "free-state digital human" product line, extending its existing live-commerce and service avatars into more flexible behavioural modes. Baidu Smart Cloud (百度智能云) fielded its digital human ViviDora at a humanoid-robotics industry event, where the avatar moderated an audience Q&A segment with engineers. Kuaishou's (快手) Kling AI (kling.ai) continues to promote its free AI avatar function through the Motion Control feature, allowing users to generate dance or performance clips from a short reference video. Yunnan Moucheng Digital Technology (云南谋成数字科技有限公司), based in Kunming's Panlong District, offers AI agent customisation, AI digital human applications, AI matrix-account systems and AI-driven marketing services to small and mid-sized clients. In Hong Kong, Pantheon Lab, a 2019-founded Science Park tenant, combines deep-learning visual content generation, digital humans and agentic AI ecosystems to supply one-stop enterprise solutions across customer service, education and media. Haitian Ruisheng (海天瑞声) disclosed that it has extended beyond AI training data into downstream applications, including a large project involving thousands of digital humans and a dedicated voice-model platform. Huibo Xing (慧播星) supplied the digital human presenter used in a Sina Finance video package covering a robot half-marathon. Fangzhi Technology (方直科技) reported in its 2025 annual-report summary that it applies virtual digital human technology alongside internet and AI tools to the digitalisation of primary and secondary education content. Fengyuzhu (风语筑) is now classified by Chinese financial media under the virtual digital human, 3D modelling, NFT concept, influencer livestream and digital twin sector tags. Hebei Broadcasting Wireless Media (河北广电无线传媒股份有限公司), based in Shijiazhuang, disclosed the in-house development of an AI-based digital human interaction system as part of its innovation R&D pipeline.

Industry Infrastructure and Flagship Events: Beijing's Chaoyang District hosts the Beijing Digital Human Base (北京市数字人基地), where the third and fourth floors of a redeveloped commercial complex have been populated with a cluster of digital human companies and projects deemed to have growth potential, while the lower floors house brand retailers to create foot-traffic synergy. The Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center (北京人形机器人创新中心) showcased its embodied Tiangong 3.0 (具身天工3.0) humanoid at an industry exhibition where Star Dynamic Era (星动纪元) presented its Q5 humanoid robot and Baidu Smart Cloud's ViviDora digital human conducted live audience Q&A, illustrating the growing convergence between the Chinese humanoid-robot and digital-human sectors. In Yancheng, a Jiangsu provincial event themed around AI-enabled manufacturing upgrades used a Q-version elk AI digital human as its on-stage host for the hosting segments. (A Q-version elk-themed AI digital human is a stylized virtual character that combines a chibi-like cartoon design with elk-inspired visual elements and AI-driven functionality, resulting in a cute, non-realistic digital mascot capable of hosting or presenting at events, often reflecting local cultural symbols such as Yancheng’s association with Père David’s deer.) The Shandong provincial cultural-technology authority has written digital humans, the metaverse, AI and science-fiction industries into the province's 15th Five-Year Plan cultural-technology innovation action, alongside the roll-out of the Shandong Cultural Data Center as the central repository.

Beijing Municipal Digital Human Base (北京市数字人基地) is China's first dedicated digital human industry base, located within the Donghu Huanle Song (东湖欢乐颂) commercial complex in the Chaoyang District of Beijing and operated by Shenzhen-listed entrepreneurship services platform Chuangye Heima (创业黑马, ticker 300688) under the framework of its Heima Metaverse Accelerator. Officially inaugurated in February 2024 with support from the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology and Chaoyang District authorities, the base occupies a Phase 1 planned area of 15,000 square meters converted from an existing commercial mixed-use development. By November 2024, 49 companies had taken up residence on site, with the broader industry ecosystem serving more than 110 upstream and downstream digital human enterprises including Digital Xusheng, Botai Intelligent (博特智能), and Yunbo Technology. Four shared technical platforms built around digital human production and digital content creation had been placed into operation, comprising a large-space multi-person XR technology testing center, a digital human motion capture and XR virtual shooting integrated application platform, a high-fidelity digital human acquisition platform, and a digital human trusted evidence storage platform built on Chang'an Chain (长安链) blockchain technology by the operator's subsidiary Beijing Shuzhi Yunke Information Technology Co., Ltd. (北京数智云科信息科技有限公司). The base is structured around three major service platforms, four carrier spaces, five service systems, and an industrial fund, and all resident companies access the technical platforms at preferential below-market rates to reduce innovation and research costs for smaller players in the Internet 3.0 ecosystem. Application focus areas span live streaming e-commerce, tourism services, digital film and television, corporate branding, and digital employees, aligning with Beijing's target to grow its digital human industry scale beyond RMB 50 billion by 2025 under the 《北京市促进数字人产业创新发展行动计划（2022-2025年）》. In December 2025, the base held an application scenario accelerator event at which a dedicated application scenario alliance was launched and member companies were certified, with participants drawn from Zhongguancun Chaoyang Park (中关村朝阳园), NetEase Cloud (网易云信), Meihua Investments (梅花创投), Botai Intelligent, DeepScience (深元科技), and more than 30 other enterprise representatives, reinforcing its role as a central node in Beijing's digital human and Internet 3.0 industrial chain. 

The Beijing Action Plan for Promoting Digital Human Industry Innovation and Development (2022–2025) (北京市促进数字人产业创新发展行动计划（2022-2025年）) was issued on August 8, 2022 by the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology (北京市经济和信息化局) and released publicly during the 2022 Global Digital Economy Conference, marking the first municipal-level policy in China dedicated specifically to the digital human industry and widely described in official Chinese commentary as the country's first such industry-specific support policy (国内出台的首个数字人产业专项支持政策). The plan sets a headline target of more than 50 billion yuan in Beijing's digital human industry scale by 2025 and calls for cultivating one to two leading enterprises with revenue exceeding 5 billion yuan, alongside a cluster of specialised small and medium-sized firms, technology platforms, and application demonstration zones. It commits close to 900 million US dollars in supporting resources toward building an integrated virtual human technology, commercial, and governance ecosystem across the city, addressing core technical areas such as modelling, rendering, driving, and intelligent interaction, as well as industrial applications spanning media, finance, cultural tourism, education, healthcare, urban services, and government affairs. The document also emphasises standards development, intellectual property frameworks, talent cultivation, and cross-district coordination within Beijing, positioning the capital as the national anchor for digital human research, policy experimentation, and commercialisation, and it served as the policy foundation for the subsequent launch of the Beijing Digital Human Industry Base (北京市数字人产业基地) in February 2024, which set a further revenue target of over 20 billion yuan by 2025. 

Entertainment and AI Short Drama: The Paper (澎湃新闻) reported that AI short dramas built around digital human actors and assembly-line scripts have moved from novelty status in 2025 to a mainstream vertical-video genre in 2026, with some production houses claiming a finished episode produced per day at very low cost. NetEase (网易) opened a global submission call for AI short drama videos under the 2026 Global Digital Economy Conference, framing digital human performers as the emerging replacement for low-budget human actors in the format. Tencent's (腾讯) QQ News published a consumer-facing tutorial walking readers through producing an AI short drama titled "Colleague.Skill" end-to-end on the Vidu (vidu.com) platform, covering digital human performers, intelligent scoring and one-click post-production from a single text prompt. Accompanying industry commentary warned that up to 80 percent of conventional short-drama actors could lose work to AI digital human performers over the next market cycle.

Regulatory and Legal Developments: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家网信办) is preparing a comprehensive draft regulation covering digital virtual human services across the full service lifecycle, with a specific prohibition on providing virtual intimate-relationship services to minors, as reported through the Zhuhai municipal news network. A Science and Technology Daily commentary carried by Sohu argued that "cyber replicas" of real persons must not cross legal red lines, urging users to treat every social-media post and video as potential training data for unauthorised digital clones and to scrutinise platform data-licensing terms carefully. Reporting on both the "Colleague.Skill" project and the Shandong replace-departed-employee case has prompted wider public debate over whether turning working professionals into permanent AI labour substitutes amounts to an impermissible form of personality commodification under existing Chinese civil-code protections. These national and local moves collectively signal a tightening regulatory environment around the Chinese digital human sector as deployment scales across entertainment, services, education and public-sector contexts.

April 20 News

Tourism: Foping County in Shaanxi has launched the "AI Foping+" digital human as an official intelligent guide to the giant panda homeland, delivering multimodal immersive explanations of panda ecology, Qinling mountain landscapes, and human-interest stories through integration with Alibaba (阿里巴巴) large model Tongyi Qianwen (通义千问). The 20th Guizhou Tourism Industry Development Conference used its cross-border tourism promotion session to launch the Guizhou International Tourism Portal (贵州国际旅游门户网站, Guizhoutravel), which embeds the bilingual twenty-four-hour digital human "Huang Xiaoxi" (黄小西) as an always-on virtual host for overseas travellers. In Jiangxi, the decade-long "Jiangyou Library" (江右文库) ancient-text preservation project, covering roughly 1,600 volumes and 800 million characters, now pairs an AI digital human with mini-programs and short videos to animate classical sources for younger readers. In Hubei, an AI card that makes artifacts across more than 300 museums "speak" when tapped with a phone has reportedly sold 1.3 million units overseas, appearing in the same provincial exhibition zone where robot performances and digital human interactions are grouped as frontier outputs, and where the Zidong Taichu (紫东太初) multimodal large model is visualized as a Han-dynasty-robed digital human called "Xiao Chu" (小初). Smart-tourism system rankings for 2026 also highlighted Weishan Lake (微山湖) as a site adopting digital human guides and VR immersion to raise online ticketing share and traveller word-of-mouth.

Cultural Events: The 2026 Guangxi Three-Three Bagui Carnival (广西三月三·八桂嘉年华) opening ceremony in Nanning centred on the "Liu Sanjie" (刘三姐) digital human, dressed in Zhuang brocade and calling out the festival name bilingually alongside officials and tourists as part of the "One-Click Tour Guangxi" (一键游广西) cultural-tourism programme. The Xingning District mountain-song gala within the same festival unveiled the AI mountain-song music video "Ni De Ya" (《尼的呀》), produced by the Art and Media College of Nanning Vocational University (南宁职业技术大学艺术与传媒学院), in which intelligent robots and an on-screen virtual digital human performed a synchronized opening dance. In Guiyang's Wudang District, the "Three-Three Festival" celebration of Buyi folklore was staged with an AI digital human as co-host, part of Guizhou's wider effort to fold virtual beings into ethnic cultural programming. The 2026 China Food Festival (中华美食荟) hosted in Ningxia introduced the virtual AI host "Ning Xiaowei" (宁小味) sharing the stage with human presenters and costumed robots, with real-time links to a Wuzhong Morning Tea branch venue to dramatize human-machine co-performance. Jilin's provincial culture and tourism authority tied its reading-day campaigning to Changchun's 33rd World University Winter Games of 2027, deploying a digital human-led format to combine cultural promotion with sports marketing.

Entertainment: The 13th China Network Audio-Visual Conference (中国网络视听大会) in Chengdu centred on its AI Creator Economy Forum, at which Shen Hao, chief scientist of a national key laboratory at Communication University of China (中国传媒大学), released the "2026 China Digital Human Influence Index Report" (2026中国数字人影响力指数报告). The same forum hosted the 2026 ACX "AI Super Creator Competition" (AI超创赛) award ceremony, confirmed regional-competition partnerships, and launched the Aichuang Creator Service Alliance (爱创创作者服务联盟). Veteran director Li Shaohong, speaking on the industry's "Light Curtain Plan" (光幕计划) that moves short-drama performers into feature film, drew a line between AI digital humans and live actors around the quality of perceived "living presence". Shanhai Xingchen (山海星辰) showcased its NOVA AI platform at the same conference as a multi-dimensional reshaping of the broadcast ecosystem, while Hongguo (红果) short-drama chief editor Le Li framed live-acted short drama as the quality-growth track of the industry. The large-scale video character performance model "LPM 1.0" (large-performance-model.github.io) was positioned as a real-time visual engine for virtual assistants, game NPCs, and live-streaming virtual avatars, aimed at continuous long-form performance without time limits. The AIGC Film Unit Thematic Forum of the 2026 Beijing International Film Festival convened specialists including Liu Shuliang (刘书亮) to debate virtual idols, digital humans, virtual characters, agents, and AGI, asking why cultural industries continue to commission digital human products widely regarded as imperfect. Chinese-language short-form comedy on YouTube, including the "mimi" digital human clips of the "mimi Little Theatre" (mimi小剧场) channel, illustrates the export of domestic AIGC digital-human humour formats onto overseas social platforms.

Marketing: The Shandong Consumer Association's Intelligent Economy Consumer Education Guide (2026 edition) identifies AI digital human live-stream shopping as one of the AI-enabled consumer practices now reshaping daily behaviour alongside smart appliances, smart healthcare, and smart mobility. Shandong Jinyu Network Technology (山东瑾瑜网络科技) markets its sixth-generation AI live-streaming system as an unmanned live-streaming tool for non-specialist users, emphasizing intelligent driving, visual quality, and multi-platform adaptation. Xi'an-based short-video marketing services frame digital human substitution of on-camera labour as one layer within a stack that runs from content generation and smart editing through to data operations and localized customer acquisition. A post-correction communications cycle by Henan authorities on a data-fraud accountability case circulated a video explicitly credited to the Huibo Xing (慧播星) digital human system. A financial-content creator publishing on Yunnan germanium and semiconductor equities disclosed that the on-screen presenter was not a real person but a digital human named "Michael", providing a concrete example of mandatory synthetic-media disclosure in investor-facing output. JD Group (京东集团) staged a digital human appearance of founder and chairman Liu Qiangdong (刘强东) at the China International Consumer Products Expo (消博会), during the same period in which he travelled to Liaoning for face-to-face talks with provincial leadership. Shanghai Xinhua Media Chain (上海新华传媒连锁) opened Shanghai's first "All Citizens Reading Week" (全民阅读活动周) with the AI digital human "Xiao YUE" (小YUE) and the launch of the "365 Reading Person" brand, alongside Shanghai Book City's (上海书城) "Book Scrolls Millennia" exhibition of three thousand years of Chinese script.

Education: Shanghai Nanhu Vocational and Technical College (上海南湖职业技术学院), positioned as Shanghai's first five-year continuous vocational college, reports graduate employment above 96.5 percent and treats digital virtual human live streaming as a signature teaching output, with students performing the motion capture that drives avatars sharing the stream with real hosts. Its Digital Creative College runs the "Miao Qu Blind Box" (喵趣盲盒) pipeline end-to-end from IP drawing through 3D-printed colouring, while its Smart Business and Tourism College pairs costumed real anchors with digital virtual humans as a showcase for the Shanghai high-skilled talent training base newly based in Hongkou. Shandong Shenghan Vocational College of Finance and Trade (山东圣翰财贸职业学院) has rolled out an integrated AI employment-services device bundling resume generation, completeness checking, position recommendation, digital human mock interviews, and round-the-clock AI career consultation, with dedicated teacher training on each function.

Healthcare: A Shanghai hospital-sector AI launch presented the PalClaw intelligent agent through a hologram-projected virtual image called "Xiao Peng" (小蓬), which was asked live to judge whether a specific hospital should institute a weekend surgery plan, framed publicly as a response to operational pain points under the rubric of the "silicon-based employee". Shandong Aikeser Digital Technology Co., Ltd. (山东艾克斯尔数字科技有限公司) pairs an AI digital human medical-history collection system with its Hermes teaching stack to create a closed teaching loop that runs from simulated patient intake through to student performance feedback in medical education.

Enterprise: Colleague.skill (同事.skill) trains a "replacement post" workplace digital human by scraping the Feishu (飞书) records and DingTalk (钉钉) documents of departed employees, marketed as a continuity solution for vacated roles and discussed in the same commentary that entertains the speculative prospect of producing a million digital replicas of education influencer Zhang Xuefeng (张雪峰). The Liaoning Province Chain Operation Association (辽宁省连锁经营协会) used an expanded president's meeting in Shenyang to convene its AI Digitalization Technology Application Committee, with AI digital humans flagged as a 2026 full-scenario substitute for live-streaming and office labour across provincial retail-chain members.

Technology: A Tencent News AI industry daily on 17 April 2026 reported the global simultaneous open-sourcing of the SentiAvatar framework, the 3D digital human character model SUSU, and the high-quality action dataset SuSuInterActs, positioning the three releases as an accelerator for 3D digital human research and deployment. The same briefing noted that Enflame Technology (燧原科技) had refiled its initial public offering prospectus with 2025 revenue figures, underlining the Chinese AI chip supply chain behind digital human workloads. In Hong Kong, Science Park anchor INNOPOLE hosted an "AI+ Industrial Revolution" demonstration by Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation in which creative-technology firms showcased AI-driven virtual humans capable of real-time interaction and fine-grained expression and motion capture, deployed into customer service, education, and adjacent service scenarios.

Industry Policy: A 2025–2030 global AI digital human industry standards and commercialization research report locates the sector's inflection point at the late-2025 implementation of the "Information Technology Customer-Service Virtual Digital Human General Technical Requirements" (《信息技术客服型虚拟数字人通用技术要求》), described as a technology-quality-safety three-in-one specification and the first domestic standard targeting customer-service virtual digital humans. The same report outlines a "central standards plus local ecosystems" pattern in which Hunan concentrates on low-latency rendering technology backed by a dedicated one-billion-yuan special fund, Beijing anchors a digital human industrial park hosting more than three hundred upstream and downstream enterprises, and Guangdong pursues customized digital human scenarios tied to researcher Jiang Long (姜龙) within a wider manufacturing intelligence upgrade. Guangdong's own industrial coverage sets these efforts beside a 68.0 percent year-on-year rise in industrial-robot output and a "digital twin plus industrial intelligent agent" infrastructure push across Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Foshan, and Dongguan. Yuanmeng Space (元梦空间), a metaverse operator with nearly a decade of focus and more than one hundred intellectual property assets spanning artificial intelligence, metaverse, and digital humans, has been recognized as a national high-tech enterprise and a technology-oriented small and medium enterprise, with more than 160,000 platform users and the "Yuanmeng" digital art asset product approaching launch.

The Information Technology — General Technical Requirements for Customer Service Virtual Digital Humans (信息技术客服型虚拟数字人通用技术要求), formally designated GB/T 46483-2025, is China's first national standard in the virtual digital human field, published on October 5, 2025 and taking effect immediately upon release, having originated as project 20242094-T-469 in the 2024 fourth batch of recommended national standards. SenseTime (商汤科技) served as the primary drafting unit, working over roughly two years of preparation under the guidance of the China Electronics Standardization Institute (中国电子技术标准化研究院) alongside more than thirty participating organizations from industry, academia, and research, with the standard managed by TC28 (the National Information Technology Standardization Technical Committee) and executed by its SC24 subcommittee on computer graphics, image processing, and environmental data representation under the supervision of the Standardization Administration of China (中国国家标准化管理委员会). It establishes a comprehensive reference framework for customer service digital human systems covering six modules of image generation, visual interaction, voice interaction, emotional interaction, image driving, and operations maintenance, and sets quantified performance benchmarks including lip-sync accuracy of at least 90 percent, gesture interaction success rates of at least 80 percent, emotional interaction success rates of at least 80 percent, 2D digital humans with clear and complete facial features, 3D hyper-realistic digital human models with polygon counts of at least 200,000, and voice interaction response times under two seconds, while also specifying requirements for keyword maintenance, corpus updates, and multimodal interaction spanning voice, gesture, and body movement. The standard fills a long-standing gap in unified technical norms for customer service digital humans deployed across finance, government affairs, education, e-commerce, and telecommunications, and SenseTime became the first company to pass conformity testing under the standard in April 2026 with its Ruying (如影) live interactive digital human product, positioning the document as a foundation for China to promote its digital human technical norms internationally. 

Ethical Contexts: The Cyberspace Administration of China (网信办) is preparing new rules to govern digital virtual human services across their full lifecycle, with a specific prohibition on the provision of virtual intimate-relationship services to minors, signalling an official concern with companion and emotional-attachment use cases rather than with technical capability alone. Industry debate running through the Beijing International Film Festival AIGC panels and through the 2026 China Digital Human Influence Index Report extends these concerns into questions of authenticity, performer displacement, and the cultural legitimacy of commissioning digital humans whose imperfections are openly acknowledged by their own commissioning producers.

April 19 News

Healthcare: Zhengzhou Guancheng TCM Hospital (郑州市管城中医院) launched Henan Province's first twenty-four-hour traditional Chinese medicine artificial intelligence clinic, with an AI digital human physician conducting intelligent triage and allowing patients to complete self-service consultations in roughly five minutes at any hour of the day. The rollout, announced at a provincial classical-prescription transmission launch event held in Zhengzhou, positions the AI digital human as a continuously available front-line intake and guidance layer that supplements rather than replaces human practitioners and functions without operational closure.

Film and Short Drama: Casting notices offering compensation for AI short drama human-image collection have begun circulating in background-actor recruitment groups, reflecting a shift in which production companies digitise performers in order to generate synthetic cast members for AI-assisted short-form productions and raising pointed consent and likeness-theft concerns among working actors. Director Li Shaohong (李少红), speaking on the Lightscreen Project (光幕计划) panel covered by Securities Times, argued that the perceived vitality of living performers remains the principal gap separating digital humans from flesh-and-blood actors, while the National Radio and Television Administration (广电总局) has concurrently been building a coordinated central-provincial-platform framework to steer micro short drama toward higher-quality output. New Energy Short Drama Dream Factory (新能量短剧梦工厂) released the AI micro short drama Wang Yangming: Heart Battle (王阳明：心战) on YouTube, using a digital human rendering of the Ming-era philosopher as the protagonist to carry classical Chinese thought to overseas audiences and to dovetail with the broader online circulation of a digital Wang Yangming persona. iQIYI (爱奇艺) has moved to refine contracted artists into reusable digital alter-egos for future productions, prompting commentary that the synthetic performances can outpace those of certain live stars and drawing renewed scrutiny to portrait-rights exposure across the entertainment supply chain.

The Lightscreen Project (光幕计划) is a state-aligned actor development and training initiative linked to the Beijing International Film Festival (北京国际电影节) that focuses on improving the professional quality of performers emerging from China’s rapidly expanding micro short drama sector. It functions as a selection and training pipeline in which young actors are evaluated by established industry figures, undergo intensive instruction in acting craft and industry practices, and participate in production projects, with the goal of restoring performance depth and discipline in a production environment increasingly shaped by speed, algorithms, and platform metrics. Within the broader regulatory push led by the National Radio and Television Administration to standardize and elevate short-form content, the project serves as a talent-focused intervention, emphasizing authenticity, emotional realism, and the “sense of a living person” identified by Li Shaohong as the key distinction still separating human actors from digital humans. 

Automotive and Retail Livestreaming: At the Changsha launch of Hongqi Tiangong 05 and 06 (红旗天工05/06) on the Meixi Lake waterfront in Hunan, the automaker allowed an AI digital human to host the entire reveal rather than using celebrity presenters or pyrotechnics, staging the event around an 800V high-voltage platform, twelve-minute fast charging, and the Sinan (司南) intelligent driving stack at an accessible price point. JD.com (京东) used its 2026 Merchant Conference to unveil an interactive-agent-led digital human livestream system built on its JoyAI large model, wrapping e-commerce knowledge-enhanced question answering, dynamic scene control, and operational decision support into a single virtual seller designed to behave less like an animated avatar and more like a trained commercial operator.

Streaming and Creator Economy: Bigo Live (bigo.tv), the overseas streaming platform operated under JOYY (欢聚集团), has reported that its 2026 content structure is no longer dominated by singing and dancing talent rooms and is instead being reshaped by e-sports productions, team-based group broadcasts, and AI virtual humans, which together are absorbing a growing share of creator revenue on the platform. The thirteenth China Internet Audiovisual Conference hosted the AI Creator Economy Forum in Chengdu, where organisers presented the 2026 ACX AI Super Creation Contest awards, signed provincial partnership agreements, launched the Aichuang Creator Service Alliance (爱创创作者服务联盟), and released the 2026 China Digital Human Influence Index Report (《2026中国数字人影响力指数报告》) as a new sector benchmark. On the same regional stage, the Sichuan Radio and Television Bureau (四川省广播电视局) activated a micro short drama review service node inside the Shaocheng International Cultural Creative Valley (少城国际文创谷), and the Chengdu SO Show (成都SO秀) launched an AI-plus-cultural-creation OPC acceleration plan aimed at individual creators working with digital personas.

Tourism and Cultural Heritage: On the Hehuan Bridge over Folk Song Lake in Nanning, Guangxi, a naked-eye 3D digital human of the legendary Zhuang song-maiden Liu Sanjie (刘三姐) appeared alongside a Dong ethnic singing team during the 2026 Sanyuesan Cultural Tourism Festival, blocking passing visitors in a staged song-bridge challenge and demonstrating how millennium-old intangible heritage is being reinterpreted through volumetric display. Tourism platform vendors have begun marketing turnkey smart-tourism systems built on Tencent Cloud (腾讯云) architecture, packaging AI customer service, digital human tour guides, and intelligent itinerary planning into a single stack designed to sustain golden-week traffic with twenty-four-hour response across scenic-area operators.

Libraries and Reading Promotion: Shanghai Xinhua Media Chain (上海新华传媒连锁) opened the inaugural National Reading Week at its Fuzhou Road Shanghai Book City flagship by introducing an AI digital human named Xiao YUE as the public face of a year-long 365 Readers initiative. Changchun Library (长春市图书馆) anchored the 2026 Capital of Books reading season with digital human guides, AI painting screens, and interactive guidance terminals that position virtual presenters as part of a technology-and-reading fusion programme. Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication (北京印刷学院) staged an experiential reading carnival in which an AI digital human book-recommendation station sat alongside immersive electronic-book displays and temperature-responsive ink merchandise, while Taiyuan Library (太原图书馆) rolled out twenty-eight themed activities in Shanxi that incorporate a digital human book-recommendation channel within scan-to-read, scan-to-listen, and scan-to-browse reading pathways.

Sports and Live Events: The opening ceremony of the Jiangsu Super League (苏超) deployed a thirty-metre augmented-reality virtual dinosaur that passed low over spectators' heads, a set-piece described as a milestone fusion of digital creatures (数字生物) and physical stagecraft despite the creature drawing social-media comparisons to a cured-duck silhouette. Lenovo (联想) has been named a technology supplier for the 2026 FIFA World Cup hosted across the United States, Mexico, and Canada, where its stack is expected to include a football AI super-agent, a VAR-oriented 3D digital human visualisation layer, and a referee-perspective AI video enhancement system that together bring synthetic mediation into live officiating.

Agriculture and Rural Extension: The third edition of Zhejiang Province's New Farmer Skills Competition, staged in Jiande under the jurisdiction of Hangzhou, introduced an AI digital human styled as the AI New Farm Teacher (AI新农师) to function as a continuously available rural advisory persona, and the same event opened a Village Recommendation Officer track that pairs human communicators with the digital persona in outreach scenarios. The framing positions the digital human as both a recommendation engine and a culturally legible figure capable of sustaining empathetic contact with farming audiences.

Enterprise and Public Administration: Zhejiang Dongze Holdings (浙江东泽控股有限公司), a Wenzhou-headquartered manufacturer, has deployed AI alter-ego employees capable of negotiating in fluent Spanish to service European buyers without dispatching human sales personnel, presenting the "AI clone" (AI分身) as an efficiency instrument for overseas market expansion. Jiangsu Province consolidated a catalogue of sixty-seven high-value artificial intelligence application scenarios released by its state-owned enterprise cohort, with Jiangsu Guoxin Group (江苏省国信集团) and Jiangsu Communications Holding (江苏交控) presenting AI digital human deployments among their use cases and with Nanjing acting as a central node for implementation. The Beijing Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology (北京市经济和信息化局) published a three-year action plan covering 2026 to 2028 for a Digital Economy Enterprise Going-Abroad Innovation Service Base and released a digital human hosted interpretation of the document as part of the policy rollout. Chongqing Liangjiang New Area (重庆两江新区) convened a digital-economy talent fair offering more than four hundred positions in roles that explicitly include AI digital human operations for livestreaming and back-office automation.

Gaming and Character Systems: Games-industry veteran Su Kui (苏魁) has described his OPC one-person-company venture as beginning with a digital human built from skeletal animation and connected to a large language model, designed to function as an emotional companion, advisor, and conversational agent capable of voice and text dialogue. An industry-watch daily flagged the SentiAvatar framework together with the accompanying 3D digital human SUSU character model as new tooling that targets the persistent unnaturalness of avatar motion and expression by generating linguistic, gestural, and affective output in real time. YuanMeng Space (元梦空间) has positioned itself as a nearly decade-old metaverse operator holding more than one hundred intellectual-property rights across artificial intelligence, metaverse, and digital human technologies, claims national high-tech enterprise status, and reports a user base exceeding one hundred and sixty thousand.

Regulatory and Ethical Contexts: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家网信办) issued the draft Digital Virtual Human Information Service Management Measures (《数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法》) for public consultation, proposing that any display of a digital virtual human carry a persistent on-screen indication of its synthetic nature throughout the service lifecycle. An accompanying strand of the draft prohibits the provision of virtual intimate-relationship services to minors, extending a full-lifecycle regulatory perimeter over digital virtual human offerings and coinciding with broader enforcement actions against disorderly online financial information. The GitHub project “同事.skill” went viral in April 2026 with tens of thousands of stars (despite some reports claiming over 100,000 at peak attention), inspiring derivative projects such as “张雪峰.skill” that use structured prompts and public materials to approximate the reasoning and speaking style of Zhang Xuefeng, thereby prompting debate over personality rights, data use, and the ethics of creating unsanctioned digital representations of real individuals. A Shandong games company has already trained a departed human-resources specialist into a functioning digital alter-ego that continues to perform invitation, consultation, and reporting tasks, illustrating how the digital alter-ego paradigm is migrating from public figures into ordinary employment contexts.

April 18 News

Regulatory and Ethical Contexts: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家互联网信息办公室) released the Digital Virtual Human Information Service Management Measures (Draft for Comment) in early April, establishing the first dedicated boundaries for digital virtual human services. The draft forbids infringement of intellectual property rights during the creation of virtual humans, prohibits inducing minors to become addicted to digital virtual human services, and bars the provision of virtual relatives or virtual companion relationships to minors that could encourage excessive consumption. Separate consumer-protection coverage addressed the twin industry pain points of image confusion and content non-compliance in digital virtual humans used within AI short dramas, with industry observers reading the rules as a signal that digital virtual humans are not an extra-legal domain. Adjacent reporting on elderly-targeted fraud catalogued escalating AI-enabled deceptions, including virtual girlfriend schemes, synthetic voice calls, and AI face-swapping. A further debate emerged around the education commentator Zhang Xuefeng (张雪峰), whose unauthorised cybernetic digital human reconstruction preserved his signature phrases and rhetorical framework while filtering out the lived texture of his experience on the winter streets of Harbin, raising unresolved concerns about the unauthorised refinement and afterlife of public personalities.

Industrial and Enterprise Applications: The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (工业和信息化部) issued guidance on accelerating industrial-scenario intelligent agents, naming smart inspection digital humans alongside process-automation assistants and embodied intelligence equipment as priority targets for self-deciding, self-executing, and self-evolving capability. Endpoint (Shaanxi) Technology Co., Ltd. (端点（陕西）科技有限公司), a Xi'an high-tech enterprise with a long focus on software base-layer development, released AI digital human software aimed less at spectacular avatars than at resolving the repetitive-labour problem faced by content creators. In Hong Kong, engineer Liu Runshen (刘润燊) converted his career shift into a one-person company offering customised digital human solutions to the finance and education sectors, leveraging the Greater Bay Area for operational support while serving primarily Hong Kong and overseas clients whose higher willingness to pay supports stronger pricing. Qingdao-based service firms profiled in 2026 AI optimisation rankings combine AI content production, digital human customisation, and generative engine optimisation services across Shandong.

Hong Kong engineer Liu Runshen (刘润燊, Kenley Lau) founded Modou Technology International (魔豆科技国际有限公司), a one-person company offering AI Agent solutions that leverage Baidu's Wenxin large model and multimodal interaction technology to help SMEs generate digital humans for e-commerce livestreaming and intelligent customer service, with customised offerings for the finance and education sectors. Rather than building proprietary systems, the company integrates existing AI tools to keep pace with rapid iteration, and pursues two business lines: AI-driven product promotion and personal branding for Hong Kong clients, plus a joint AI curriculum with the Chinese University of Hong Kong for primary and secondary students. Current annual revenue is in the low hundreds of thousands of HKD from individual IP services, with projected 2026 full-year revenue of HKD 20 million once the university curriculum collaboration launches, and plans to expand from one person to a 30-person team in the second half of 2026 with a Guangzhou-based AI content production unit. Liu is incubated at both the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (Guangdong) Innovation and Entrepreneurship Incubation Base and Hong Kong Cyberport, and targets Hong Kong and overseas clients for their higher willingness to pay while relying on Greater Bay Area talent and production capacity for cost efficiency. 

Tourism and Cultural Heritage: The 2026 China AI Tourism Marketing White Paper and parallel 2026 smart tourism system rankings documented the migration of digital humans into round-the-clock live commerce, customer service, and destination operations, with platforms built on Tencent (腾讯) Cloud's high-concurrency architecture supporting holiday-peak traffic at operators including Huaqiao City (华侨城) multi-park resort complexes. Shuming Technology (Wuhan) Co., Ltd. (数命科技（武汉）有限公司), founded by Luo Biwen (罗弼文), sold more than 500,000 Mark Yin (Mark印) AI cultural relic cards in the first quarter across global markets including the United States. Tapping a card against a phone summons an AI digital human based on artefacts such as the Sword of King Goujian of Yue and the Bianzhong of Marquis Yi of Zeng to converse with the user. Jilin Northeast Asia Publishing Media Group (吉林东北亚出版传媒集团) is commercialising its Jiyu (吉遇) digital human cloud exhibition hall, and the Sichuan International Communication Center (四川国际传播中心) launched an overseas app in which each featured giant panda carries a dedicated page displaying a virtual avatar, birthplace, and real-time information. The Hongyaigu scenic area in Shijiazhuang deployed a digital human for visitor-facing operations, while a travel blogger produced follow-up outreach video on Tibet's G318 National Highway using a Huibo Star (慧播星) digital human. The All-media AI Live Broadcast Platform (全媒体AI大直播平台) partnered on a Liu Qingzhu (刘庆柱) digital human system in Zhengzhou to interpret the Yellow Emperor and the civilisational roots of the Yellow River basin.

Education: Shanghai Xinhua Media (上海新华传媒) unveiled its 365 Days of Books programme anchored by AI digital human Xiao YUE (小YUE), with the inaugural 365 Classroom running at the Fuzhou Road Shanghai Book City between 20 and 26 April. Guangzhou's municipal education authorities rolled out a three-teacher classroom model combining human educators, virtual digital human teachers, and smart assistants, in which the human teacher leads instructional design and value guidance while the digital human handles supporting pedagogy. In Tianjin, Tianjin University (天津大学), Tianjin Normal University (天津师范大学), and Tianjin University of Technology (天津理工大学) are offering digital human mock interviews and AI career assessments as part of expanded career guidance ahead of the Third National College Student Career Planning Competition finals scheduled for 22 to 25 April. Beijing Agricultural University (北京农学院) launched an anti-fraud digital human micro-course as part of a coordinated national security education push across capital universities. Changchun's 2026 Citizens' Reading Season features digital humans and AI painting screens that allow young readers to interact with digital figures and convert hand-drawn sketches into digital works. Huawei (华为) is building its first Shandong artificial intelligence science and education training project at Qingdao's Ocean Science and Education Industrial Park, with digital human talent training embedded in a 1+1+1+N government-enterprise operating model.

Healthcare: Henan opened its first traditional Chinese medicine AI outpatient clinic in Zhengzhou on 15 April under the Zhongguancun Yanhuang TCM Science and Technology Innovation Alliance (中关村炎黄中医药科技创新联盟). The clinic pairs a five-minute self-service consultation workflow with a famous-doctor digital human inheritance studio that uses AI to reconstruct the diagnostic and treatment experience of senior TCM practitioners and make it available to working physicians.

Entertainment and Media: Yaoke Media (耀客传媒) unveiled the AIGC fantasy-mystery short drama Qinling Bronze Mystery Record (秦岭青铜诡事录), starring AI digital human leads Qin Lingyue (秦凌岳) and Lin Xiyan (林汐颜) in a story following a retired reconnaissance soldier investigating mining-area anomalies and a two-generation blood-sacrifice mystery in the Qinling mountains. Hangzhou's Shangcheng District released Zhejiang's first dedicated AIGC audiovisual industry policy, the Golden Ten, with a 500-million-yuan industrial fund attached, and Zhejiang Satellite TV (浙江卫视) announced a twenty-six-studio cluster under its Borderless Communication strategy that includes AI manga-drama projects. Bigo's 2026 content outlook positioned AI virtual humans alongside esports and team broadcasting as jointly reshaping a more complex and efficient content ecosystem, presenting guilds with the operational choice of how rather than whether to enter the space. An AI Creators' Economy Forum held in Chengdu featured Hong Kong City University (香港城市大学) vice-president Lin Fen (林芬) comparing the current phase of AI creativity to a Kodak moment, and Communication University of China (中国传媒大学) national key laboratory chief scientist Shen Hao (沈浩) publishing the 2026 China Digital Human Influence Index Report.

The “2026 China Digital Human Influence Index Report” (《2026年度中国数字人影响力指数报告》), released by Communication University of China national key laboratory chief scientist Shen Hao, was formally unveiled at a 2026 AI creator economy forum in Chengdu, confirming the continuation of an established annual research series analyzing China’s digital human ecosystem. The report, produced by the university’s State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence and Communication and associated research institutes, frames the industry as transitioning from presentation-focused virtual figures to AI-driven, agent-like entities embedded in real-world systems, emphasizing increased autonomy, integration with large models, and expanding roles across media, industry, and services. Its release format follows a conference-first model, meaning it is publicly presented and cited but not yet widely available as a full standalone document.

Marketing and Retail: Bojun Technology (伯俊科技) concluded the Guangzhou leg of its AI Retail Growth roadshow, emphasising that the opening of platform-side digital human traffic delivery has unlocked AI livestreaming's full commercial value at costs measured in single-digit yuan per hour. In Daming County, Handan, Hebei, local authorities are expanding a multi-channel livestreaming matrix that combines local broadcasters, external recruits, and AI digital humans to lift logistics efficiency and industrial-product sales, with further plans to roll out AI digital humans and virtual customer service across more than two thousand industrial enterprises.

Government and Public Services: Heilongjiang has embedded AI into its labour and personnel dispute mediation and arbitration system through Long Xiaozhong (龙小仲), a digital human figure that appears on the first national Digital Human Resources and Social Security top-listing action scenario roster. The city of Yichun has brought an AI digital human online for public-facing government services, and Harbin has migrated transport-operator annual-inspection formalities to a paperless online workflow, forming part of a broader Heilongjiang transition from responsive processing to seamless citizen enjoyment of government services.

The rostering system referred to here is a centrally coordinated mechanism used by Chinese administrative bodies, particularly the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security of the People's Republic of China, to identify, evaluate, and promote high-performing digital governance use cases as national reference models. It operates through a “top-listing” (揭榜挂帅) framework in which local governments or agencies submit applied AI or digital service solutions—such as digital humans, automation tools, or intelligent decision-support systems—for competitive assessment against criteria including technical reliability, policy alignment, scalability, and measurable administrative impact. Selected entries are placed on an official roster of action scenarios, which functions both as a validation signal and as a dissemination instrument, enabling standardisation and replication across regions. The system is typically aligned with broader digital transformation agendas coordinated with entities like the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and it reflects a governance model that combines pilot experimentation with structured national rollout, where successful local innovations are formalised into reusable templates for wider public-sector adoption.

Capital Markets: On 16 April the virtual digital human sector index rose to 1431.702 points, up 2% on turnover of 35.947 billion yuan, with Huayi Brothers (华谊兄弟) leading the gainers at a 20.11% advance to 2.09 yuan. Aoyo Share (奥雅股份) climbed 5.80% on turnover of 51.67 million yuan, trading on a concept basket of vocational education, data elements, virtual digital humans, the Greater Bay Area, and the metaverse. Fengshang Culture (锋尚文化) eased 0.25% the previous session on its own concept mix of cultural media, IP economy, virtual digital humans, virtual reality, and metaverse exposure. Xinmei Shares (新媒股份) fell 2.01% against a conceptual lineup that includes online education, virtual digital humans, intellectual property, and state-owned enterprise reform. At the 2026 World Internet Conference Asia-Pacific Summit, Yixin (易鑫) announced plans to open-source its AI Infra within the year, following the earlier release of what it describes as the industry's first Agentic large model.

The “digital human share index” is a concept-based stock market index created by Chinese financial data platforms and brokerage systems rather than a single official institution, constructed by tagging listed companies with exposure to the “virtual digital human” theme and aggregating them into a tradable basket; its constituents are not pure digital human developers but a mixed group of firms across film and television production, digital media, cultural technology, education, design, and data-related sectors that have either disclosed involvement in or are associated with virtual avatars, synthetic presenters, immersive media, or metaverse applications, meaning the index functions as a proxy for investor sentiment toward the broader virtual being ecosystem rather than a strictly defined industry benchmark. 

April 17 News

Education and Employment Services: Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology (西安建筑科技大学) deployed digital human interviewers at its "Hongzhi Navigation Plan" spring 2026 double-selection recruitment fair for graduating students, with the digital interviewers supporting full-position simulated interviews and intelligent follow-up questioning to help students rehearse job-interview skills in an immersive setting. At Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology (南京信息工程大学), the Jiangsu 2026 spring recruitment drive for high-end equipment, next-generation information and communication, and emerging digital industries brought 173 employers and more than 6,000 positions together with on-site digital human interviewers conducting live interviews. In Heze, Shandong, which added 16,600 new urban jobs in the first quarter, the municipal employment push relied on livestreamed job fairs and AI-driven matching, including livestreaming digital human hosts and AI résumé tools. At the Jilin Youth Film and Television OPC Innovation Center (吉林青年影视OPC创新中心), the inaugural training program built an AIGC-based toolchain spanning copywriting generation, intelligent editing, digital human modeling, and cloud rendering for young creators.

Government Services and Civic Affairs: The Beijing Municipal People's Government (北京市人民政府) and Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology (北京市经济和信息化局) published a digital-human-narrated explainer of the Beijing Three-Year Action Plan for the Digital Economy Enterprise Overseas Innovation Service Base (2026–2028). In Ezhou, Hubei, a government-affairs digital human known as "E Xiaobang" (鄂小帮) operates on a vertical large screen, conducting voice interactions with residents to answer policy questions and guide them through administrative procedures. Heilongjiang Province has rolled out an AI digital human government-service assistant in Yichun as part of a provincial push from "perceptible fast service" to "imperceptible instant access," complementing Harbin's online-only annual inspection of transport operating permits. Guangxi's Department of Commerce introduced a department-level digital human named "Shangwu Jun" (商务君), who appeared alongside the cultural figure "Liu Sanjie" and a folk orchestra at the opening of the 2026 Guangxi "33 Shopping Festival" (购在中国·2026广西"33消费节") in Nanning on April 15, marrying digital-human technology with ethnic song-fair traditions to promote cross-border ASEAN trade and domestic consumption.

National Security and Public Education: A cross-provincial civics curriculum broadcast used an AI digital human in Shaanxi to explain to middle-school students the importance of precise timekeeping for national security, with the wider program covering nuclear, polar, space, and other frontier security domains and extending to Fujian's Fuqing nuclear power station. For the 2026 National Security Education Day, Hangzhou launched a dedicated national-security-education digital human that relies on an AIGC platform to generate high-quality themed broadcast videos, and Zhejiang provincial media highlighted the deployment as part of a broader push to use digital humans and video accounts as everyday channels for security awareness. In Beijing, Central University of Finance and Economics (中央财经大学) led the creation of the Capital Financial Security Digital Intelligence Engineering Laboratory to drive AI-based risk early warning, while Beijing University of Agriculture (北京农学院) launched an "anti-fraud digital human" microcourse with dormitory interactive screens simulating common scams including order-brushing schemes and AI face-swapping fraud. Gansu's "New Thought on the Longyuan" quarterly-to-annual speech contest incorporated AI digital human presentations alongside livelihood storytelling, immersive red-trail experiences, and "Data Tells Gansu" AI works.

Healthcare: Shiyou Technology (世优科技) has built a 2D digital human physician deployed inside hospitals to operate around the clock, able to listen to patients describing symptoms such as weak digestion, interpret them through traditional Chinese medicine frameworks, and recommend appropriate departments such as TCM constitution assessment; the company has partnered with hospitals to create "Chinese renowned physician" IP avatars and intelligent triage services as a new paradigm for smart outpatient guidance.

Retail, Marketing, and E-commerce: JD.com (京东) used its 2026 Merchant Conference to release a new generation of digital human livestream hosts centered on an interactive Agent architecture and powered by the JoyAI large model, moving away from preset scripts and keyword-triggered responses toward hosts that "genuinely listen, see, and respond." JD also introduced a free-form digital human product line, expanding beyond its earlier merchant-assistant tools. Agricultural Bank of China's Guangdong Branch (农业银行广东分行) debuted an AI digital human named "Nong Xiaoyun" (农小耘) at the 139th China Import and Export Fair (Canton Fair) in Guangzhou, marking the bank's first deployment of a digital human ambassador at the event. Sichuan's network audiovisual industry showcased digital humans across multiple exhibitor booths at the 13th China Network Audiovisual Conference, alongside dynamic industry-map screens and naked-eye 3D immersive experiences in Chengdu's Pidu district, while the Xinmang Fund (新芒基金) announced it would increase investment in Chengdu-based AI-native IP and digital human ventures.

Tourism and Cultural Heritage: Guangxi's "33 Shopping Festival" paired the "Shangwu Jun" digital human with regional cultural performance to promote the Zhuang "Sanyuesan" spring-festival tourism circuit. Silver-haired tourism products in China now incorporate a digital human named "Yang Xiaoyang" (扬小杨) that provides text-to-speech and speech-to-text conversion, voice-guided tours, and electronic maps tailored to older travelers. In Hubei, a Wuhan-based seventeen-person company has given more than three hundred museums globally the ability to "speak," creating AI digital human avatars of artifacts such as the Sword of Goujian and the Bianzhong of Marquis Yi of Zeng so that a quick tap between an artifact card and a mobile phone triggers a conversation with the object; fifty-six Chu-state relics have already been turned into AI digital humans under this program. Smart-tourism ticketing systems in 2026 are integrating digital human virtual tour guides alongside smart navigation and AI customer service in ecological scenic areas, theme parks, and agritech parks. Songcheng Performance Development (宋城演艺) is placing virtual humans into live scenic-area settings to serve as NPCs in parades, flash performances, and guest interactions, reinforcing immersive Song-dynasty cultural atmospheres.

Shuming Technology (Wuhan) Co., Ltd. (数命科技（武汉）有限公司), founded by CEO Luo Biwen (罗弼文). According to Hubei Daily's reporting, the 17-person Wuhan-based team has given more than 300 museums globally the ability to "speak" through AI digital humans, with the Sword of Goujian (越王勾践剑) and the Bianzhong of Marquis Yi of Zeng (曾侯乙编钟) among the artifacts rendered as AI digital human avatars, a tap between a physical artifact card ("Mark印" card / Mark Yin card) and a mobile phone triggers a conversation with the object, and fifty-six Chu-state (楚国) relics have been turned into AI cards. The deployments are reported to include major institutions such as the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with multilingual narration support cited at 143 languages. The program also encompasses the Jing Xiaochu (荆小楚) digital human at Jingzhou Museum and AI guides rolled out at the Wuhan Marathon and Wuhan city walk (Dangdang Bus / 兜兜巴士) use cases. 

Songcheng Performance Development Co., Ltd. (宋城演艺) is a Shenzhen-listed Chinese cultural tourism and live performance conglomerate headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, best known for its large-scale scenic-area theatrical productions under the Songcheng and Romance series brands, including the flagship Romance of Songcheng staged at Hangzhou Songcheng and franchised variants in Sanya, Lijiang, Jiuzhai, Guilin, Zhangjiajie, Xi'an, Shanghai, and other destinations. Within the digital human context, the company has positioned itself as a cultural tourism adopter rather than a technology developer, integrating virtual hosts, digital performers, and AI-driven interactive characters into its scenic areas and theater experiences to extend traditional song-and-dance storytelling into immersive, screen-based, and metaverse-adjacent formats. It has partnered with technology providers to deploy digital human guides and virtual idols in its theme parks, experimented with XR and volumetric capture to augment stage productions, and explored virtual performance IP as a complement to its live-show intellectual property, including digital twin versions of signature shows intended for online distribution and location-based entertainment. The company's digital human activity is framed as a strategic response to post-pandemic tourism recovery pressures and to the broader Chinese cultural tourism sector's shift toward digital-physical integration, smart scenic areas, and youth-oriented virtual content, aligning with MCT and provincial initiatives encouraging cultural enterprises to adopt AIGC, digital humans, and metaverse technologies for heritage presentation and visitor engagement. 

Non-Heritage Preservation: Tongjiang, Heilongjiang has built a non-heritage digital experience hall for the Hezhe ethnic group's Yimakan oral tradition, recording voices of thirty-six inheritors including Wu Baochen and You Wenfeng, archiving fifty-four classic Yimakan passages, and rendering the material through digital human performers to sustain living transmission of the form. Guizhou has formulated provincial regulations on ethnic-minority intangible cultural heritage that similarly point toward digital human-based documentation and dissemination of traditional forms.

Media, Film, and Short-Form Drama: Yaoke Media (耀客传媒) released the AIGC fantasy-mystery micro-drama "Qinling Bronze Mysteries" (秦岭青铜诡事录), a two-year production and one of the first domestic micro-dramas whose plot is carried entirely by AI digital human leads, featuring the company's proprietary AI digital human performers "Qin Lingyue" (秦凌岳) and "Lin Xiyan" (林汐颜) in the dual protagonist roles. The broader micro-drama sector is undergoing a structural overhaul, with production costs falling by orders of magnitude and junior actors once earning roughly one thousand yuan per day facing wholesale replacement by digital human performers. The China Federation of Radio and Television Performing Arts Committee issued a formal statement against AI look-alikes, voice mimicry, face-swapped micro-dramas, commercial product placements, and virtual human replicas of identifiable celebrities, framing these practices as infringements on performers' rights. Tianjin Haihe Media Center (天津海河传媒中心), through its Tianjin Daily platform, hosted the AI Super Creator Challenge at which Lü Xin (吕欣), dean of the Digital Human Research Institute at Communication University of China (中国传媒大学数字人研究院), discussed AI applications and content premiumization for seasonal-themed production.

Enterprise Technology, R&D, and Listed Companies: iFlytek (科大讯飞) filed a patent titled "Digital Human Video Generation Method," covering a technique for generating digital human video from a reference image combined with input text, aimed at semantic consistency in virtual human generation. Perfect World (完美世界) saw its share price rise 7.61 percent as institutional investors continued to favor the company for its exposure to cloud gaming, virtual digital humans, and metaverse segments. Annie Co., Ltd. (安妮股份) is building blockchain-based digital asset infrastructure with smart-contract licensing and revenue distribution explicitly positioned for virtual digital human and metaverse scenarios. Chuanwang Media (川网传媒) is categorized under virtual digital human, smart government affairs, DeepSeek-concept, AIGC, and cultural-media concept boards on the Chinese markets. Wireless Media (无线传媒) reported that its Hebei IPTV "Lingxi Assistant" and digital human "Jixiang" (吉祥) were selected by the National Radio and Television Administration as model cases in "Smart Family New Scenes" and "Digital Stage and Smart Cultural-Museum Audiovisual Systems" respectively. ST Yilianzhong (ST易联众) continues to organize its business around digital medical insurance, digital healthcare, digital human affairs, digital technology, and digital services.

Regulation and Industry Self-Governance: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家互联网信息办公室) released the "Measures for the Management of Digital Virtual Human Information Services (Draft for Public Comment)" (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法（征求意见稿）) on April 3, opening public consultation on rules that target two industry pain points: image confusion of virtual humans and content violations. The draft forbids providing digital virtual human services that use an identifiable natural person's image without that person's consent, prohibits defamatory or disfiguring depictions, and bars infringement on third-party intellectual property during virtual human creation and operation; it also explicitly prohibits enticing minors into addictive use of digital virtual human services and prohibits offering minors virtual relatives, virtual companions, or other virtual intimate-relationship services that could induce excessive reliance. Tmall (天猫) has for the first time issued commodity standards for AI software and applications, explicitly covering deep-synthesis applications such as virtual human interaction alongside API-key sales, interface services, and text, image, and audiovisual generation tools, while banning marketing claims such as "100 percent accurate" and "fully replaces human labor."

Personal Digital Twins and AI Companions: A wave of open-source projects in China including "Zhang Xuefeng.skill" and "AI Refinement" has demonstrated pipelines that distill an individual's chat histories and social-media traces into a personal digital human or digital avatar, prompting commentary from Xinlang Finance (新浪财经) on rights protection for those being "packaged" into digital humans. A Shandong gaming and media company attempted to train a departed employee into an AI digital human that would continue to perform work functions, surfacing in Hubei Daily commentary the question of whether such "cyber laborers" fall under labor law. Separate reporting framed the distillation of colleagues, former romantic partners, and other personal relations into bespoke digital twins as a form of personality extraction raising novel consent and identity-rights issues. The draft virtual human regulation is widely cited in this context as signaling that digital virtual humans are not a lawless zone.

Industrial and Advertising Applications: Shenyang unveiled the country's first "Digital Intelligence Worker Lei Feng" (数智工人雷锋) as a multi-angle digital human commemoration of Lei Feng's years in Liaoning, combining digital worker iconography with historical memory. Holographic digital human technology is being used to bring street advertising boards to life, with highly realistic virtual figures created on computers and projected into physical environments via advanced projection hardware so that expressions and body movements appear naturally integrated with the surrounding space.

April 16 News

Healthcare: Hunan Provincial Tumor Hospital has deployed a pre-triage digital human in its outpatient lobby, developed by Wuhan Zelin Huantu (武汉泽霖寰图), which interacts with patients through conversational dialogue, directing them to appropriate departments and providing preliminary guidance on symptoms such as abdominal pain or palpable masses. The system is designed to reduce wait times and front-load clinical intake by automating the initial patient-routing function. Separately, the Beijing Digital Smart TCM Industry Development Research Institute (北京数智中医产业发展研究院), newly established in Beijing's Chaoyang District as the first institution of its kind nationally, has opened an application showcase featuring nearly forty representative products, among them a conversational TCM digital human capable of dialectical diagnosis, representing a dedicated effort to integrate AI-driven virtual practitioners into traditional Chinese medicine workflows. In Hefei, the high-tech zone's exhibition center displays a digital human alongside the "Zhi Yi Zhuli" (智医助理) system, an AI medical assistant that has passed China's National Medical Licensing Examination, positioning the two technologies side by side as demonstrations of Anhui's ambitions in intelligent healthcare.

Government and Public Services: In Jiangsu, authorities unveiled "Xiao Hai" (小海), a national security-themed digital human, at a public event tied to National Security Education Day on April 15, where the figure attracted crowd engagement at a sporting venue during the Jiangsu Provincial Games athletics preliminaries. Separately, the Jiangsu Yancheng-based Yancheng Newspaper Group demonstrated a "digital human troupe" inside a digital holographic cabin during a visit by the Guangxi Press Association, showcasing figures including "Su Yan" (苏言), a digital anchor for the National Immigration Administration, and digital versions of local figures such as a Huai Opera performer and a Su Super League goalkeeper, illustrating applications spanning government communications, cultural promotion, and civic outreach. In Guangxi, the Commerce Department deployed a digital human to co-host the launch ceremony of the 2026 "33 Consumer Festival" in Nanning, integrating virtual presenter technology into a provincial-level government consumer promotion event. Shenyang's "Smart Heping" (智慧和平) mini-program platform, which has accumulated over 240,000 users, has incorporated digital human capabilities into its service architecture covering news, government affairs, civic services, commerce, and tourism. In Shijiazhuang, the municipal social security bureau launched an AI digital human to serve as an intelligent customer service instructor, supporting the digital transformation of public-facing benefits administration. Beijing Agricultural College has introduced "anti-fraud digital human" micro-courses deployed on dormitory interactive screens, using scenario simulations of high-frequency scam types including fake part-time job schemes and AI face-swapping fraud to deliver national security education directly within student living spaces.

Entertainment and Media: The 13th China Online Audio-Visual Conference, which opened on April 15 in Chengdu, featured demonstrations of digital humans and advanced production tools at its Yongchuan Science and Technology Film Studio pavilion, spotlighting Chongqing's twin-engine development model combining technology-driven production with location-based filming. At the same conference, Xinmang Fund (新芒基金) announced plans to deepen investment in Chengdu with a stated focus on AI-native IP and digital humans, aiming to support local creators and small teams, while the Chengdu High-tech Zone's Tianfu Changdao Yuanchuang Island OPC launched an acceleration plan anchored in digital human IP and AI agent tool platforms tied to Chengdu's cultural tourism scenes. In Beijing's Mentougou District, the newly established "XR Immersive Audio-Visual Joint Laboratory" (虚实无界XR沉浸视听联合实验室) includes a dedicated digital human production center alongside an XR virtual broadcast studio, with capabilities spanning AI micro-short drama production, ultra-high-definition program recording, and real-time rendering for film and television content. The growing displacement of human actors by digital humans in China's short-drama sector has become a significant industry flashpoint, with Hangzhou Mingji Culture Media (杭州鸣季文化传媒有限公司), whose founder Ji Xian entered the short-drama market in 2022 with crews of more than a dozen people, now observing that digital humans offer capital advantages through lower costs and immunity from celebrity scandals, while Red Fruit Short Drama (红果短剧) issued a public notice on sustained enforcement against the unauthorized use of AI-generated short-drama materials. Shiyou Technology (世优科技) has deployed AI digital human guides within holographic cabins and holographic barrels as part of smart exhibition hall experiences, applying real-time rendering and interactive presentation technology to reshape visitor engagement in museum and exhibition contexts.

Tourism and Cultural Heritage: Students from Shandong Tourism Vocational College (山东旅游职业学院) have taken their "Rural Tourism Smart Media" project into multiple villages across Shandong Province, using AI-driven content creation, intelligent editing, digital human on-camera presentation, and livestream audience development as tools for rural tourism digital promotion. At Zhejiang Tourism Vocational College (浙江旅游职业学院), student teams have delivered digital human explainer videos to small and medium-sized museums as part of a nationally recognized pilot program, with the Cangnan Museum in Wenzhou reporting measurable increases in visitor traffic following the deployment of these AI-narrated guides. In Chongqing, design firms are conceptualizing next-generation exhibition halls for 2026 that integrate AI digital human docents into holographic and immersive spatial environments, reflecting the city's broader push to merge digital creative design with cultural tourism infrastructure.

Education: Xi'an University of Technology's (西安工业大学) School of Marxism has undertaken a funded research project applying digital humans to the teaching of the "Introduction to the Chinese National Community" curriculum, exploring how virtual presenter technology can support ideological and political education in higher education settings. At Shanghai University of Political Science and Law (上海政法学院), the university's spring recruitment fair showcased an AI-enhanced career services center built on a "technology plus humanities" model, integrating digital human career mentors into a system that also draws on the institution's strengths in AI law, management, and psychology for intelligent career assessment and employment service development.

Commercial and Enterprise: Chongqing Hansha (重庆汉沙) has positioned itself as a provider of low-cost, rapid-deployment digital human solutions, occupying a niche in the vendor landscape oriented toward accessibility and speed of implementation. In Guangdong, Zhihui Zhaoneng (智慧兆能) ranked first in a 2026 comparative evaluation of interactive digital humans, with testing covering technical capability, scenario adaptability, and product maturity. iFlytek Zhizuo (讯飞智作) topped a separate 2026 national virtual digital human vendor recommendation ranking published by Xingtai-based media, assessed across dimensions of technical strength, scenario fit, and deployment track record. In Changsha, the newly opened "Xingchuanghui" (星创荟) Innovation Service Center at the Changsha Economic Development Zone has created a dedicated digital human and launched a livestream channel as part of its platform for enterprise innovation services. Bairong Intelligence (百融智能) provided 3D holographic digital human technology for the 2026 Beijing Half Marathon, deploying virtual presenter capabilities at the scale of a mass-participation sporting event. In Suzhou, an OPC Community Day and financial salon at the Taicang Zhihuigu featured project demonstrations including ultra-realistic intelligent digital humans, with seven AI projects presented to investor audiences in a fifteen-minute pitch format. In the financial sector more broadly, Chinese institutions have begun deploying "digital employees" capable of reading micro-expressions and speech-pattern analysis during client interactions, representing a shift from scripted service bots toward behaviorally aware virtual agents in lending and advisory contexts. A Shandong-based game company generated national debate after creating a digital human replica of a departed employee who then "returned to work" in virtual form, with the original individual reportedly consenting and describing the outcome as entertaining, though the case has prompted widespread public concern about the boundaries of digital human labor replication.

Regulatory and Legal: The Cyberspace Administration of China published a draft regulation titled "Measures for the Management of Digital Virtual Human Information Services" (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法) on April 3, 2026, with a public comment period running through May 6, defining digital virtual humans as non-physical entities that simulate human appearance using graphics, digital image processing, or AI, driven by either real humans or computational systems, and possessing voice, behavioral, and interactive capabilities. The regulation mandates that digital human services obtain explicit individual consent from natural persons, displayed in a prominent and clearly understandable manner, and addresses abuses including unauthorized use of celebrity likenesses, unauthorized "resurrection" of deceased individuals, and deepfake-enabled fraud. Commentary published in Qiushi and by Xinhua's Liaowang Weekly framed the regulation as a necessary response to the rapid commercial penetration of digital virtual humans across livestream commerce, social interaction, cultural tourism, and education. Separately, a regulation on AI companion services takes effect on July 15, 2026, with core provisions prohibiting the provision of virtual intimate relationship services, including virtual relatives and virtual partners, to minors. The Hangzhou Internet Court, China's first internet court, has adjudicated the nation's first virtual digital human intellectual property infringement case, establishing early judicial precedent in a domain where legal frameworks remain nascent.

April 15 News

Regulation and Policy: The Cyberspace Administration of China published the Draft Measures for Digital Virtual Human Information Service Management (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法征求意见稿) in April 2026, jointly issued with the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and two additional departments. The draft targets two core problems in the digital virtual human sector: identity confusion between real and synthetic figures, and content that falls outside acceptable norms. Among its provisions, Article 10 explicitly prohibits the provision of virtual companion services to minors. Separately, reports highlighted the legal risks of companies training AI digital humans based on departed employees without obtaining valid consent, noting that the draft measures require the authorization of a specific natural person before a recognizably modeled digital virtual human can be deployed as a service.

Livestreaming and E-commerce Fraud: A widely circulated Xinhua "New China Viewpoint" investigation documented the proliferation of AI-generated digital human videos on short-video platforms designed to manipulate elderly users, a phenomenon dubbed "AI Boss" (AI霸总). The reports, carried across outlets in Guangxi, Hubei, Fujian, and other provinces, described operators producing digital human videos in as little as five minutes and simultaneously running dozens or even hundreds of accounts to conduct romance-style scams targeting seniors. In the e-commerce domain, JD.com (京东) disclosed that it had previously built a digital human modeled on founder Liu Qiangdong, whose first one-hour livestream session two years ago attracted substantial viewership, illustrating the ongoing commercial adoption of executive-modeled digital humans for direct sales broadcasting. In Tianjin, Hanfan Digital Technology (天津市汉梵数字科技有限公司) was recognized for its digital human proxy broadcasting service, which was selected as a featured case study on the Huawei Cloud marketplace, serving primarily small and medium-sized merchants.

The "AI霸总" (AI Boss) phenomenon refers to a wave of AIGC-generated digital human personas deployed across Chinese short-video platforms beginning in late 2024 and escalating sharply through early 2026, in which AI-generated or AI face-swapped male figures posing as wealthy, refined, emotionally attentive executives are used to cultivate parasocial relationships with elderly women, particularly widowed women in their 70s and 80s. The personas typically appear in luxurious settings, address viewers with intimate language such as "姐姐" (older sister) and "想你" (I miss you), and sustain engagement through highly anthropomorphic emotional expression produced at industrial scale, with operators reportedly generating a single video in five minutes and running dozens of accounts simultaneously. The scheme monetizes through tipping, overpriced product sales, and emotional manipulation that drives repeat engagement, with individual operators reporting daily revenues of 2,000 yuan or more. The most widely reported case involves an 84-year-old grandmother who spent nearly 10,000 yuan, handwrote a 500-character love letter to an AI persona, and refused to believe family members who told her the figure was a digital human, insisting the AI understood her better than they did. The phenomenon drew national media attention across outlets including Sina Finance, China News Weekly, Phoenix News, and the 21st Century Business Herald, as well as concern from NPC (National People's Congress) delegates, and has been framed by Chinese government sources and state media as a form of predatory emotional fraud exploiting the loneliness and digital illiteracy of elderly populations, raising urgent questions about the regulatory adequacy of China's existing frameworks for AI-generated content and digital human deployments. 

Healthcare and Medical Education: Digital Human Technology (数字人科技) exhibited at the 93rd China International Medical Equipment Fair in a presentation themed around digital anatomy and hands-on training enablement, positioning its digital human systems as tools for medical education. In Beijing, the newly established Beijing Digital Intelligent Traditional Chinese Medicine Industry Development Research Institute (北京数智中医产业发展研究院) announced capabilities including a TCM AI digital human that can conduct dialogue and perform syndrome differentiation, integrating multimodal perception into health management workflows alongside embodied intelligent robotics and brain-computer interface technologies.

Cultural Tourism and Accessibility: In Fujian, a company in Fuzhou developed a customized sign-language digital human product for the cultural tourism sector, deploying a transparent-cabinet integrated device that projects a digital human interpreter for hearing-impaired visitors at cultural sites. Students from Zhejiang Tourism Academy (浙旅院), enrolled in its smart tourism technology program, produced digital human guide videos for small and medium-sized museums including the Cangnan Museum in Wenzhou, generating measurable increases in visitor traffic after the videos were distributed online. In Chengdu, municipal planners announced a strategy linking Chengdu's distinctive cultural tourism scenes with digital human IP and AI agent tool platforms to boost the global competitiveness of locally produced digital creative content, building on momentum from the Ne Zha film franchise. The 2026 ACX "24-Hour Master Race" competition launched at the 13th China Online Audio-Visual Conference in Chengdu, with Lu Xin, director of the Digital Human Research Institute at Communication University of China (中国传媒大学), serving as a co-initiator of the event, which aimed to advance Chengdu- and Sichuan-branded digital cultural production.

Education and Ideological Instruction: Yantai Institute of Technology (烟台科技学院) in Shandong deployed a digital human named Bo Xiaoya (博小雅), created as a digital replica of Vice President Gao Jing, as part of the institution's "AI + International Strategy Engineering" initiative to link intelligent technology with cross-cultural communication. In Wuhan, Donghu University (武汉东湖学院) built a "Lei Feng Digital Human" interactive zone featuring 720-degree panoramic venue replication as part of a "Da Sizhengke" ideological education model, reaching over 12,000 student interactions through digitally enhanced learning.

Broadcasting and Telecommunications: China Broadcasting Network Liaoning (中国广电辽宁公司) launched an AI-TV ultra-high-definition set-top box equipped with a three-mode voice remote control and built-in AI digital humans named Liaoliao (辽辽) and Ningning (宁宁), positioned as part of the province's smart broadcasting upgrade. Hebei Broadcasting Wireless Media (河北广电无线传媒股份有限公司) in Shijiazhuang was tagged with digital human capabilities as part of its IPTV and mobile media operations.

Retail and Urban Promotion: Shiyou Technology (世优科技) deployed AI digital human shopping guides and VR large-space experiences in Harbin retail stores as part of Heilongjiang province's efforts to fuse digital economy with cultural tourism, moving AI from technology demonstration into consumer-facing service. In Guangzhou, the Wanbo business district in the Changlong area introduced an AI digital human named Xiaowan (小萬) to promote the district on-site, presenting location advantages, industrial layout, and development potential to visitors in an interactive format.

Employment and Public Services: At the 2026 Henan Spring Breeze Action employment assistance recruitment fair, AI digital humans were deployed to provide intelligent job-matching services, allowing job seekers to interact with a digital human interface for personalized position recommendations. In Tianjin, the 2026 Dongli Lake half-marathon incorporated digital human interactive Q&A alongside live entertainment to create an immersive event atmosphere for participants and spectators.

Enterprise and Technology Development: Nanchang University of Aeronautics (南昌航空大学) jointly with Jiangxi Kejun Industrial (江西科骏实业有限公司) filed a patent for a talking head animation synthesis method designed to significantly improve generation efficiency for virtual anchors and digital humans. Social platform Soul open-sourced its SoulX-FlashHead real-time digital human generation model, achieving 96 frames per second streaming inference on a single NVIDIA 4090 GPU. Phantom Future Tianjin (幻影未来（天津）数字科技有限公司) exhibited a digital human front-end integrated with a pixel-style virtual office interface, designed to enable direct user interaction with enterprise AI agents. Xianxin Technology (相芯科技) in Hangzhou appeared in connection with Migu Culture's acquisition of a self-collision processing patent relevant to digital human rendering. A separate report noted that miHoYo (米哈游) founder Cai Haoyu invested in new AI models, with the broader digital human broadcasting landscape cited as spanning Tencent Hunyuan digital human, ByteDance, Alibaba, and Kuaishou alongside international entrants.

Ethical and Social Dimensions: Reports from Xinhua's New Beijing Daily explored the concept of bidirectional digital immortality, in which virtual digital humans are designed to interact with living people in real time, including AI-driven "resurrections" of deceased individuals. The coverage noted that the social and psychological implications of such deployments remain largely unresolved. In a parallel case widely discussed across Chinese media, the practice of companies training digital humans based on former employees without consent was framed as a potential violation of personal information rights, with commentators citing the forthcoming CAC draft measures as a necessary corrective.

April 14 News

Cultural Heritage and Tourism: The Guangxi Ethnic Museum has deployed a digital human named "Gui Ling'er" to narrate historical stories along the Li River in Guilin, while visitors to Wuzhou's Qilou City heritage district can scan codes to hear century-old trading port tales delivered by digital guides. In Hunan, Shuangfeng County Cultural Tourism Development Co. debuted an interactive digital human system called "AI Meet Zeng Guofan" at a basketball event, drawing crowds of fans, parents, and children to engage with a virtual recreation of the Qing-dynasty statesman. Students from Zhejiang Tourism Vocational Academy have been producing digital human narrated guide videos for underfunded county-level museums, with Wenzhou's Cangnan Museum reporting a measurable uptick in visitors after the videos were published online. ByteDance's "non-heritage digital human" project, which uses digital figures to present intangible cultural heritage, has been selected as a demonstration case by the UNESCO Creative Center. In Guangxi, the Commerce Department's digital humans Shangwujun and Liu Sanjie were announced as co-hosts for the launch night of the provincial "33 Consumer Festival," merging cultural iconography with commercial promotion.

ByteDance’s “non-heritage digital human” project uses AI-driven virtual humans to present and transmit intangible cultural heritage through interactive, multilingual dialogue and real-time demonstrations, combining large language models with deployment on platforms such as Douyin and Volcano Engine. These digital figures, exemplified by systems like “Feifei,” have been used at major cultural events in China as guides and educators, shifting heritage preservation from static display to interactive transmission aimed at broader and younger audiences. The initiative was selected as a demonstration case by UNESCO’s International Centre for Creativity and Sustainable Development under its program on protecting cultural expression in digital environments, which evaluated global projects for innovation and scalability, positioning ByteDance’s approach as a replicable model for AI-enabled cultural preservation and dissemination. 

The UNESCO International Centre for Creativity and Sustainable Development (ICCSD) is a Beijing-based UNESCO Category 2 centre established through cooperation between UNESCO and the Chinese government, positioning China as a central institutional hub for advancing creativity-led sustainable development within the global UNESCO framework. While aligned with UNESCO’s cultural and development agendas, the centre is funded and operated by China, allowing it to integrate national priorities such as digital innovation, cultural preservation, and creative industries into international programs. Through research, policy coordination, and global forums like Creativity 2030, ICCSD functions as a platform where China promotes models that combine technology and culture—such as AI-driven heritage projects—as scalable solutions for sustainable development, reinforcing its role in shaping how digital creativity and cultural expression are applied within global governance structures. 

Healthcare: Xuanwu Hospital in Beijing, affiliated with Capital Medical University, has launched what it describes as the country's first Parkinson's disease AI doctor platform, deploying physician "AI avatars" that answer foundational patient queries around the clock while operating within strict safety boundaries that exclude prescribing or recommending specific treatments. At the 2026 Healthy China Hospital Presidents' Forum in Wuhan, a digital human named Chu Daifu was highlighted as handling sixteen service interactions per day in a clinical support role. Southern Medical University has released a Hospital AI Platform whose architecture includes digital avatar capabilities integrated into a multi-agent system supporting automated model training and deployment, with named applications including Zhi Shen, Nanfang Zhima, and Nanyi Xiaozhi.

Entertainment and Media: A television program has paired the hyper-realistic digital human Noah with live-action host Li Hao, dividing celebrity performers into two competing teams, one led by the human host and the other by Noah, in a format that blends metaverse aesthetics with variety-show competition. The China Radio and Television Social Organization Federation Actors Committee issued a formal statement opposing unauthorized AI face-swapping, voice cloning, and virtual-human replication of real performers for commercial use, including in short dramas and branded content. Separately, reporting on AI-generated short dramas noted that producing a digital human whose appearance approximates a real person costs vary by fidelity level, with entry-level versions available cheaply and higher-end versions commanding significantly more, raising ongoing questions about likeness rights in the booming short-drama market.

Livestreaming and E-commerce: Haier Smart Home (海尔智家) operates an AI livestream center in Wuhan where digital human broadcasts now account for roughly thirty thousand hours alongside approximately one hundred thousand hours of human-presented content, using what the company calls "digital clone humans" that replicate a real presenter's appearance, voice, speech patterns, and body language. Huiboxing (慧播星) digital humans were used in an agricultural livestreaming video promoting red jujube farming from Cele County in Xinjiang's Hotan Prefecture, as part of a broader rural-assistance broadcast campaign. MiHoYo (米哈游) founder Cai Haoyu's investment in a new AI model has prompted industry commentary positioning virtual hosts and AI digital human livestreaming as among the most commercially viable near-term applications, with platform operators expected to absorb these tools into their own ecosystems rather than offering them through third-party creators.

Enterprise and Workforce: A gaming and media company in Shandong drew national attention and widespread criticism after it trained AI digital humans based on departed employees, enabling the virtual replicas to introduce themselves and continue performing work tasks, raising questions about personal information rights when consent is ambiguous or absent. At Qingdao Port's QQCTU terminal, young dockworkers independently formed a "digital human creation group" to produce AI-narrated educational micro-videos, repurposing the technology for internal workplace communication. Shandong Digital Culture Group (山东数字文化集团) unveiled its third-generation digital human AI consultant at the 2026 Qilu Spring Auto Show, where attendees noted visible improvements over the previous edition. In Guiyang, a recruitment fair for eastern Chinese university graduates featured a dedicated AI digital human zone using voice interaction to match candidates with positions and answer talent-policy questions in real time. Meituan (美团) maintains a dedicated digital human and creative generation team within its platform technology division, staffed in part by Shanghai Jiao Tong University graduates specializing in semantic parsing. Guijiren (硅基数字人), showcased at an OPC event in Jiangsu, offers small-business owners personalized AI avatars intended to serve as always-on digital representatives for individual shop operators.

Consumer Services and Insurance: New China Life Insurance (新华保险) has launched a digital human service layer on its 95567 customer hotline, described as an innovation in policyholder interaction. In Hangzhou, a consumer-rights digital human named Hang Xiao Xiao has been deployed by local authorities to shift dispute-resolution services from scheduled in-person appointments to instant online responses, operating across Zhejiang province as part of the 3.15 consumer protection campaign.

Education and Training: Hefei Normal University's School of Music has launched a "Good Show on Stage" project that integrates digital human opera anchors and immersive opera experience spaces as part of a full-chain intellectual property plan for traditional Chinese opera, with deployments already active at the university and at multiple sites across Anhui province. Guangdong Industry and Trade Vocational Technical College (广东工贸职业技术学院) has incorporated virtual digital human production into hands-on training for students, alongside AI video creation competitions and public AI courses, as part of its broader AI-plus-vocational-education strategy. Chengdu University of Technology's Xunhai Zhiqing student team has developed a foreign-trade support solution that uses high-fidelity digital human technology to produce multilingual product videos at scale, targeting cost barriers faced by small and mid-sized export enterprises.

Cross-border Commerce and Marketing: Tianjin Jiuniu Data (天津九牛数据) operates a cross-border marketing system called Tainiu that incorporates localized virtual digital humans alongside multilingual AI voiceover and overseas live-footage libraries, aimed at helping Chinese brands build presence on TikTok and other international platforms. Ruilishi (瑞立视) has published an overview of virtual digital human monetization pathways, positioning the technology as a cost-reduction tool for enterprise clients in the business-to-business market rather than a direct revenue generator.

Technology and Research: Duandian (Shaanxi) Technology (端点（陕西）科技有限公司) has developed a system that drives digital human shoulder, neck, and hand gestures directly from voice characteristics, automatically generating forward-leaning posture and emphatic hand movements when the system detects rising pitch and increased volume in the audio input. Yingshi Technology (萤石科技) has released an AI digital human described as capable of nuanced emotional expression, first shown at the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai by locally based robotics firm Zhikepai (智可派机器人), whose debut mass-produced character-type embodied intelligence robot was presented at the same event. JD.com (京东) has open-sourced JoyAI-Image-Edit, a twenty-four-billion-parameter image-editing model, as part of a broader technology pipeline that extends from foundation models through digital humans to embodied-intelligence data centers. The Agricultural Bank of China (中国农业银行) has announced the establishment of a Smart Banking Construction Office tasked with building enterprise-grade AI digital human employees, reported in the context of its institutional business restructuring.

JoyAI-Image is a unified multimodal foundation model designed to handle image understanding, text-to-image generation, and instruction-guided editing within a single integrated system, whereas JoyAI-Image-Edit is a specialized derivative model focused solely on instruction-based image editing, taking an existing image and applying precise, spatially controlled modifications; the key difference is that JoyAI-Image functions as a general-purpose visual intelligence model covering multiple tasks, while JoyAI-Image-Edit is optimized specifically for high-accuracy, controllable editing workflows. 

Regulatory and Ethical Contexts: The Cyberspace Administration of China published draft measures titled the Digital Virtual Human Information Services Management Measures in early April 2026, marking the first dedicated regulatory framework for digital virtual humans and requiring that a visible "digital human" label be displayed continuously throughout any virtual-human presentation. Five Chinese government departments jointly issued rules establishing that virtual companions must not be provided to minors, setting a boundary on AI anthropomorphic interaction services. Legal commentary on the Shandong employee-cloning case has centered on whether the draft measures, combined with existing personal information protection law, would render the practice unlawful absent explicit, informed, and specific consent, particularly when the digital replica's appearance, voice, and behavioral mannerisms are closely modeled on a real individual. A separate report from Shanghai flagged the proliferation of "AI boss" romance-scam videos, noting that a single digital human video can be produced in under five minutes and that operators may run dozens or even hundreds of such accounts simultaneously, targeting elderly viewers. The Hong Kong International InnoEX exhibition, opening on April 13 for a four-day run, featured digital humans among its headline technology categories alongside AI, smart office solutions, and Internet of Things applications.

April 13 News

Regulatory and Standards: China's first national standard for customer-service digital humans, formally designated GB/T 46483-2025 and titled "Information Technology: General Technical Requirements for Customer-Service Virtual Digital Humans," came into effect in April 2026. The standard establishes unified specifications for product form, functional boundaries, performance metrics, image generation, visual interaction, voice interaction, and emotional response for customer-service digital humans. SenseTime (商汤科技) became the first enterprise to pass compliance testing under the new standard, with its SenseTime Ruying platform cited as the first national-standard-compliant digital human. Separately, the Cyberspace Administration of China published for public comment its draft "Measures for the Management of Digital Virtual Human Information Services," which stipulates that digital virtual human services that are sufficiently identifiable as a specific natural person may not be offered without that person's explicit consent. In a parallel regulatory development, five agencies including the CAC, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, and the State Administration for Market Regulation jointly issued rules governing AI anthropomorphic interaction services, explicitly prohibiting the provision of virtual companions to minors. These regulatory moves coincide with judicial precedent: television host He Jiong successfully sued over an unauthorized AI virtual likeness, with the court ordering 203,000 yuan in damages, a case subsequently designated by the Supreme People's Court as a typical case in personality rights judicial protection.

Healthcare: Capital Medical University's Xuanwu Hospital in Beijing launched what it described as China's first Parkinson's disease AI doctor platform, deploying AI avatars modeled on real physicians to provide round-the-clock consultation for patients. The system enables patients to interact with digital replicas of their treating doctors at any hour, addressing questions about symptom management such as worsening tremors. In a separate development reflecting the emotional dimensions of digital human companionship among older populations, reports from Hubei province described an octogenarian who became deeply attached to an AI digital human companion, an episode that prompted broader media discussion about the gap between the emotional needs of elderly populations and the current capabilities of AI companionship products.

Ethics and Labor: A game and media company in Shandong province generated substantial public controversy by training AI digital humans based on departed employees to continue performing their work duties. The company's own assessment was candid, describing the resulting digital clones as limited in capability, able only to handle simple commands and repetitive inquiries. The case rapidly escalated online when the open-source project "Colleague.skill" appeared on GitHub, quickly followed by derivative projects including "Ex.skill," "Boss.skill," and "Parents.skill," collectively forming what commentators termed a "digital cloning" ecosystem. The controversy intensified further when a separate project produced an AI digital clone of Zhang Xuefeng, the prominent education consultant, within two weeks of his death, prompting widespread debate about the ethics of posthumous digital replication and the commercial implications for knowledge-based professionals whose expertise and likeness can be synthesized without consent. Media commentary framed the Zhang Xuefeng case as a harbinger of challenges facing all content creators and professionals whose livelihoods depend on specialized personal knowledge.

Cultural Tourism and Public Events: In Chongqing's Hechuan district, local authorities unveiled an AI digital human modeled on Tao Xingzhi, the celebrated educator, to mark the 134th anniversary of his birth. Shiyou Technology (世优科技) provided full-stack digital human technology for the project, encompassing the complete pipeline from digital human creation to deployment. Shiyou Technology also deployed its Bota AI digital human interaction kiosk at Nanning Baiyun Airport in Guangxi to support smart travel services. Separately, the Guangxi Department of Commerce announced that its digital human "Shangwujun" would appear alongside the iconic cultural figure Liu Sanjie at the launch of the provincial "33 Consumer Festival," using a digital human performance format to promote consumer engagement. Guangxi-based AI applications were also reported to be producing digital humans for e-commerce services targeting both Chinese and ASEAN markets. In Tianjin, the 2026 Dongli Lake Half-Marathon incorporated digital human interactive question-and-answer sessions at start and finish areas as part of the event's experiential programming, alongside real-time comment walls and live music.

Enterprise and Government Services: The Shijiazhuang municipal government in Hebei province launched "Shi Baobao," an AI digital human intelligent customer service agent for the city's social security system, providing automated public-facing inquiry services. In Shaanxi province, the National Defense Industry Vocational Technical College deployed a floor-standing AI interview kiosk equipped with the "Zhimianxing" digital human interview system, covering job positions across all industries as part of a career services initiative combining AI-based resume diagnostics with human mentorship. China Financial Certification Authority (中金金融认证中心) presented its digital human "A Zai" at the 2026 Zhongguancun Forum's metaverse innovation and development session, positioning the product within the financial-sector track of metaverse digital human standards. Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (浦发银行) applied for a patent on a business data processing method designed to improve the accuracy of digital human-driven product recommendations.

Education and Workforce Development: Guangdong Industry and Trade Vocational Technical College introduced virtual digital human production as a hands-on training module within its broader integration of AI into vocational education, alongside AI video creation competitions and artificial intelligence open courses. Jiangsu Broadcasting, in partnership with Huawei (华为), launched what was described as the first national "Media Intelligent Assistant" innovation competition, with participating tracks that include digital human broadcasting alongside intelligent writing and video editing, drawing academic collaboration from Nanjing University, Southeast University, and Communication University of China. At Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, a spring recruitment fair for graduating students deployed "AI Hua Dao," a digital human providing on-site services including resume consultations and career counseling, with the event attracting nearly 20,000 university graduates from across Hubei province. In Nanchang, Jiangxi province, the municipal fire and rescue brigade launched an AI short-video creativity competition for university students that specifically emphasized the use of AI-generated content technologies including digital human broadcasting and AI-generated voiceover. The city of Wuhan announced the launch of an AI online community with plans to distribute tens of millions of yuan in AI product experience vouchers covering more than one hundred products including digital humans, AI painting tools, coding assistants, and research instruments.

Entertainment and Content: Blue Focus (蓝色光标), the marketing communications group, continued to develop its virtual human and metaverse business segment, which includes the Su Xiaomei intellectual property, virtual production capabilities, and extended reality studio operations, positioning these alongside its AI-powered full-chain marketing and e-commerce conversion services. On Bilibili (哔哩哔哩), the annual creators' conference highlighted the expanding ecosystem of virtual UP hosts, with coverage noting the growth of content formats that blend virtual presenter identities with commentary on gaming updates and anime narratives, a format driving engagement through what was characterized as immersive "phantom narrative" audience participation.

Infrastructure and Industrial Policy: In Beijing's Mentougou district, a new XR Immersive Audiovisual Joint Laboratory was inaugurated, occupying nearly 3,000 square meters and featuring a digital human production center equipped with advanced spatial video systems capable of high-precision reconstruction of drivable and editable digital human models. Shandong province's fifteenth five-year plan formally incorporated digital humans alongside AI, metaverse technologies, and science fiction industry development as priorities for integration with cultural innovation, while a separate Shandong provincial initiative called for accelerating the development of humanoid robots, bionic robots, and digital humans as strategic intelligent products within the province's digital industry corridor linking Jinan and Qingdao. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced plans to release a new batch of "AI+" high-value application scenarios with manufacturing as the primary focus, with industry commentary noting the potential for AI digital humans to be deployed across livestreaming and office environments.

April 12 News

Regulatory and Standards: On April 10, 2026, the Cyberspace Administration of China, along with the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, and the State Administration for Market Regulation, published the Interim Measures for Management of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services (人工智能拟人化互动服务管理暂行办法), which will take effect on July 15, 2026 and explicitly prohibit the provision of services designed to induce minors into becoming dependent on digital virtual humans. This regulation complements the earlier draft Digital Virtual Human Information Service Management Measures released by the CAC on April 3, 2026, which established a broader framework for governing digital virtual human services including rules around consent and data use. Separately, SenseTime (商汤科技) secured the first national-standard digital human certification under GB/T 46483-2025, titled General Technical Requirements for Virtual Digital Humans (虚拟数字人通用技术要求), which defines a reference architecture and functional and performance requirements for customer-service-type virtual digital human systems.

The Ministry of Public Security (中华人民共和国公安部), headquartered in Beijing, is China's principal law enforcement and public security agency, and it has become a significant institutional actor in the digital human space through both regulatory authority and operational deployment. On the regulatory side, the MPS co-issued the 2022 Provisions on the Administration of Deep Synthesis of Internet Information Services alongside the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), establishing the foundational compliance framework governing digital human content generation, and it co-issued the 2025 measures on face recognition technology application and security management. Its Science and Technology Information Bureau guides the China Security and Protection Products Industry Association, which hosts the annual Politico-Legal Intelligence Exhibition where digital humans are a featured technology category alongside smart policing and intelligent terminals. On the deployment side, public security bureaus across China have increasingly adopted digital human police officers for citizen-facing services, including the anti-fraud AI digital human developed by Hebei's Handan anti-fraud center, the digital human police officer in Zhangjiakou's government service hall answering queries on household registration and traffic management, Nanjing's anti-fraud digital humans enabling one-click propaganda video generation, Xinjiang's first digital human police officer "Xiaoke" (小克) launched in January 2025, Kunming's "Chunxiao" (春晓) AI police assistant built on China Mobile's cloud infrastructure and DeepSeek, Guangzhou's "Rong Xiao'an" (榕小安) digital human police deployed in commercial districts, and Xi'an traffic police's "Yong'an Jun" (永安君) intelligent Q&A system. The MPS's First Research Institute publishes the journal Police Technology (警察技术), and its research affiliates contribute to cybersecurity and identity authentication standards that underpin the secure deployment of digital human systems nationwide, including the national network identity authentication platform and associated public safety industry standards published in late 2025. 

The Interim Measures for the Management of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services (人工智能拟人化互动服务管理暂行办法) is a regulatory instrument jointly issued on April 10, 2026, by five Chinese government agencies: the Cyberspace Administration of China, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, and the State Administration for Market Regulation. The regulation originated as a CAC draft released for public comment on December 27, 2025, with a feedback deadline of January 25, 2026, and was formally approved at the CAC's third internal meeting on February 2, 2026, before receiving interagency sign-off and publication. Taking effect on July 15, 2026, the measures govern AI services that simulate human personality traits, thought patterns, and communication styles, establishing provider safety responsibilities across service standards, data security, user protection, security assessments, and supervisory compliance. The regulation's most prominent provisions prohibit the provision of virtual companion, virtual intimate relationship, and virtual family member services to minors, and ban the generation of content for minors that could trigger imitation of unsafe behavior, produce extreme emotions, or encourage unhealthy habits. Chinese legal commentators have framed the measures as marking China's entry into a new phase of scenario-specific, fine-grained AI governance, and at least one cross-jurisdictional analysis has drawn parallels between these measures and California's Companion Chatbots law passed in October 2025, noting that the two regulatory systems arrive at similar protective goals through different institutional mechanisms. 

The General Technical Requirements for Virtual Digital Humans (虚拟数字人通用技术要求), formally designated GB/T 46483-2025 under the full title Information Technology -- General Technical Requirements for Customer Service Virtual Digital Humans (信息技术客服型虚拟数字人通用技术要求), is China's first national standard in the virtual digital human field, published on October 5, 2025, and taking effect immediately upon release. The standard was led by SenseTime (商汤科技) as the primary drafting unit and developed over two years of preparation under the guidance of the China Electronics Standardization Institute (中国电子技术标准化研究院), with more than thirty participating organizations from industry, academia, and research, managed by TC28 (the National Information Technology Standardization Technical Committee) and executed by its SC24 subcommittee on computer graphics, image processing, and environmental data representation, under the supervision of the Standardization Administration of China. It establishes a comprehensive reference framework for customer service digital human systems covering six modules -- image generation, visual interaction, voice interaction, emotional interaction, image driving, and operations maintenance -- and sets quantified performance benchmarks including lip-sync accuracy of at least 90 percent, gesture interaction success rates of at least 80 percent, emotional interaction success rates of at least 80 percent, 2D digital humans with clear and complete facial features, 3D hyper-realistic digital human models with polygon counts of at least 200,000, and voice interaction response times under two seconds, while also specifying requirements for keyword maintenance, corpus updates, and multimodal interaction across voice, gesture, and body movement, effectively filling a long-standing gap in unified technical norms for customer service digital humans deployed across finance, government affairs, education, e-commerce, and telecommunications. SenseTime became the first company to pass conformity testing under the standard in April 2026 with its Ruying (如影) live interactive digital human product, and the standard is now being positioned as a foundation for China to promote its digital human technical norms internationally. 

Financial Services: At the 2026 Zhongguancun Forum Metaverse Innovation and Development Forum held in Beijing, China Financial Certification Authority (中金金融认证中心) showcased its digital human "A Zai," which was presented as a frontrunner in the financial sector's adoption of metaverse digital human standards. Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (浦发银行) filed a patent for a business data processing method designed to improve the accuracy of digital human-driven product recommendations, indicating the bank's continued investment in personalized digital human interactions within its customer service infrastructure.

Enterprise and Workforce: A Shandong-based game and media company drew widespread attention and controversy after reportedly training departed employees' work data into AI digital humans that continued performing their former job functions. The underlying project, an open-source GitHub initiative called "colleague.skill" (同事.skill), quickly went viral and spawned derivative projects including "ex-partner.skill" (前任.skill) and "boss.skill," raising public alarm about the boundaries between human labor and AI replication. In a related development, a downloadable "skill pack" modeled on the late education consultant Zhang Xuefeng appeared online, enabling an AI persona to field questions about school selection, major choice, and career planning in his distinctive communication style, prompting discussion about the posthumous digital replication of public figures. Shandong Shuchang Digital Technology (山东数昶数字技术有限公司), a Jinan-based company established in 2021, filed a patent for a generative AI-based method of creating digital employees, further signaling corporate interest in systematizing the production of AI-driven workforce substitutes. Separately, discussions around the One Person Company model, as articulated by commentator Bu Anxun, highlighted the role of shared digital human tool platforms and computing resources as foundational public infrastructure for AI-driven solo entrepreneurship.

E-commerce and Brand Marketing: Australian health supplement brand Swisse deployed JD.com's digital human livestreaming technology on its flagship store, reportedly doubling consumer dwell time during off-peak traffic periods by using an AI-driven digital host to maintain continuous engagement. Tianyu De Liquor (天佑德酒) disclosed in an investor Q&A that it has deployed a virtual digital human named Li Ling'er (李灵儿) alongside an internal AI customization system, though the company clarified that both applications are built on third-party models rather than proprietary technology.

Healthcare and Community Wellbeing: In Shanghai's Yangpu District, Jiangpu Road Subdistrict opened the "Jiang Xiaoyue" (江小悦) Mental Health Service Center, which features an AI experience zone where a digital human serves as a conversational companion for local residents, described as their most popular "friend" for discussing personal concerns. Hong Kong-listed traditional Chinese medicine healthcare provider Gushengtang (固生堂) has introduced an AI avatar system for its practitioners alongside an AI health assistant aimed at improving the patient-side consultation experience, with the company receiving a maintained "buy" rating from Huafu Securities in connection with its accelerating technology deployment.

Government and Public Services: The Shijiazhuang Municipal Social Security Administration in Hebei province launched "Shi Baobao" (石保保), an AI digital human intelligent customer service agent designed to handle public inquiries on social insurance matters. Zhejiang province issued new guidance calling for the accelerated rollout of a "digital human social security" platform integrating AI-powered intelligent consultation, recruitment, policy assessment, and targeted support services as part of its broader "fifteen-minute employment service circle" initiative.

Media and Broadcasting: Huiboxing (慧播星), a digital human video production platform, appeared across multiple unrelated news broadcasts as the credited production tool, with its digital human presenters delivering reports on subjects ranging from a Yunnan school disciplinary incident to coal mining damage in Guizhou to satellite imagery of the world's largest iceberg, reflecting the quiet but steady normalization of synthetic anchors in routine Chinese news video production. At a digital transformation event held by China Southern Power Grid's Guangdong Yangjiang Power Supply Bureau, an AI digital human named Zhiling (智玲) served as the on-stage host, replacing a traditional human emcee. Jiangsu Provincial Broadcasting and Television Bureau and Huawei jointly launched the first national "Media Intelligence Assistant" innovation competition, in which AI digital human broadcasting was cited as one of the core application areas alongside intelligent writing and video editing.

Cultural Tourism and Education: At the Chinese Culture Learning Center in Kashgar, Xinjiang, visitors can pass through an interactive "magic door" installation to explore cultural heritage sites and modern cityscapes, and can engage directly with a digital human guide as part of the immersive experience. In Nanjing, the 2026 Jiangsu Green Low-Carbon Building International Expo featured interactive digital humans and immersive multi-screen displays within its "AI + Housing and Urban-Rural Construction" exhibition zone. Xuzhou's Quanshan District, designated by the Jiangsu municipal government as an experimental zone for digital economy and AI industry development, is producing digital humans that require only twenty to thirty minutes of real-person data capture to generate highly realistic virtual replicas. Guangdong Industry and Trade Vocational Technical College incorporated virtual digital human production into its hands-on AI training curriculum as part of a broader push to integrate artificial intelligence into vocational education, while a fire safety short video competition in Nanchang, Jiangxi, specifically encouraged participants to use virtual digital humans and AI-generated visuals in their creative entries.

Entertainment and Content Production: The AI-driven short drama sector has given rise to a growing gray market in which production companies purchase performers' permanent likeness rights for as little as 1,500 yuan to create digital human actors, with actress Lu Jia reporting that casting calls for such "AI artists" have become commonplace in performer notification groups. Industry observers noted that because of legal risk around unauthorized use of celebrity likenesses, current commercial exploration remains confined to original digital human characters or mid-tier internet personalities whose intellectual property carries less litigation exposure. miHoYo (米哈游) released a new performance large model designed to drive virtual character animation, part of a broader convergence of AI music generation, digital human technology, and virtual character performance that is reshaping the foundational logic of China's cultural entertainment industry.

April 11 News

Cultural Tourism: Digital humans are entering China's scenic areas and cultural tourism events at scale. At the third Hunan Tourism Development Conference opening ceremony, a digital human named Hengyang "Huo Chuquan" appeared on stage alongside celebrity host He Jiong, delivering fluent real-time interaction that demonstrated digital humans moving beyond screen-based concepts into live event co-hosting. Across the country, from Luzhou in the southwest to the Yili General's Mansion in the northwest, and from Shanxi's historical sites to Shanghai's modern landmarks, digital humans are being deployed as cultural interpreters and immersive guides. In Shaanxi, Xi'an Jiaotong University's Westward Migration Museum has completed an exhibition upgrade incorporating digital humans alongside immersive experiences of the historic straw-shed auditorium and touchscreen access to professors' manuscripts, using the technology to animate historical narratives. Danfeng County in Shangluo, Shaanxi is building smart tourism benchmarks across the full chain of dining, lodging, transport, sightseeing, shopping, and entertainment using digital tools including digital human livestream rooms for e-commerce.

Livestreaming and E-Commerce: Haier Smart Home has established an AI livestream center in Wuhan where digital human broadcasting now accounts for approximately 30,000 hours per month alongside 100,000 hours of human-hosted livestreaming, with the facility integrating AR, VR, and digital human technologies and holding 11 patents. The center chose Wuhan for its talent pool and cost advantages, with staffing costs roughly 70 percent of Hangzhou's rates, and the team has grown to over one thousand people. In Sichuan, a forum on platform economy empowering individual business operators held in Chengdu's Pidu District saw platform companies announce digital human livestreaming capabilities alongside AI-powered product selection and pricing tools, enabling 24-hour agricultural product broadcasting. Tianyoude liquor (天佑德酒) has deployed a virtual digital human named Li Ling'er alongside an internal AI customization system, with the company confirming these applications are built on third-party models.

Workforce and Labor Ethics: A game and media company in Shandong has drawn intense public attention and debate after training AI digital humans based on departed employees' work data to continue performing tasks including HR consultation, appointment scheduling, and spreadsheet creation. The case prompted commentary from the Shandong Provincial Computing Center at the National Supercomputing Center in Jinan, where experts emphasized that technical feasibility does not equate to legal safety, and that "informed consent" alone may be insufficient to address the complex rights issues involved. Zhou Hongyi weighed in publicly on the controversy, stressing that boundaries around such practices must be clearly defined. The case has raised broad questions about whether AI digital replicas of former employees could catalyze entirely new workplace models, with multiple commentators warning that the practice sits at a sensitive intersection of personal data rights, labor law, and AI ethics.

Technology and Open-Source Frameworks: SentiPulse (思维光谱), in collaboration with a doctoral team from Renmin University of China's Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, has open-sourced SentiAvatar, described as China's first interactive 3D digital human framework. SentiAvatar is a complete text-to-motion generation solution that enables digital humans to produce contextually and emotionally responsive real-time movements, moving beyond preset animation libraries. Separately, Soul App's AI research team Soul AI Lab has released the open-source model SoulX-LiveAct, which applies structural optimizations to an autoregressive diffusion framework to achieve stable long-duration digital human video generation, advancing streaming generation from basic capability to sustained output quality. In Tianjin, Tuguan Digital Technology (图观（天津）数字科技有限公司) has been granted a patent titled "A Method, Device and Medium for Digital Human Generation and Interaction," with authorization notice number CN121547664B and an application date in January 2026, covering methods for generating and interacting with digital humans.

Enterprise and Government Services: In Shijiazhuang, Hebei, the city's first social insurance AI digital human intelligent customer service agent and AI digital human instructor, named Shi Baobao, have been launched to handle public inquiries on social security topics including pension verification procedures and self-service options through the Hebei Human Resources and Social Affairs App. In Guizhou, the provincial sports lottery system has implemented a digital human training framework to standardize and automate training for sales personnel, replacing traditional training methods with intelligent delivery. Wuhan has launched an AI-focused online community that will distribute tens of millions of yuan in AI product experience vouchers covering categories including digital humans, AI painting, programming assistants, intelligent writing tools, and research instruments.

Financial Services and Standards: China Financial Certification Authority (中金金融认证中心, CFCA) has had its digital human "A Zai" selected as one of the first verification units under new metaverse industry standards. The standards being developed include classification and grading frameworks for virtual digital humans under the metaverse services rubric, with CFCA leveraging its expertise in financial security and identity authentication to advance digital human deployment in the financial sector. The standards work features a dual-track approach, with ten draft industry standards open for comment covering virtual digital human classification and industrial metaverse scene construction.

China Financial Certification Authority (中金金融认证中心有限公司), commonly known as CFCA, is a national-level electronic authentication institution affiliated with China UnionPay that provides digital certificate services, SSL certificates, and security infrastructure to China's banking and financial sector. In the digital human domain, CFCA has developed its own digital human named "A Zai" (A仔), which in April 2026 became the first financial-sector entity to pass the national metaverse digital human industry standard verification, earning CFCA designation as the inaugural verification unit under these standards at the 2026 Zhongguancun Forum. The A Zai digital human system integrates financial security authentication technology and has been deployed at scale in scenarios including identity verification and intelligent customer service, with cumulative transaction processing exceeding ten million instances. CFCA also provides a digital human SDK used by major Chinese banks including ICBC, China CITIC Bank, China Merchants Bank, Ping An Bank, Huaxia Bank, and Bank of Communications for customer-facing digital human services within their mobile banking applications. Additionally, CFCA operates the China Electronic Banking Network, which features its own digital human anchor named Echo, and the organization publishes the annual Digital Bank Survey Report, a widely cited benchmark in China's digital banking industry. CFCA has also signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Tencent Cloud to build a trusted digital ecosystem. 

Digital Identity and Trust Infrastructure: Anheng Information (安恒信息) and e-Qianba (e签宝) have jointly launched VeriAgent in April 2026, positioned as a trusted digital human infrastructure for the AI agent era. VeriAgent's core function is to issue tamper-proof digital identity credentials to each AI agent, establishing a trust foundation for digital human and AI agent interactions in an environment of growing autonomous agent deployment.

VeriAgent is a "trusted digital human infrastructure" jointly launched in early April 2026 by e-Qianbao (e签宝) and DBAPPSecurity (安恒信息). It addresses growing security and trust concerns around AI agents by providing each digital human instance with a tamper-proof digital identity certificate, binding every digital human to a real human entity (individual or legal person), and applying cryptographic signatures to each operational step. The product covers identity authentication, behavioral security, dynamic authorization, and skill certification across the full lifecycle of a digital human, from creation through activation, suspension, and revocation. VeriAgent was developed in response to incidents like the OpenClaw security vulnerability, which highlighted risks of identity fraud and skill misuse among AI agents. Rather than functioning as a standalone security tool, VeriAgent positions itself as a trust layer that migrates the established electronic signature trust framework from "carbon-based" humans to "silicon-based" digital humans, aiming to support compliant deployment of AI agents in high-risk sectors such as finance and commerce. 

Regulation: The Cyberspace Administration of China has published the draft Digital Virtual Human Information Services Management Measures for public comment, establishing requirements including prominent display of "digital human" labeling throughout the duration of any digital human's operation and compliance with national regulations on AI-generated synthetic content labeling. Commentary has noted that the draft provides a feasible and forward-looking governance framework addressing issues including digital humans that resemble celebrities, unauthorized resurrection of deceased individuals, and deepfake abuses, with identity disclosure requirements imposed at the source.

Healthcare and Traditional Medicine: The Beijing Digital Intelligent Traditional Chinese Medicine Industry Development Research Institute (北京数智中医产业发展研究院) has been established with an AI-plus-TCM multi-scenario application demonstration center. The center's first cohort of nearly 40 representative industry products includes TCM digital humans alongside large language models, brain-inspired intelligence systems, embodied systems, brain-computer science applications, and intelligent management platforms.

Education: In Fuzhou, Fujian, the Gulou District is pursuing a smart education development path where digital humans are being used to recreate the aesthetics of the ancient Silk Road, and AI motion capture technology enables precise error correction and personalized guidance for students, with teachers integrating these technologies into instructional practice.

Advertising and Brand Interaction: OPPO has deployed AI Agent interactive advertising on information feed platforms, transforming standard ads into brand-avatar chat experiences where users encountering an advertisement can engage in real-time conversation with a brand AI persona, completing brand consultation and product navigation in a single interaction.

Film, Media, and Content Creation: An OPC (one-person company) entrepreneur with a background in film and television visual effects has pivoted to combine AI technology with 3D applications, expanding into interactive content, AI-generated film and television, media interaction, digital humans, and digital twins as part of a broader trend of solo creators leveraging AI to multiply output across creative domains.

Zheng Haifeng (郑海峰) is a post-1970s entrepreneur in Qingdao who began a second venture after more than 20 years of professional experience, during which she witnessed rapid advances in computing technology that motivated her to shift into AI-driven entrepreneurship. Her current focus is on building digital humans and developing proprietary IP around them, using these assets to enable low-cost, high-efficiency brand promotion. The approach relies on AI to construct and deploy digital human representations as scalable media interfaces, reducing production costs while increasing output capacity. This transition reflects a broader move from traditional media or technical roles into AI-enabled content systems, where digital humans function as both creative products and commercial tools. 

April 10 News

Workplace and Labor: A game and media company in Shandong recently trained an AI digital human based on the work data of a departed human resources specialist, enabling the digital clone to continue performing tasks such as consultations, appointment scheduling, and document preparation. The experiment, which the company says was conducted with the former employee's consent, has triggered widespread debate across Chinese media and social platforms about the legal boundaries of creating digital replicas of workers. Wu Xiaoming, director of the Shandong Provincial Computing Center (National Supercomputing Center in Jinan), cautioned that training an AI digital human goes beyond producing a talking virtual likeness, instead converting a person's appearance, speech patterns, knowledge structure, and workflow into machine-callable and reusable assets. Legal commentators cited by multiple outlets warned that unauthorized use of a person's data to create such digital surrogates could carry criminal penalties of up to seven years, and a prior Shanghai court case involving similar issues was recognized as one of the city's exemplary cases for 2023. The Cyberspace Administration of China's draft regulation on digital virtual human information services, released on April 3, 2026, directly addresses this category of risk by requiring prominent "digital human" labeling and imposing shared accountability across service providers and users throughout the production chain.

Regulation and Standards: The Cyberspace Administration of China published its draft Measures for the Management of Digital Virtual Human Information Services for public comment, defining the scope of digital virtual humans, mandating personality rights and personal information protections, and requiring that all digital human content carry a visible "digital human" identifier in compliance with national AI-generated content labeling rules. Separately, at the 2026 Zhongguancun Forum annual Metaverse Innovation and Development Forum held in Beijing, CFCA (中金金融认证中心) announced that its digital human "A Zai" became the first financial-sector digital human to pass verification under the metaverse digital human standard, as detailed in the document "Metaverse Common Services: Virtual Digital Human Grading and Classification" (元宇宙共性服务虚拟数字人分级及分类), which specifies technical parameters, application scenarios, and safety requirements.

Cultural Tourism: Digital humans are being deployed across scenic and cultural heritage sites throughout China in increasingly varied forms. At Dunhuang's Mogao Caves digital experience hall in Gansu, an AI digital human identified as a "painter" uses dynamic light and projection to recreate the mural restoration process while interacting with visitors in real time. In Hunan, the digital human "Hengyang" appeared alongside celebrity host He Jiong at the opening ceremony of the Second Hunan Tourism Development Conference, delivering fluent improvisational dialogue on stage. Across a broader landscape spanning Luzhou in Sichuan, the Ili General's Mansion in Xinjiang, historical sites in Shanxi, and modern landmarks in Shanghai, a wave of digital humans is being embedded into tourism experiences ranging from IP revival to VR immersion. In Guangxi, a China-Vietnam cooperation initiative on AI-enabled cross-border tourism includes the digital human "Detian A Mei" alongside smart customs clearance and payment systems as part of a broader smart tourism training program conducted in Nanning, Liuzhou, Guilin, and Hechi.

Livestreaming and E-Commerce: JD.com (京东) launched its "free-form digital human" product JoyStreamer, built on its JoyAI large model, which achieves human-level motion and intelligent camera tracking for livestreaming applications. In Sichuan, a platform economy summit held in Chengdu's Pidu District by provincial, municipal, and district market supervision authorities saw platform companies announce digital human livestreaming capabilities for individual business operators, aimed at enabling small merchants to access AI-driven live commerce. Silicon Intelligence (硅基智能), based in Nanjing, continues to operate its digital human livestreaming system with all related services driven by token-based computation, as described by its founder Sima Huapeng in a separate interview in which he characterized AI as a new generation of "digital labor force" and identified Hong Kong as fertile ground for cultivating AI engineering talent.

Open-Source Technology: SentiPulse (思维光谱) partnered with a doctoral team at the Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence at Renmin University of China to release SentiAvatar, described as China's first open-source interactive 3D digital human framework, along with companion 3D digital human character assets. The framework is designed to address foundational pain points in the industry by giving 3D digital humans more natural, expressive motion. Separately, Soul AI open-sourced SoulX-LiveAct, a digital human generation system claiming hour-level stability with high lip-sync and body fidelity scores, applicable to digital human livestreaming, AI education, and metaverse scenarios, alongside companion releases SoulX-FlashTalk and SoulX-FlashHead.

AI-Generated Content and Short Drama: The short drama industry in China is increasingly relying on AI-generated digital humans rather than human actors. Actors who previously appeared in over a hundred short dramas report losing work since early 2026, with one publicly opposing the practice of selling one's likeness for digital replication on grounds that an AI virtual human can be infinitely copied and permanently deployed, effectively constituting a permanent transfer of one's digital portrait rights. E-commerce platforms across China now host numerous shops offering AI video generation and digital human customization services, reflecting the low technical barrier to entry that regulators have identified as a key enforcement challenge.

Education: Universities in Hunan are adopting "counselor digital humans," AI-powered virtual counselors available around the clock to answer student questions about academic planning, mental health, and employment, freeing human counselors to focus on more complex interpersonal support. Guangzhou University's Cantonese Zhisheng team has built a large-scale multimodal Cantonese-language corpus platform using AI voice technology, with applications including digital humans and cross-language simultaneous interpretation, developed in partnership with Tencent and Baidu.

Healthcare and Funerary Services: Health AI applications in China have begun deploying "AI avatars" of real physicians as intelligent agents that function as always-available health consultants, a development framed as requiring mandatory human-AI collaborative review to ensure safety. In Gansu, the Lanzhou Fushouyuan cemetery has introduced an AI digital human funerary service, demonstrated publicly on March 31, 2026, representing an emerging application of digital human technology in memorial and bereavement contexts.

Brand and Regional Marketing: China National Salt Xinjiang (中盐新疆) launched an AI digital spokesperson for its Tianshan lake salt product line, depicted as a young woman in ethnic attire set against Tianshan mountain scenery, integrating regional geographic identity and ethnic cultural motifs into a branded virtual character. The company opened a public naming campaign for the character across its digital channels.

April 09 News

Workplace and Labor: A game and media company in Shandong province trained an AI digital human replica of a departed HR specialist, using the former employee's chat records, work documents, and decision-making habits to create a digital clone that continued answering colleagues' questions, producing PPTs, and generating spreadsheets via DingTalk. The case sparked national debate across outlets including Pengpai News, Ziniu News, Sichuan Online, and Guangzhou Daily, raising questions about consent, data rights, and the legal boundaries of digital labor clones. Separately, Huxi News reported on an emerging trend of AI friendship products in which users train AI avatars of themselves to socialize with other users' AI avatars online, with humans intervening only at key moments.

Regulation and Governance: The Cyberspace Administration of China published its draft Measures for the Administration of Digital Virtual Human Information Services for public comment on April 3, 2026, establishing requirements for full-process management of digital virtual humans. The draft mandates that all digital humans carry a visible "digital human" label throughout their use and comply with national standards for AI-generated synthetic content identification. Provisions address the use of digital likenesses of deceased persons, requiring respect for the wishes of the deceased and protection of next-of-kin rights, and explicitly prohibit the provision of virtual romance or virtual companionship services to minors. Multiple expert commentaries characterized the draft as offering a feasible and forward-looking governance framework with global relevance. Separately, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and nine other departments jointly issued the Measures for AI Science and Technology Ethics Review and Services, strengthening ethical oversight of AI applications including digital humans. The Inner Mongolia autonomous region government issued its AI+ Action Implementation Plan for 2026 to 2028 on April 8, 2026, targeting digital humans among the application domains for cross-sector AI integration. Zhengquan Shibao reported on proposed copyright frameworks for AI short dramas, recommending the creation of celebrity image banks, ordinary-person image banks, and digital asset libraries for managing digital human likenesses used in content production.

Short-Form Video and Entertainment: Jiangxi Soy Sauce Culture Media (江西酱油文化传媒有限公司) operates a production base where AI screenwriting, digital human voiceover, and automated image generation are integrated into an industrialized pipeline capable of producing over 1,000 AI-generated micro-dramas per year. The topic of "AI face-stealing in short dramas" trended nationally after actor Wang Jinsong publicly alleged that his likeness was used without authorization in the short drama Taohua Zan, prompting broader discussion of digital human platform liability and personality rights litigation. QQ News reported that under the proposed regulations, digital virtual humans must be labeled throughout short drama content, and platforms failing to display such labels would be in violation. Huibboxing (慧播星) digital humans were credited in at least two nationally distributed news videos, one covering a medical story from Chongqing and another reporting on cross-strait diplomatic developments, indicating the company's digital human technology is being used as a production tool for news video narration and presentation across multiple outlets.

Virtual Idols and Digital Characters: Luo Tianyi, recognized as China's first digital virtual character and the first Chinese virtual figure to use voice synthesis technology for a Chinese voice bank, has appeared alongside human singers on major satellite TV broadcasts, Spring Festival Galas, and even the Winter Olympics. Chaoxinwen profiled the emergence of a new generation of AI-powered virtual idols positioned as upgrades over earlier vocaloid-style characters. The hyper-realistic virtual idol Miya, created under the miya163 project, was presented as a showcase of advanced digital human production technology applied to metaverse entertainment.

Open-Source Technology and Research: Soul App's AI research team, Soul AI Lab, released the open-source model SoulX-LiveAct, which achieves a technical breakthrough in real-time interactive digital humans by overcoming the hour-scale generation bottleneck through a Neighbor Forcing co-diffusion step alignment mechanism. SentiPulse, in collaboration with Renmin University's Hillhouse research group, open-sourced the SentiAvatar framework for interactive 3D digital humans, alongside the 3D digital human character model SUSU and the high-quality motion dataset SuSuInterActs, aiming to redefine the paradigm for 3D digital human motion generation.

Government Services: China Unicom Heilongjiang deployed a smart guidance AI digital human system at the Yichun municipal government services hall, powered by DeepSeek and China Unicom's Yuanjing large language model, providing both online intelligent customer service and an in-person AI digital human assistant. Jize County in Hebei province launched a digital human intelligent guidance system to optimize the experience at its government services center. Hebei Radio and Television Wireless Media (河北广电无线传媒股份有限公司) disclosed that it is developing an AI-based digital human interactive system. Dahua Intelligent Technology (福州达华智能科技股份有限公司) has partnered with Xingke Nuo Mobile on AI digital human initiatives.

Industry and Enterprise: Xuzhou's Quanshan district in Jiangsu is positioned as a digital culture industry hub where local digital human technology requires only 20 to 30 minutes of real-person data capture to generate a high-fidelity digital clone, with single-video production costs significantly reduced. Yan Hanping, a Jiangsu provincial leader, inspected digital human applications at Yancheng's Yanfu Bao newspaper, including the Yanfu Bao digital human and the Ziwei Hua corpus for AI-powered industry tools. Sichuan Business Vocational College signed a cooperation agreement with Chengdu Mingtu Technology (成都明途科技) to co-build an AI assistant platform and a Sichuan Provincial intelligent digital human system based on Mingtu's WorkBrain platform. Daming County in Hebei is expanding its logistics and e-commerce ecosystem by incorporating AI digital humans alongside local and externally hired personnel. A young entrepreneur working from a co-working space in Wuhan's Dongxihu district developed an AI digital human tool alongside blockchain projects and secured $100,000 in international investment. The Shenzhen municipal government highlighted Shenzhen Zhouming Digital Culture Technology (深圳市洲明数字文化科技有限公司), whose Shanyin large model integrates traditional Chinese culture to provide users with round-the-clock cultural companionship and inspiration, and Shenzhen Shuyuan Wansuan Information Technology (深圳市术源万算信息技术有限公司), listed among firms deepening AI applications across finance, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and cultural verticals. Jili province's women's federation organized an e-commerce training program in Changchun covering digital human livestreaming and data-driven product selection.

Hospitality: Shangmei Hotel Group deployed a virtual digital human named Shang Xiaomei (尚小美), integrated with the DeepSeek large model, as part of an AI-driven approach to hotel guest services, as reported in the context of broader industry moves toward AI-powered hospitality.

Cultural Heritage and Education: Hubei University's School of Journalism and Communication unveiled the Jingchu Red Press and Journalists exhibition hall, where a digital human narrator guides visitors through historical materials tracing the development of the Chinese Communist Party's news enterprise. Plans for the exhibition include further digitization using QR codes and digital human narration to bring the stories of historical press figures to life.

April 08 News

Regulation: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家互联网信息办公室) released the draft "Administrative Measures for Digital Virtual Human Information Services" (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法（征求意见稿）) for public comment, with a feedback deadline of May 6, 2026. The measures aim to regulate the full lifecycle of digital virtual humans, defined as non-physical entities generated through graphics, digital image processing, or artificial intelligence that simulate human appearance and possess voice, behavioral, interactive, or personality characteristics. Key provisions include mandatory display of a "digital human" label throughout any interaction, image authorization requirements, protections for minors, and ethical guardrails around "resurrecting" deceased persons as digital humans, requiring respect for the decedent's wishes and protection of next-of-kin rights. The Hangzhou Internet Court has established judicial precedent by ruling that original digital human likenesses constitute fine art works protected under copyright law, affirming both personality rights and intellectual property protections. iiMedia Research (艾媒咨询) projects that the core digital human market will exceed 40 billion yuan, with associated industries surpassing 600 billion yuan.

Workplace and Labor: A game and media company in Shandong province trained an AI digital human based on a departed employee's likeness and voice to handle customer inquiries and produce presentations, claiming the former employee consented to the training. The case, reported by Dahe Daily (大河报) and widely circulated across Chinese media, triggered debate over personal information protection, privacy rights, and AI ethics. Legal commentators cited potential violations of China's Personal Information Protection Law and relevant Criminal Law provisions, with one attorney from Henan-based Zejin Law Firm (泽槿律师事务所) noting that unauthorized training of an "AI clone" using a person's likeness could carry penalties of up to seven years' imprisonment. The CAC's concurrent release of the draft digital virtual human regulations was widely referenced in coverage as a timely governance response.

E-commerce and Livestreaming: Eastern Shopping (东方购物), a home shopping platform under Shanghai Media Group (上海广播电视台), launched an AI-powered digital human named Lingling (灵灵) to deliver a new interactive shopping experience, marking SMG's push to integrate intelligent agents into consumer-facing media services. Separately, in Hebei province, Daming county is expanding its e-commerce logistics ecosystem by building a diversified livestreaming operation that includes AI digital human hosts alongside human presenters. In Zhejiang province, manufacturers in Jiaxing are deploying digital human livestream rooms and online VR showrooms as part of broader smart marketing initiatives tied to the region's industrial digitization drive.

Government Services: Jize county (鸡泽县) in Handan, Hebei province, deployed a digital human named Xiaoze (小泽) at its government services hall, appearing on a smart screen to guide citizens through personal and enterprise service processes. The Xining Housing Provident Fund Center in Qinghai province launched a digital human intelligent customer service agent named Jiajia (家家) to provide immersive consultation for housing fund inquiries, as part of the city's effort to modernize its first open-format provident fund service outlet.

Funerary and Memorial Services: Lanzhou Fushouyuan Cemetery (兰州福寿园公墓) in Gansu province has begun offering customized AI digital humans generated from photographs of the deceased, producing short biographical films screened during farewell ceremonies to narrate the life story of the departed. Cemetery general manager Dai Qiong and corporate planning director Gao Xiaoxia described the service as a response to families who were unable to say a final goodbye. Separately, Jimu Yida (积木易搭) developed a metaverse-based memorial platform for the China Martyrs Network (中华英烈网) titled "Remembrance 2026 Qingming Tribute," enabling users to select digital human avatars to participate in immersive online memorial activities honoring revolutionary martyrs.

Healthcare: Yidu Tech (医渡科技) deployed an AI physician clone through its Yidu Qianxun (医渡千循) platform, creating a digital counterpart of a prominent cervical pre-cancer specialist. The AI doctor clone supports frontline healthcare workers and health management teams in performing precise patient stratification and intelligent follow-up across the full disease management cycle, aimed at improving quality and efficiency of care delivery at the grassroots level.

Tourism: Inner Mongolia's Hulunbuir region is integrating digital human technology into its cultural tourism branding strategy as part of a broader "Fusion Road" initiative. Between 2023 and 2025, Hulunbuir's tourist reception volume grew from 29.22 million to 36.82 million visitors, with tourism revenue climbing from 49.4 billion to 64 billion yuan, and digital human applications are being incorporated alongside other innovations to sustain that trajectory.

Education: Qinghai Normal University Affiliated No. 3 Experimental Middle School (青海师范大学附属第三实验中学) is exploring AI digital human applications in classroom instruction, with teachers independently producing safety education micro-courses and building a human-machine collaborative teaching model as part of the school's smart campus development.

Metaverse and Esports: In Guangxi, industry observers are positioning digital humans, large-space technologies, and real-time cloud rendering as foundational elements for building immersive esports experiences within the broader AI-plus-metaverse framework, as part of discussions around Guangxi's strategy for breaking into the sector.

Intellectual Property: A case handled by Jiangsu-based Sutao Law Firm (苏韬律师事务所) illustrates emerging IP disputes around digital humans. A company contracted with a live model to create an exclusive digital human based on her likeness, specifying permitted platforms, channels, and product categories. The case highlights the growing complexity of digital human image authorization as the technology scales commercially.

Enterprise Technology: Tencent Cloud (腾讯云) is accelerating the deployment of its digital human technology across multiple industries, with its CSIG division marketing avatar-based services internationally. Japan's Vector Group adopted Tencent Cloud's technology to launch an avatar-driven video advertisement production service called Abamo (阿巴莫). Separately, Dingjiee DigiSmart (鼎捷数智) is offering digital clone capabilities as part of its AI-native enterprise software platform, providing "spatial services" including command-center intelligent agents and digital twins of personnel. "Yue Xiang Holdings" (悦享控股) is conducting global beta testing of its overseas product Klon AI, which enables users to generate consistent digital avatar models for ongoing social media content creation and short video production. In the Yangtze River Delta, Wuxi High-tech Zone signed a cooperation memorandum with Volcengine (火山引擎), ByteDance's enterprise technology arm, to recruit projects focused on digital human production and AI-plus-content initiatives.

Tencent Cloud’s digital human initiative is driven by its Cloud & Smart Industries Group (CSIG), which repackages Tencent’s internal AI, media, and interaction technologies into enterprise-facing cloud services. Rather than offering standalone avatars, Tencent provides modular “AI Digital Human” systems that combine speech synthesis, language models, and real-time rendering to create interactive virtual humans for applications such as customer service, marketing, education, and live streaming. These digital humans function as the front-end interface for backend AI systems, aligning with an “agent + avatar” architecture in which avatars handle user interaction while AI systems perform underlying tasks. Internationally, CSIG is expanding deployment through localized partnerships and industry-specific solutions, embedding its digital human technology into regional markets rather than distributing a single standardized global product. 

Tencent's Cloud & Smart Industries Group (CSIG) is led by Dowson Tong, who serves as Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent and CEO of CSIG, overseeing the company's cloud computing, AI, and enterprise strategy. Within CSIG, Wu Zurong (Lori Wu), previously responsible for incubating Tencent Meeting from its inception, took on leadership of the Yuanbao AI assistant application following its transfer from the Technology Engineering Group to CSIG in early 2025, reflecting a product-execution layer focused on specific consumer-facing AI applications rather than a broad AI portfolio mandate. At the corporate level, James Mitchell serves as Chief Strategy Officer and Senior Executive Vice President, responsible for strategic planning, mergers and acquisitions, investment activities, and investor relations across Tencent as a whole rather than within CSIG specifically. Pony Ma, as Chairman and CEO, and Martin Lau (Liu Chiping), as President, set overall corporate direction, investment priorities, and international expansion strategy. 

Dingjiee DigiSmart (鼎捷数智), listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange under stock code 300378, is a Taiwan-founded enterprise software company established in 1982 that rebranded from Dingjiee Software (鼎捷软件) in September 2024 to reflect its pivot toward AI-driven digital intelligence. Led by Chairman and CEO Ye Zizhen (叶子祯) and Executive Vice President Liu Bo (刘波), the company operates across mainland China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia with over 5,300 employees and more than 50,000 accumulated clients in sectors such as equipment manufacturing, automotive parts, and electronics. In the digital human context, Dingjiee DigiSmart has built its Athena (雅典娜) industrial internet platform as a foundation for integrating AIGC and large language model capabilities, launching products such as ChatFile and a personal AI assistant called "Nana Help Me" (娜娜帮我) developed in partnership with Microsoft OpenAI in Taiwan. The company's IndepthAI multi-agent platform, which integrated DeepSeek in early 2025, supports digital human interaction scenarios for enterprise use, and Liu Bo has publicly articulated a vision of carbon-based humans coexisting and collaborating with silicon-based digital humans in work and life, positioning the company's AI agents not as replacements but as "digital extensions" of human workers across manufacturing, sales, and customer service applications. 

Klon AI is a global-facing AI portrait and digital identity creation tool developed by "Cheers Holdings" (悦享控股, NASDAQ: CHR), which reported RMB 1.07 billion in full-year 2025 revenue and 550 million registered users across its platforms. The product features a professional-grade AI Portrait Generation Engine that combines generative AI, intelligent visual processing, and traditional photography techniques into an AI-native application, allowing users to produce high-quality personal portraits and social content in minutes. It sits within a broader product ecosystem that includes HomeGlow AI and Huanju AI (焕居AI) for smart home design, CheerChat (悦灵犀AI) for multimodal AI content creation, and CheerCar for connected vehicle entertainment, all underpinned by the company's Beichenxingyue (北辰星悦) large model infrastructure that Cheers Holdings plans to deepen across all business lines in 2026. 

Media and Content: Huiboxing (慧播星) digital human technology is being used to produce video segments for news outlets, with recent deployments noted in coverage by Anhui-based and other regional media organizations for general news presentation. Beijing Daily (北京日报) featured an AI digital human named Xiaolu delivering a comedy-style monologue segment on trending topics, illustrating the use of digital humans in editorial entertainment content.

April 07 News

Regulation: The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) drafted the Measures for the Administration of Digital Virtual Human Information Services (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法), which was published for public comment on April 3, 2026, with a feedback deadline of May 6. The draft requires that all digital virtual human services display a prominent "digital human" label throughout the entire service process, in compliance with national regulations on marking AI-generated and synthetic content. The measures prohibit inducing minors to become addicted to digital virtual human services, and require that any use of a natural person's sensitive personal information for modelling, image generation, or scene construction must comply with applicable law. Portrait rights are a central concern: the Civil Code already prohibits the unauthorized creation, use, or public disclosure of another person's likeness, and any AI-generated image capable of identifying a specific natural person constitutes infringement under that standard; the draft extends this framework specifically to virtual human services. Platforms are required to upgrade content review mechanisms, and portrait licensing compliance for AI short dramas is identified as a specific operational requirement. Tencent's (腾讯) cloud digital human is referenced in media coverage as an illustrative example of the services this regulatory framework is designed to govern.

Enterprise & Workplace: A gaming media company in Shandong drew widespread attention in early April 2026 after it was reported that the company had trained an AI digital human modelled on a departed employee to continue performing work functions. An internal source identified as Xiaoyu confirmed that the former colleague had in fact left the company and that a digital double had been created with the individual's consent, though the system remained in an internal testing phase and had not yet been deployed externally. The case generated significant public and legal commentary, with Fu Jian, director of Henan Zejin Law Firm (河南泽槿律师事务所), warning that an employee's chat records, work emails, and personal work materials constitute personal information, and that reissuing a departed employee's image or voice in digital human form without explicit authorization constitutes an infringement of personal rights. Parallel commentary framed the phenomenon under the concept of digital avatars (数字分身), noting that the "人.skill" series of applications — developed on large language model foundations — allow specific individuals' memories, personality traits, and linguistic habits to be converted into interactive digital doubles capable of sustained virtual interaction, raising unresolved questions about accountability when such systems communicate, make decisions, or deflect responsibility on behalf of a real person.

Government & Public Services: In Hebei Province, Jize County (鸡泽县) within Handan City launched a digital human intelligent guidance system at its government service hall, deploying a virtual digital human named Xiaoze (小泽) on a large interactive screen to greet citizens and direct them through personal or enterprise service procedures. In Heilongjiang Province, the city of Yichun deployed an AI digital human as part of China Unicom Heilongjiang's (黑龙江联通) Smart Guidance System, allowing citizens to access government services by following the digital human's directions after scanning an official public account. In Gansu Province, Lanzhou incorporated AI digital human livestreaming into its Spring Wind Employment Action, using the format as a new-mode recruitment channel alongside conventional online platforms such as Ruyi Employment Network and short-video platforms. In Fujian Province, the Women's Federation deployed digital human lecturers to conduct 63,000 advocacy sessions across the province as part of ideological and political outreach work.

Cultural: Beijing Capital Library (首都图书馆) deployed an AI digital librarian named Tuyueyue (图悦阅), capable of providing precision book recommendations and information queries. Beijing City Library's metaverse hall features an AI digital human modelled on the writer Lu Xun (鲁迅), enabling real-time dialogue with readers. Zhongyuan Book Building (中原图书大厦) introduced an AI study room as part of its Echo Hall offering. In Fujian, visitors to a Lin Huiyin (林徽因) themed exhibition hall were able to interact with an AI digital human experience integrated into the venue. In Inner Mongolia, Hulunbuir (呼伦贝尔) incorporated digital human technology into its Fusion Road cultural tourism brand as part of a cross-provincial tourism cooperation initiative.

Tourism: In Anhui Province, a tourism experience framed as "touring Huangshan with an AI digital human" was active during the Qingming holiday period, positioning the digital human as an interactive travel companion integrated into the park environment. In Hubei Province, a Wuhan cultural tourism digital human commissioner (武汉文旅数字人推荐官) was deployed within the Hubei Humanoid Robot Innovation Center's 7S store in the Optics Valley district of Wuhan's East Lake High-Tech Development Zone — a facility that soft-opened on November 11, 2025 and formally launched in February 2026, and which Hubei Daily subsequently characterised as Central China's first embodied intelligence showroom — where it functioned as an AI-driven virtual guide, interacting with visitors on-screen to generate personalised Wuhan travel itineraries on demand, alongside a broader exhibition of robotic exhibits spanning more than ten application scenarios. 

Entertainment & Short Drama: The short drama sector in China has shifted substantially toward AI-produced content, with AI short dramas now dominant across the segment. Jiangxi Soy Sauce Culture Media Co., Ltd. (江西酱油文化传媒有限公司), operating in the Ganjiang New Area (赣江新区), uses a fully integrated AI workflow — covering scriptwriting, digital human voiceover, and image generation — to produce more than 1,000 AI animated short dramas annually. The unauthorized use of celebrity likenesses by AI-generated actors became a concurrent controversy, with actor Yi Yang Qianxi (易烊千玺) identified as a subject of allegedly infringing content concentrated on the Honguo Short Drama (红果短剧) platform. Broader reporting noted that AI actors in short dramas can be produced using only a small set of photographic source materials without engaging real performers, costumes, or props, and that the practice of using ordinary citizens' faces without authorization has emerged as a related concern. Legal commentary on real-person-driven digital humans noted that where such a digital human is driven by and identified with a specific natural person, questions of identity equivalence and portrait-right compliance apply.

Technology: JD.com (京东) unveiled what it termed a free-form digital human (自由态数字人), described as the company's latest technical breakthrough in digital human development, characterized by the ability to move and operate without physical constraints in a virtual environment. JD.com simultaneously open-sourced the Instruct version of its foundational large model JoyAI-LLM Flash as part of the same technology release. Huibo Xing (慧播星) digital humans were used in news video production, appearing credited in video content published by NetEase (网易) across multiple regional news items. In the AI short drama production context, real-person-driven digital human technology was identified as a distinct technical category in which the digital human's motion and expression are controlled by an actual operator, creating specific regulatory and identity-rights implications distinct from those of fully synthetic AI actors.

April 06 News

Regulatory Context: On April 3, 2026, China's Cyberspace Administration (国家互联网信息办公室) released for public comment a draft document titled the Measures for the Administration of Digital Virtual Human Information Services (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法（征求意见稿）), structured across five chapters and twenty-seven articles covering general provisions, rights protection, service norms, supervisory inspection, legal liability, and supplementary provisions. The draft defines digital virtual humans as virtual digital images existing in a non-physical world that simulate human appearance and possess voice, behavior, interactive capacity, or personality characteristics, created through computer graphics, digital image processing, or artificial intelligence, and driven by real persons or computation. All digital virtual human content must carry a prominent "数字人" (digital human) label in compliance with national AI-generated content identification standards, and any organization or individual using sensitive personal information for modeling, image generation, or scene construction must obtain explicit separate consent from the relevant natural person. The draft explicitly prohibits providers from offering virtual intimate relationship services to minors, including virtual relatives and virtual companions, and bans content designed to induce excessive consumption or guide users through religious means. Yu Xun (虞浔), a professor at East China University of Political Science and Law, described the regulation as aligned with the trajectory of artificial intelligence development and a necessary framework for the industry.

Yu Xun (虞浔) is a professor at East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai, where he also serves as Director of the Social Cooperation Office, Deputy Director of the Shanghai Institute for Comprehensive Social Security Administration, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Zongzhi Yanjiu, and Research Fellow at the Shanghai Research Center for Xi Jinping Thought. His academic disciplines are Legal Theory and Digital Law, and his teaching and public commentary span AI governance, digital rule of law, procuratorial studies, consumer protection, and foreign-related legal services. He has twice been seconded to the Chuzhou People's Procuratorate and has participated in cooperation activities with the Beijing and Shenzhen procuratorates. 

Cultural and Memorial: In Tianjin, a cultural initiative titled "Color China" deployed an AI digital human to recreate the likeness of late Peking yun drum master Luo Yusheng (骆玉笙), enabling a simulated three-generational co-performance alongside living inheritors of the art form. A separate Tianjin ceremony marking the 150th anniversary of educator Zhang Bolin's birth incorporated an AI digital human to re-enact Zhang Bolin's historical speeches, presented alongside AI short dramas, poetry, Peking opera, and spoken drama. In Shanghai, a Qingming-period education event organized by Putuo District used an AI digital human to reconstruct scenes from the Long March in combination with live student recitations. The Qingming period more broadly saw growing public engagement with AI digital humans as a form of memorial practice: actor Bao Xiaobo (包小柏) attracted nationwide attention for creating a digital life reconstruction of his deceased daughter, while a Bilibili content creator known as Wu Wuliu (吴伍六) used AI tools to generate a virtual digital human of his late grandmother, drawing widespread emotional response and commentary on the social role of synthetic beings in grief and remembrance.

Tourism: In Hubei, a flagship embodied intelligence showroom described as the first of its kind in central China featured a Wuhan cultural tourism digital human recommendation officer capable of producing customized travel itineraries, deployed as part of a broader experiential demonstration space that also included robotic music performance, companion robots, and robotic animal demonstrations. In Inner Mongolia, the Hulunbuir city government and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Department of Culture and Tourism (内蒙古自治区文化和旅游厅) jointly incorporated digital human technology into the promotion of a regional cultural tourism brand built around the theme of a heritage fusion route, with the digital human serving as a vehicle for brand communication. In Anhui, tourists at Huangshan were able to follow an AI digital human guide through the scenic area during the spring holiday and Qingming travel season, with the application framed as a technology-augmented visitor experience.

Ji Xiaoqing (冀晓青) is the current Director (厅长) of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Department of Culture and Tourism (内蒙古自治区文化和旅游厅), appointed by the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region People's Congress Standing Committee on July 24, 2025. Her earlier career included serving as Vice Chairwoman and party group member of the Inner Mongolia Women's Federation, Vice Mayor and party group member of the Wuhai city government, and Standing Committee member and head of the Propaganda Department of the Wuhai city party committee. From May 2020 she served as party secretary of the Inner Mongolia Federation of Literary and Art Circles, and from January 2021 as its elected chairwoman, a position she held until her appointment to the department. 

Library and Public Information: The Beijing City Library's metaverse hall features an AI digital human modeled on the writer Lu Xun (鲁迅), capable of interactive exchange with library visitors in a technology-oriented exhibition environment. The Capital Library (首都图书馆) separately deployed an AI digital librarian named Tu Yueyue (图悦阅), designed to provide personalized book recommendations with precision. Both deployments were cited alongside the broader integration of artificial intelligence into library services in China, including the use of AI systems to answer research queries and manage reference services across a range of institutional contexts.

Public Services: An AI intelligent customer service digital human developed under a multimodal transportation large model program has been deployed as a pilot at airports in Xiamen, Fuzhou, and Shanghai, providing front-facing service interaction to address operational efficiency gaps in smart transport management. In Jiangsu, the Kunshan Civil Affairs Bureau (昆山市民政局) introduced a digital human at cemetery service locations during the Qingming period to provide visitors with intelligent navigation assistance and policy explanation, presented as a measure to make grave-tending more orderly and accessible. In Zhejiang, the Hangzhou market regulation authority introduced a digital human named Hang Xiaoxiao (杭小消) for consumer rights services, enabling real-time online responses to complaints and inquiries and replacing a model based on scheduled in-person appointments.

Enterprise and Finance: Shanghai Beiling (上海贝岭), a semiconductor manufacturer listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, incorporated digital human broadcasting as a presentation format in its 2024 annual performance briefing, using the technology to convey operational and financial results to investors. Shandong Digital Culture Group (山东数字文化集团) unveiled a third-generation digital human AI advisor at the 2026 Qilu Spring Auto Show held at the Shandong International Convention and Exhibition Center, positioning the system as an upgraded interactive intelligence capability for automotive retail and exhibition contexts. In Guangdong, reporting on the province's large model ecosystem noted that several of the 132 certified models are applied to digital human interaction and multilingual overseas marketing scenarios, reflecting the integration of digital human technology into enterprise services and cross-border commerce.

Broadcasting and Media: Huibo Star (慧播星), a digital human production platform, provided the synthetic presenter credited in the production of a video documentary about the Chinese Navy's amphibious assault ship Sichuan, with the digital human anchor explicitly noted in the publication credits of the article. Shanghai Beiling's use of digital human broadcasting in investor communications, noted above, further illustrates the deployment of AI presenters in formal corporate communication contexts, extending the application of synthetic anchors beyond entertainment media into regulated financial disclosure.

Livestreaming and Labor: A prominent trend in 2026 coverage is the displacement of human livestream hosts by AI digital humans, with one actor-turned-livestreamer reporting that deployment costs for digital humans have fallen to less than one-tenth of previous levels, substantially reducing the commercial advantage of human performers in the sector. Industry coverage noted that AI digital humans in 2026 are adapted for full-scenario livestreaming and office environments, with efficiency gains sufficient to substitute for human labor across a widening range of use cases. Jiufang Zhitou (九方智投), a financial data and AI services provider, lists a product called Jiufang Digital Human (九方数字人) as part of its AI capability suite, alongside intelligent image recognition and sentiment analysis tools, targeting financial media and investor communication applications.

Digital Identity: A GitHub project titled Colleague.Skill (同事.Skill) attracted significant attention in Chinese technology media for its demonstration that an AI digital double of a departed colleague can be constructed by ingesting that individual's workplace chat records and professional documents, reproducing their technical norms, communication register, and interpersonal habits with reported fidelity. Coverage described the project as a form of workplace satire with substantive implications, prompting discussion about posthumous data rights, digital legacy, and the governance of personal AI avatars in professional settings. Separately, commentary in Chinese business media noted the practice among some technology entrepreneurs of deploying AI digital doubles to manage personal and administrative affairs, directing human attention toward core business operations, a pattern that reflects an emerging category of delegated AI persona use among founders in China's technology sector.

April 05 News

Regulation: The Cyberspace Administration of China (国家互联网信息办公室) released the draft Regulations on Digital Virtual Human Information Service Management for public comment on April 3, 2026, with a submission deadline of May 6, 2026. The draft formally defines digital virtual humans as entities existing in non-physical worlds that simulate human appearance, voice, behavior, and interactive capability using graphics, digital image processing, or artificial intelligence technologies, driven either by real humans or computational systems. Under the proposed framework, all digital virtual human services must display a prominent label containing the characters "数字人" (digital human) continuously throughout the duration of each service session, in conformity with national standards for AI-generated and synthesized content identification. The draft explicitly prohibits service providers from inducing minors to develop dependency on digital virtual human services and requires that all digital virtual human content uphold socialist core values, respect social ethics, and serve public interests. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (工业和信息化部) has concurrently advanced standardization efforts across the metaverse and digital human sector, placing ten industry standards covering digital humans, industrial metaverse applications, and virtual exhibition hall technologies under public consultation, with a separate standard for digital human identity identification having been initiated in January 2026. National People's Congress representative Zhong Zheng called separately for stronger regulatory enforcement against the widespread abuse of AI digital humans in commercial livestreaming environments, which she characterized as generating systemic disorder in that sector.

Tourism: On April 3, 2026, the i Huanggang (i黄冈) cultural tourism supply chain platform launched in Hubei province with AI digital human versions of the historical figures Su Dongpo and Li Shizhen as its principal virtual companions. The Su Dongpo digital human is capable of planning travel itineraries, narrating historical content, and recommending local services to visitors, while the Li Shizhen digital human serves a parallel function as a dedicated virtual guide within the platform's tourism ecosystem. In Guizhou, the province's cultural tourism digital human Huang Xiaoxi (黄小西) made a prominent debut at the Guizhou Tourism Development Conference, where she presented a new family of related virtual characters and promoted the "ticket root economy" initiative, positioning AI-driven virtual beings at the center of the province's smart tourism strategy. In Hangzhou, Zhejiang, a large-scale water performance titled Xiang Hu Ya Yun (湘湖·雅韵) incorporated a digital human in the ceremonial role of torch-lighter, combining drone displays and water-screen projection with the virtual character's appearance. Students at Ningxia University reported developing AI digital human tour guide applications as campus projects, reflecting the embedding of this technology in academic training programs for the digital economy workforce.

The i Huanggang (i黄冈) platform is a Hubei province public services application that has adopted AI digital human technology across cultural tourism, government services, and elderly care. Its most prominent digital human deployment is the i Huanggang Cultural Tourism Supply Chain Platform, launched on April 3, 2026, which features a "digital human ensemble" built around AI-rendered versions of historical figures associated with the Huanggang region, most notably Su Dongpo and Li Shizhen. The Su Dongpo digital human serves as a virtual tourism companion capable of planning travel routes, narrating historical content, and recommending local services, while Li Shizhen fulfills an equivalent guide function within the same platform ecosystem. In government and commercial service contexts, the platform deploys digital human agents as customer service representatives and shopping assistants offering intelligent question-and-answer interaction. A separate elderly care module, developed as an extension of the i Huanggang infrastructure and documented as operational from at least late 2024, uses a virtual digital human to provide companionship services and general query responses for senior users. The platform is supported by China Telecom Wing Payment (中国电信翼支付), which provides backend infrastructure and has deployed comparable digital human service configurations in analogous city-level government applications elsewhere in China. 

Cultural Commemoration: AI digital human technology featured prominently in memorial and cultural programming across multiple cities. In Tianjin, a commemorative event marking the 150th anniversary of the birth of educator Zhang Bailing integrated AI digital human performances alongside Peking opera, spoken drama, poetry, and AI-generated short film as part of a multimedia tribute. A documentary video about martyr Su Yilin, produced in connection with a Tianjin repatriation ceremony, credited Huibo Star (慧播星) digital human technology in its production credits. At the national level, ByteDance's (字节跳动) intangible cultural heritage digital human program was selected as a demonstration case by the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, recognizing it as an instance of AI-powered cultural activation. The Cyberspace Administration's reference guide on positive AI content production explicitly endorsed digital human broadcasting as a format for news delivery and endorsed the deployment of digital humans alongside high-precision reconstructions of historical cultural relics and ancient architectural heritage.

Entertainment: An AI-generated ancient-style short drama titled Taohua Zan (桃花簪), comprising 72 episodes distributed through the Hongguo (红果) platform, was taken down following public controversy over the unauthorized use of real individuals' facial likenesses in its production. The incident intensified industry debate about compliance obligations in AI short drama production and amplified calls for regulatory intervention from legislators and commentators. Legal analysis circulating in investment and entertainment media noted that digital humans do not possess civil subject status under current Chinese law and therefore cannot hold performers' rights, leaving the legal ownership of AI-generated performances in an unresolved position. An AI virtual host appeared alongside live Yue opera performers in the 2026 Yue Opera Spring Festival Gala, a television program distributed simultaneously to more than two hundred countries and regions and augmented with three-dimensional holographic technology, marking a mainstream broadcast application of the AI virtual host format.

Workplace Ethics: An open-source project named colleague-skill, identified on GitHub, generated substantial public controversy in China for enabling companies to generate AI digital human replicas of departed employees by ingesting their historical chat records and work documents into a large language model. The resulting digital human is reported to replicate a former employee's communication style, working habits, and responses based on their accumulated prior output. Public discussion on Chinese social platforms prompted extensive debate about whether the creation of a digital likeness of an individual without explicit consent constitutes a violation of personal information protection law, with no authoritative legal resolution yet established. A related stream of commentary identified the structural risk that employees may effectively continue performing labor in digital form after resignation without compensation or awareness, raising questions about the limits of corporate data governance authority.

Marketing: Yunnan Aibing (云南爱冰), a regional digital marketing service provider operating in Yunnan province, offers a package of AI digital human livestreaming, short video scripting, and e-commerce promotion services targeting local commercial clients. As a designated regional agent for the Xiaoice (小冰) digital employee system covering Yunnan, Guizhou, and Chongqing, Yunnan Aibing deploys Xiaoice's digital human technology to operate virtual livestreaming for clients including Kunming Department Store Group (昆明百货大楼集团), Yunnan Zhenghao Home Furnishing (云南正豪家居), and Guizhou Cili Workshop (贵州刺梨工坊). The broader pattern of AI digital human deployment in livestreaming commerce across southwestern provinces reflects a regional scaling of this application, with multiple service providers offering integrated packages covering digital human creation, script generation, and platform traffic acquisition.

Public Services: In Kunshan, Jiangsu, a smart cemetery management system has incorporated AI digital human technology to deliver intelligent navigation and policy interpretation services to visitors, accumulating more than 150,000 service engagements over two years of operation with zero fire incidents and zero safety events recorded. In Hebei, provincial tax authorities have deployed a digital human named Ji Xiaoyue (冀小悦), using an anthropomorphic avatar and intelligent voice interaction to provide around-the-clock tax information services to residents. In Ankang, Shaanxi, an employment service terminal features a digital human to walk job seekers through the registration and position-matching process step by step, reducing the need for human staff at self-service kiosks. In Nanning, Guangxi, city government agencies incorporated digital human demonstrations as part of an immersive AI experience event organized around public-sector innovation, with digital human applications showcased alongside workplace innovation competitions and a public-private engagement framework. Shanghai Beiling (上海贝岭) introduced digital human broadcasting as part of its 2024 annual results presentation, marking an early corporate adoption of the format in financial communications.

Virtual Production: In Chongqing, entrepreneur Lu Qi, recipient of the New Chongqing Contribution Award, established a digital film enterprise focused on virtual production and digital human technology, relocating operations to Yongchuan district in 2018. The team achieved a recognized industry milestone in 2019 by completing development of what was described as the first fully autonomous real-time digital human technology built on an end-to-end domestic technical pipeline in China, subsequently open-sourcing the platform to support the broader development of the domestic digital human industry.

Lu Qi (卢琪), born in Beijing in October 1990, is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Dawa Future (重庆达瓦未来影像科技有限公司). A postgraduate-educated entrepreneur and representative to the Chongqing Municipal People's Congress (6th term), he launched his first company, Dawa Future (Beijing) Imaging Technology Co., Ltd., in 2014, with a focus on virtual production and digital human technology. In 2016 he established an associated incubator, and in 2018 he relocated the enterprise's core operations to Yongchuan District in Chongqing, founding Dawa Future (Chongqing) Imaging Technology Co., Ltd. with a team of three core members. Under his leadership the company developed into the operator of the Yongchuan Science and Technology Film Studio, which became one of China's largest virtual production facilities, and contributed simulation technology to major national projects including the 70th National Day parade and the Beijing Winter Olympics opening ceremony. Lu Qi has received the 26th Chinese Youth May Fourth Medal and the New Chongqing Contribution Award. 

Legal: The accumulation of AI digital human applications across commercial, entertainment, and interpersonal contexts has surfaced a cluster of unresolved legal questions within China's legal and regulatory environment. Adjudicated cases cited in media coverage include an AI companion application found to have infringed personality rights by using a public figure's likeness without consent to construct a virtual character, and a "digital artist" product adjudicated to be too similar in appearance to a named celebrity. The commercial exploitation of deceased individuals' likenesses through digital human services has generated ongoing ethical controversy, and the formation of simulated intimate or dependent relationships between minors and virtual companions has been identified as a social harm requiring specific regulatory attention. These documented issues collectively informed the Cyberspace Administration's decision to draft binding sectoral regulations for digital virtual human information services.

April 04 News

Regulation: China's Cyberspace Administration (国家网信办) issued a draft regulation titled the Digital Virtual Human Information Services Management Measures (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法（征求意见稿）), which requires all digital virtual human content to carry a prominent disclosure label bearing the words "digital human" and to comply with national standards for AI-generated and synthetic content identification. The draft additionally prohibits providers from designing services in ways that induce minors to become addicted to digital virtual human platforms. Separately, the China Broadcasting Association Actor Committee (中国广电联合会演员委员会) issued a formal statement declaring that any AI face-swapping, voice cloning, virtual human replication, or secondary derivative content that can be associated with specific public-figure actors constitutes infringement regardless of whether it is labeled as non-commercial, publicly shared, or personal fan creation, with all such content carrying full legal liability.

On April 3, 2026, China's Cyberspace Administration (国家互联网信息办公室) released for public comment a draft regulation titled "Measures for the Administration of Digital Virtual Human Information Services" (数字虚拟人信息服务管理办法), marking a significant step in the governance of AI-driven virtual human technology. The draft defines digital virtual human service providers as any organization or individual offering such services, and establishes two central prohibitions: using a virtual human to defame or damage another person's personality rights, and creating a virtual human based on a specific natural person's likeness or voice without that person's consent. All parties in the service chain — providers, platform users, and content distributors — are required to maintain proper labeling wherever virtual humans are displayed. The regulation acknowledges that digital virtual humans have expanded far beyond entertainment into finance, healthcare, and cultural tourism, and frames the draft as a governance framework that sets clear safety boundaries while encouraging continued sectoral adoption. 

Cultural Heritage: ByteDance (字节跳动) developed an intangible cultural heritage digital human named Feifei (非非), which was selected as a demonstration case by the UNESCO Creative Cities Network. Feifei is proficient in Mandarin, English, and Sichuan dialect, holds specialized knowledge of intangible cultural heritage subjects, can perform heritage segments and explain traditional craft knowledge, and supports real-time voice interaction with users. In Anhui, a digital human rendition of the historical figure Cao Cao (曹操) was produced as part of the "AI Captures AH" campaign organized by the Anhui Provincial Cyberspace Administration and hosted by Phoenix Network's Anhui channel (凤凰网安徽频道), inviting audiences to explore the province's Three Kingdoms cultural landscape through AI-mediated historical dialogue.

Phoenix Network (凤凰网), the integrated digital media platform operated by Phoenix New Media under the broader Phoenix Television ecosystem, functions in the digital human space primarily as a content distribution and editorial amplifier rather than as a technology developer or vendor. Its flagship internet platform ifeng.com and associated verticals including Phoenix Finance and Phoenix Video have published coverage of major digital human developments in China, including China's first national standard for virtual digital humans issued in December 2025, debates around the commercial viability of digital human livestream e-commerce, and emerging controversies such as the practice of converting former employees into AI digital human surrogates for continued commercial use. Phoenix Network's regional AI studios have also entered content production territory, with the Phoenix Anhui AI Studio producing digital human narrative content such as a historical immersive project following the Three Kingdoms figure Cao Cao, suggesting a selective move from pure coverage into digital human-enabled storytelling. Across these activities, Phoenix Network occupies the position of a media infrastructure player that shapes public discourse around digital humans in Chinese-speaking markets while cautiously experimenting with the technology in its own editorial and regional content operations, without staking a claim as a platform or ecosystem participant in the vendor sense. 

Tourism: The Guangxi Culture and Tourism Department deployed a tour guide digital human named Guilinger (桂灵儿) at the Lijiang River scenic area, providing AI-generated narration and scene interpretation as part of the region's broader effort to integrate digital intelligence into cultural tourism services. In Guizhou, the tourism digital human Huang Xiaoxi (黄小西) debuted at the opening ceremony of the Guizhou Tourism Development Conference, unveiling new character forms within a family identity and promoting the province's ticketing economy, with its AI-interactive capabilities positioned as a centerpiece of smart tourism strategy. Both deployments illustrate the consolidation of province-level digital human branding within official government tourism promotion frameworks.

The Guizhou Tourism Industry Development Conference (贵州旅游产业发展大会) is China's longest-running provincial tourism conference, held annually since 2006 and now in its 20th edition, rotating competitively among Guizhou's prefectural cities and consistently organized by the Guizhou Provincial People's Government. Its digital human engagement is anchored entirely in a single character, Huang Xiao Xi (黄小西), whose name is drawn from the provincial tourism mnemonic "黄小西吃晚饭" encoding Guizhou's key destinations: Huangguoshu, Xiaoqikong, Xijiang Miao Village, dining in Guiyang, an evening in Zunyi, and Fanjingshan. Huang Xiao Xi made her debut at the 19th conference in Anshun in April 2025, presented at the opening ceremony as Guizhou's official provincial cultural tourism digital image spokesperson, depicted as a cartoon girl wearing silver ornaments and Miao ethnic dress, built on Unreal Engine rendering with iFlytek Spark large model powering her intelligent interaction, and deeply integrated with the "One Code Travel Guizhou" (一码游贵州) 3.0 smart tourism platform launched at the same event. At the 20th conference in Guiyang in March 2026, an upgraded Huang Xiao Xi crossed from screen to physical reality in the form of an intelligent embodied robot, participated in a purpose-written AI scenario drama, and was also deployed as a hotel intelligent agent providing room guests with local recommendations, sleep aid, and parent-child companion services; simultaneously, Amap (高德地图) launched a "Follow Huang Xiao Xi to Tour Guizhou" one-click smart gateway in partnership with the character, driving a visit volume increase of more than twenty times across Amap's two million-plus Guizhou data points, with tourists accounting for 72.6% of users served. 

Amap (高德地图), China's leading mapping and navigation platform owned by Alibaba Group, has pursued digital human integration as a core interface strategy since September 2022, when it introduced its first AI virtual navigator, "Teacher Xiao Gao" (小高老师), distinguishing itself from conventional voice-only navigation by giving the guidance function a fully visualized, human-like virtual form. The same month, Amap rolled out a complete 3D navigation experience — pairing its digital human with immersive street-level rendering — across six major cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Chengdu, and Shenzhen. This positioned the digital human not as a cosmetic feature but as the primary user-facing layer of an evolving spatial interface. Amap has continued to deepen this direction, expanding 3D coverage to include 164 cities with detailed toll station environments by December 2025, while also entering adjacent digital human territory through research conducted jointly with Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, resulting in the FantasyTalking system — a portrait-animation technology capable of generating expressive, naturally moving talking faces from a single photograph. The platform has further extended into 3D restaurant display, competing with Meituan in AI-powered dining services, and Alibaba open-sourced a mobile-native 3D digital human application in June 2025 tied to Amap's infrastructure. Together, these developments position Amap as one of China's most consequential deployment environments for functional, service-embedded digital humans at national scale. 

Entertainment: China's short drama production sector is undergoing structural change driven by digital human and AI actor technology, with production costs for AI short dramas estimated at approximately one-tenth those of conventional short dramas. Yushao Media (聿潇传媒) announced in March 2026 the signing of multiple AI performers, including internet celebrity Han Anran (韩安冉), who holds tens of millions of followers, establishing a contractual model of authorized AI digital doubles grounded in real-person consent rather than algorithmically generated likenesses without authorization. Shandong Digital Human Technology Co., Ltd. (山东数字人科技股份有限公司) operates as a publicly reporting entity within this sector, and industry analysts note that digital human technology and video generation technology jointly constitute the underlying infrastructure for AI actors, which present particular challenges in replicating the full range of performance demands in dramatic content.

Healthcare: Guangdong Second People's Hospital (广东省第二人民医院) activated what is described as China's first doctor digital double (医生数字分身) in conjunction with a digital therapy ecosystem, representing a formal institutional deployment of virtual human technology in clinical and therapeutic contexts. In Yunnan, Yunnan Moucheng Digital Technology (云南谋成数字科技) implemented an AI digital human for a medical education institution, enabling the client to conduct brand presentation and customer acquisition through a synthetic virtual presenter integrated into its service workflow.

Government Services: The Guangzhou Housing Provident Fund Center integrated its AI digital human with the DeepSeek large language model, enabling the virtual agent to deliver precise, personalized guidance on housing provident fund business inquiries. In Jiangsu, a digital human service was deployed to support enterprise overseas institutional registration, consolidating previously multi-step processes into a single intelligent form submission interface with AI verification capability. In Xinjiang, a community-facing digital human named Shegoung Xiaoke (社工小克) was deployed with intelligent voice interaction, a legal knowledge graph, and on-demand legal popularization video playback, providing 24-hour legal consultation services to residents. The Tibet Autonomous Region's cyberspace authority similarly promoted AI digital humans as a mechanism for transitioning public legal education from broadcast-style delivery to interactive, service-oriented engagement. Tianjin's municipal tax administration incorporated digital human smart notification into its public tax compliance outreach, deploying virtual human reminders as a channel alongside open-microphone dialogue sessions.

Enterprise: JD.com (京东) announced through its JD Cloud division the launch of what it describes as an industry-first free-state digital human (自由态数字人), built on its proprietary JoyAI large model, with stated technical innovations centered on digital human lip model design. Endpoint Technology (端点（陕西）科技有限公司), headquartered in Xi'an's High-Tech Zone, positions itself as a full-process digital human service provider, handling the complete range of technical and deployment tasks on behalf of clients across all stages of a digital human project. Zhongyi Technology (中熠科技) produces holographic 3D digital humans designed for government services, medical, and cultural tourism interaction contexts, with industry analysts observing that such systems are evolving from single-function interface tools into broader scenario-based service platforms as metaverse applications deepen. In Chongqing, consumer AI television products are being marketed with embedded AI digital human functionality that greets users upon returning home and delivers weather and personalized information, illustrating deployment of virtual beings in domestic smart device contexts. At the 2026 Shanghai International Hotel and Commercial Space Expo (上海国际酒店及商业空间博览会), AI digital human live streaming with voice cloning was presented as a low-cost branded broadcasting solution for hospitality operators. The Nasdaq-listed Meitianpin AI Group (美天拼AI集团, HNDI) presented AI digital human and intelligent marketing case studies at the 2026 China AI Summit held in Chengdu. In Hangzhou, Hangzhou Qingganlan Network Technology Co., Ltd. (杭州青橄榄网络技术有限公司) deployed digital human assistants to streamline internal business process flows and improve operational efficiency.

The 2026 Shanghai International Hotel and Commercial Space Expo (Hotel & Shop Plus), co-organized by the China Tourist Hotel Association and the China General Merchandise Business Association and held March 31 to April 3 at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre, served as a showcase for the accelerating deployment of AI digital humans across China's hospitality sector, with multiple vendors presenting distinct implementations. Luma Intelligent Technology (鹿马智能科技) drew the most sustained coverage with its AI Super Check-in Butler, an anthropomorphic AI digital human interaction system supporting natural voice dialogue, framed as the solution bridging the last mile of hotel AI service at a moment when unmanned hotels are transitioning from concept to scaled deployment. Dindan Cloud PMS (订单来了) demonstrated a digital human live-streaming solution with voice cloning capability designed to give hotel brands a low-cost broadcast presence. Skyworth Commercial (创维商用) integrated AI digital human features into its screen-centric smart hotel infrastructure, combining them with wireless AP functionality. Yunzhiji Technology (云迹科技), backed by Qiming Venture Partners, presented its digital human Yuni within a full smart hotel experience zone encompassing self-check-in and related guest services. Peripheral coverage also noted that Nanjing has already institutionalized AI digital human deployments in hotel settings, and that the broader Chinese hospitality market in 2026 is characterized less by a shortage of AI tools than by the challenge of integrating them into coherent, systemized operational frameworks. 

Memorialization: E-commerce platforms accessible across China, including in Jilin Province, are offering services marketed as "AI revival," "make photos speak," and "AI digital human" for the purpose of recreating deceased relatives, with pricing ranging from 10 yuan to several thousand yuan and product quality reported as highly variable; some vendors have been specifically criticized for exploiting grief-driven demand. In Jinan, Shandong, a national organ donor commemoration event formally incorporated AI digital humans into ceremonial proceedings, conducting digital memorial rites for eight donors at the Shandong Provincial Ji'nan Organ Donor Memorial Plaza, representing a formal institutional adoption of virtual human technology in commemorative public ritual.

Broadcasting and Media: The Jiangsu Women's Federation officially launched Suxin (苏馨), a female digital human broadcaster, as the public-facing digital representative of its official media channel. Tianjin Haihe Media Center (天津海河传媒中心) produced the television program Chuancheng (传承), which used an AI digital human to recreate the stage presence of Luo Yusheng (骆玉笙), a celebrated Peking Drum-Song (京韵大鼓) performer, realizing what the production described as a simultaneous three-generation performance. Inner Mongolia Film Group (内蒙古电影集团) held an AI achievement showcase in Hohhot in April 2026, presenting digital human applications among its results in AI-assisted film production and audiovisual publishing. Huiboxing (慧播星) digital humans were used to produce short-form news video content in both Yunnan and Guizhou contexts, functioning as synthetic virtual presenters in journalistic material distributed across online platforms.

Inner Mongolia Film Group Co., Ltd. (内蒙古电影集团有限责任公司) is a state-owned cultural enterprise under the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region government, primarily engaged in film production, cinema operations through its Xinghe circuit, and cultural media services. Its engagement with digital human technology is peripheral rather than foundational, manifesting chiefly through AI-assisted film production workflows and immersive experiential installations. In April 2026, the group publicly demonstrated AI capabilities spanning the full production pipeline, including AI digital human applications in content creation. Its "XR Future Cinema" installation, deployed at Yijinhuoluo Airport and regional cultural expos, employs high-precision spatial tracking and multi-user interaction to deliver walk-through immersive experiences in which virtual human presences form part of the experience layer. The group has also participated in signed cooperation with CCTV and the Ordos Convergence Media Center in initiatives touching on digital human service applications, and has appeared in provincial cultural industry showcases alongside other Inner Mongolia state-owned media entities where digital human technology was among the broader attractions on display. It is not a digital human developer, platform, or dedicated vendor, but rather a regional film and media group that incorporates digital human and AI production tools as part of a wider modernization of its content and exhibition capabilities. 

Education: In Hangzhou, a community school operating under the name Xi Xuetang (西·学堂) at the Cuiyuan Street Social Education Center introduced AI digital human creation as part of an expanded AI curriculum offered to middle-aged and elderly learners, with planned modules covering photo animation, video production, and digital human generation. Changchun Digital Technology Vocational College (长春数字科技职业学院), in collaboration with Jilin Huashu Chuangke Digital Technology Co., Ltd. (吉林省华数创科数字科技有限公司), launched a digital intelligence talent platform drawing on over 30 enterprise practice projects and incorporating digital human skills as a component of vocational readiness for the digital economy. In Foshan, Guangdong, the Zhonghuang Xingyu Hong Kong-Macao School (中黄星瑜港澳子弟学校) integrated AI digital humans alongside smart ink screens and intelligent paper-pen devices as teaching tools across subject-area classrooms, with visiting Hong Kong educators citing AI digital human integration as among the most notable observations from their school exchange visit.

April 03 News

Cultural Heritage: ByteDance (字节跳动) had its intangible cultural heritage digital human project selected as an exemplary case by the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, alongside its ancient manuscript preservation work. Commentary published in Hong Kong in April 2026 examined digital human technology as a mechanism for converting the implicit, orally transmitted knowledge of traditional practices into replicable and interactive explicit knowledge, framing the technology as central to heritage digitization efforts. The Fujian Women's Federation deployed an AI digital human named "闽姐姐" (Min Jiejie) as a public-facing representative character linked to provincial women's federation communications.

Government and Public Services: Dunhuang city in Gansu Province deployed an AI digital human in its government service hall as part of a smart government initiative, alongside the intelligent guide robot "敦小飞" (Dun Xiaofei), making it the first county-level government service platform in Gansu Province to integrate the DeepSeek AI large model. A separate Gansu initiative introduced AI sign language digital humans across government, education, and cultural institutions as part of a barrier-free information accessibility program serving deaf and hard-of-hearing users. China Telecom Ningxia (中国电信宁夏公司) launched its self-developed AI digital human "宁姐姐" (Ning Jiejie) at the regional commemoration of International Women's Day, with the character designed for multi-scenario deployment across the company's AI intelligent service operations.

Tourism: Guizhou's cultural tourism digital human "黄小西" (Huang Xiao Xi) made its initial appearance as a virtual digital human at the 19th Guizhou Tourism Development Conference and was substantially upgraded for the 20th conference in 2026, transitioning from a screen-based presence to an embodied interactive form offering personalized recommendations across four service domains: hotels, scenic areas, dining, and personal services. Yunnan Tourism (云南旅游股份有限公司), headquartered in Kunming's Panlong District, is classified within virtual digital human and metaverse concept sectors as part of its digital and technology-focused business strategy. At the 2026 national spring job fair held in Yinchuan, students reported applying AI tools to create digital human tour guides as practical school projects, reflecting emerging real-world integration of digital human technology in tourism-adjacent vocational training.

Yunnan Tengyun Information Industry Co., Ltd. (云南腾云信息产业有限公司), commonly known as 腾云公司, was established in December 2017 as a joint venture initiated by the Yunnan provincial government and Tencent, with Yunnan Investment Holdings Group and Yunnan Transportation Investment and Construction Group as co-founding shareholders, and operates as the builder and operator of the provincial "游云南" (Travel Yunnan) platform, China's leading provincial smart tourism digital infrastructure. In November 2023, 腾云公司 signed a strategic partnership with MoFa (Shanghai) Information Technology Co., Ltd. (魔珐科技 / Xmov) to co-build what was announced as China's first AI virtual human cultural tourism demonstration project, with the signing attended by Tengyun Company Executive VP Wang Lei (王磊) and MoFa Partner and Business VP Mao Haifeng (毛海峰). Under the partnership, MoFa's three AIGC product lines — Youyan (有言) for virtual human video production, Youguang (有光) for virtual human live streaming, and Youling (有灵) for virtual human services — are deployed across scenic area guide training, point-of-interest navigation, and rural e-commerce promotion in Yunnan, with a concrete deployment cited at the Xishuangbanna visitor hub, where Youyan was used to produce digital guide videos for tourists. 

Enterprise and Finance: China Construction Bank (建设银行) accelerated development of its retail AI tool "帮得助理" (Bangde Assistant), which equips personal client managers with a digital avatar to integrate AI into customer-facing workflows covering needs analysis and asset allocation, as part of a stated move toward a human-plus-digital-employee collaborative operating model across its 398 large model application scenarios. Binance co-founder He Yi announced in April 2026 that her AI double (AI分身), developed through a dedicated training process, had assumed responsibility for her daily work with greater precision and efficiency than she had previously achieved herself.

E-commerce and Live Streaming: JD.com (京东) unveiled what it described as an industry-first free-state digital human alongside two named digital human systems, JoyAvatar and JoyStreamer, with core technical breakthroughs in lip synchronization modeling and motion generation enabling naturalistic performance across extended and complex multi-modal interactions. The company also released the open-source large model JoyAI-LLM Flash as the underlying infrastructure supporting these digital human capabilities. In the cross-border e-commerce sector, individual operators described using AI digital human tools to produce multilingual product videos from Chinese-language scripts, with one operator generating Russian-language promotional content featuring an AI digital human with synchronized lip movement, reporting a 70 percent reduction in labor costs.

Marketing: Blue Label (蓝色光标) ranked second in a Q1 2026 GEO service provider competitiveness assessment, with its self-developed BlueAI model covering 95 percent of operational scenarios; the company reported that its virtual human marketing segment achieved gross merchandise value exceeding 100 million yuan, producing a structural improvement in its business mix and gross margin. Shenzhou Intelligent (深度智联), based in Shanghai, received the "AI+Industry Outstanding Case Award" at the Global Developer Pioneer Conference (GDPS 2026), with its platform providing digital human video production as one of five core capabilities for real estate marketing personnel alongside content generation, customer profiling, and related functions.

Education: Guangdong Province's lifelong learning platform incorporates digital human interaction as one of its AI-enabled learning features, available alongside intelligent study companions and a credit bank system within a four-domain curriculum framework. Changjiang Vocational College (长江职业学院) in Wuhan, Hubei Province, operates a dedicated digital human live streaming room as part of its digital training infrastructure, which was visited in April 2026 by John McLean, chairman of the British-Chinese Business Development Centre, during a tour of the college's applied technology facilities. Zhonghuang Xingyu Hong Kong-Macao Children's School (中黄星瑜港澳子弟学校) in Foshan integrates AI digital human tools with smart ink screens and AI-assisted instruction in mathematics, an approach that made a notable impression on Hong Kong teachers visiting as part of a mainland teaching practice exchange program.

Memorial: A Hubei native, Wang Zhe, working in Shenzhen's Longgang district, described how a digital human of his deceased mother appeared at his wedding ceremony one year prior, delivering personalized words of blessing to fulfill an unfulfilled promise between them. The broader commercial market for AI memorial digital humans, marketed under labels including "AI resurrection" and "AI digital human," is available across multiple Chinese e-commerce platforms at prices ranging from ten yuan to several thousand yuan, with significant variation in output quality and documented cases of operators exploiting grief-driven purchasing behavior.

Technology and Infrastructure: Guangzhou Zhongyi Technology (广州市中熠科技有限公司), a national high-tech enterprise with thirteen years of experience in commercial display and an independent production base in Guangzhou's Panyu district, delivers full-chain holographic 3D digital human solutions across government, healthcare, and cultural tourism sectors, with annual production capacity exceeding 100,000 holographic projection units and AI digital human systems. A company operating within Beijing's Fengtai Science and Innovation Talent Corridor deploys an array of 80 4K cameras combined with laser infrared technology for rapid holographic digital capture, generating interactive video content in which audiences select viewing angles and project digital humans into arbitrary scenes. Xuanwu Intelligent Computing (玄武智算（内蒙古）信息科技有限公司) leverages computing resources at the Horinger New Area in Inner Mongolia to operate a cloud gaming e-sports platform providing millisecond-level acceleration for cloud gaming and AI digital human workloads. Wangda Software (网达软件) has developed metaverse applications including a metaverse conferencing platform and a digital human face customization system, classified within the virtual digital human and AIGC concept sectors. Hisense Vision (海信视像) developed AIGC capabilities for both semi-realistic and hyper-realistic digital human modeling and interaction as part of its metaverse and smart home technology portfolio.

Alibaba (阿里巴巴) released Wan2.7-Image, a unified image generation and editing model with enhanced virtual avatar face customization functions supporting full-range personalization from skeletal structure and eye shape to fine facial feature detail. PixVerse (爱诗科技) launched PixVerse R1 (realtime.pixverse.ai), described as the world's first real-time world model, incorporating a personal digital avatar feature that enables users to upload a photograph and generate a personalized avatar rendered in Realistic, Anime, or Cyberpunk visual styles.

Entertainment and Media: Tianjin's AI short drama sector incorporated digital humans into a content development project linked to the Nezha legend IP, integrating the digital human character into a coordinated content and marketing strategy alongside the underlying mythological property. Hebei Broadcasting and Television Wireless Media (河北广电无线传媒股份有限公司), based in Shijiazhuang's Qiaoxi district, carries a digital human concept classification alongside its IPTV operations, reflecting the company's positioning within the virtual digital human sector.

April 02 News

Entertainment: China's AI short drama sector is generating significant intellectual property disputes centred on the unauthorised use of celebrity likenesses in digitally generated characters. After AI-produced short drama content appeared to incorporate the facial image of actor Xiao Zhan without permission, related topics trended widely on social media, with reports noting that infringement in this domain could carry criminal sentences of up to ten years. Multiple film and television companies have faced similar accusations, with their AI digital artist characters alleged to resemble named performers, leaving unresolved questions about the legal boundaries governing synthetic actors. Actor Wang Xun spoke publicly on the matter, urging rights holders to move quickly on licensing, framing AI digital human authorisation as an opportunity for his home province's screen industry. At the high-production end of the spectrum, Lingyun Optics (凌云光), through its subsidiary Yuanke Vision (元客视界), deployed Light Field technology and its S4D human body dynamic modelling system to complete sub-millimetre precision digital doubles for "Mengdi" (梦底), a creative segment of the 2026 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, with the system delivering dynamic reconstruction and virtual-real fusion presentation at broadcast. Digital human guest ViviDora made her official debut on March 25 at the Boao Asia Forum, appearing in a session dedicated to the advancement and development of humanoid robots.

Cultural Heritage: ByteDance (字节跳动) has had its intangible cultural heritage digital human application selected as a demonstration case by the UNESCO Creative Cities Network alongside its ancient book preservation initiative. The virtual intelligent agent is fluent in Mandarin, English, and Sichuan dialect, holds specialised intangible heritage knowledge, and is capable of performing heritage segments, explaining craft processes, and engaging users through real-time voice interaction. It has provided guided explanations at the Chengdu International Intangible Heritage Festival and at cultural venues in Beijing. The Hunan Museum released a three-dimensional digital human portrayal of Han Dynasty noblewoman Xinchui (辛追夫人) in two age versions, one at thirty-five years old and one at fifty, with the digital figure subsequently deployed on electronic column displays at Changsha's Wenchang Pavilion subway station. Shanghai selected four works for the 2025 China Positive Energy Network Communication AI Showcase Cases (中国正能量网络传播AI精品案例), including productions that applied digital human technology to traditional culture innovation and international communication themes, demonstrating the medium's use in state-endorsed cultural content.

The China Positive Energy Network Communication AI Showcase Cases (中国正能量网络传播AI精品案例) is an annual state-administered recognition program jointly organized by the Cyberspace Administration of China (中央网络安全和信息化委员会办公室) and People's Daily (人民日报社), designed to identify and promote AI-generated content that exemplifies officially endorsed values in digital media production and dissemination. Works are solicited through a national collection and exhibition campaign, shortlisted candidates undergo a public comment period, and final selections are announced at an annual conference; the 2024 edition results were disclosed in March 2025 following a five-day public review window, while the 2025 edition results — comprising 95 selected works — were announced on March 28, 2026, at the Digital Intelligence Empowers Positive Energy Production and Communication Conference (数智赋能正能量生产传播大会) held in Zhengzhou, Henan Province. Winning entries have spanned short video, music composition, and animated content, with recognized works including AI-generated pieces by the People's Daily New Media Center tied to international events such as the Paris Olympics, an AI short video from the Jiangxi branch of People's Daily pairing Shakespeare with the Ming dynasty playwright Tang Xianzu, and a musical composition produced by the Central Conservatory of Music's AI composition system; participating provinces submit works through coordinated regional campaigns, with Shanghai placing four works in the 2025 selection and Yunnan placing three. 

Healthcare: Ant Group (蚂蚁集团) has opened its AI twin technology through its health platform Afu (蚂蚁阿福) to prominent physicians across China, enabling specialists to extend their clinical expertise through personalised AI doubles. Participating physicians include Chinese Academy of Sciences members Wang Jianan, Chen Zijiang, and Fan Jia, among more than thirty nationally recognised experts. Multiple tier-three hospitals in Fujian province have deployed expert AI digital twins operating continuously around the clock, conducting multi-round diagnostic conversations with patients to assess symptom onset, severity, and accompanying manifestations before generating tiered care plans spanning home management through clinical referral guidance. Shandong Digital Human Technology Co., Ltd. (山东数字人科技股份有限公司) disclosed at its 2025 annual performance meeting that overseas business grew by 65.28% and that revenue from its high-definition anatomical table product line exceeded 30 million yuan.

Tourism: At the Twentieth Guizhou Tourism Industry Development Conference, the upgraded digital human tourism agent "Huang Xiaoxi" (黄小西) was unveiled alongside the Guizhou Tourism Industry large language model and a unified service code system. The character has evolved from a static virtual figure into a physical intelligent agent capable of full-scene deployment, representing a shift from presentational function to active operational participation in Guizhou's smart tourism infrastructure. Tourism industry participants in Xinjiang have highlighted that digital human livestream rooms can reduce operational costs, extend service hours, and substantially improve tourism information delivery and visitor conversion rates, citing the technology as a strategic tool for regional tourism development. Analysts examining the smart tourism sector have separately identified high-fidelity cultural tourism digital human technology as a distinct application category, encompassing virtual tour guides and explainers capable of natural language interaction and emotional expression.

Education: The DEL Studio of the School of Art and Design at Xi'an Eurasia University (西安欧亚学院) has undertaken frame-level lip-sync matching for digital human characters in industrial-grade AI comic drama production, with team leader Yao Xiaotong describing the process as giving digital characters a soul. In Chongqing, the City Management Vocational College's "Mashang Learning" (马上学习) ideological education smart classroom employs a digital human delivered in holographic projection form to interpret core theoretical content, with the system simultaneously broadcasting to partner institutions across the Chengdu-Chongqing urban region. At a national employment promotion event held in Taiyuan under the "100 Cities, 1000 Schools, 10,000 Enterprises" initiative, a digital human was deployed for mock job interviews, with students including a software engineering graduate from Hebei University of Geosciences conducting simulated conversations about Java engineering roles. In Nantong, Jiangsu province, an AI digital human was used during a Two Sessions public education event to present policy learning content to a general audience. The Jiangsu provincial women's rights media platform separately introduced a digital human named "Suxin" (苏馨) to explain the newly issued Jiangsu Women's Rights Protection Regulations in plain, accessible language.

Marketing: Samsonite partnered with JD.com (京东) to deploy a digital human replicating its brand identity on a one-to-one basis, enabling round-the-clock commercial engagement without continuous human staffing. Meitu's (美图) roboneo.com system allows users to film a real dance performance and then transfer that motion with high precision to a cartoon virtual avatar in a single step, requiring no professional equipment or post-production experience, with the resulting output described as smooth and visually coherent. Observers of the AI short drama market have also noted the commercial utility of hyper-realistic AI digital humans as brand endorsers, citing their capacity to eliminate the reputational risks and scheduling constraints associated with human spokespersons at substantially reduced cost.

Memorial and Bereavement: Zhejiang province's Anxian Garden (浙江安贤园) in Hangzhou hosted an AI farewell ceremony on March 31 during which an AI digital human portrait frame was used to recreate the appearance and voice of a deceased person for attending family members. One participant had used the service to preserve the likeness of his wife, who died three years prior. In Guangdong, a digital human rendering of a deceased mother appeared at her son's wedding to deliver personal words of blessing, fulfilling a promise between mother and child that was left incomplete at the time of her death. In Jinan, at the city's body donation memorial square, AI digital humans were used to conduct digital ritual burial services for eight donors during a commemorative gathering. AI bereavement services in China are reported to range in price from tens of yuan to tens of thousands of yuan, reflecting a broad market spanning basic memorial functions to complex personalised reconstructions.

Governance: At the 2026 Digital Economy Cooperation and Innovation Forum held at the United Nations Palais des Nations in Geneva, Beijing Economic and Information Bureau Director Jiang Guangzhi delivered his opening address in digital human form, using the occasion to advocate open cooperation and mutual benefit in global digital governance. In Chongqing, Lu Qi led a research and production team that developed what is described as China's first independently controllable domestic digital human technology, accumulating more than one hundred related patents and intellectual property rights across real-time rendering and motion capture disciplines. Guangdong province has issued an AI innovation development action plan covering the period 2026 to 2028, signalling continued policy support for the digital human industry within the province.

Enterprise: Lingban Intelligent (灵伴智能) applies its proprietary intelligent voice and language core technologies to virtual digital human applications, alongside AIGC long-audio content production and intelligent voice service deployments. Jilin Broadcasting Media (吉视传媒) presented a naked-eye three-dimensional holographic digital human combining holographic display and artificial intelligence at the Fifth Jilin Provincial Digital Economy Development Promotion Conference and Third Jilin Province Artificial Intelligence Conference held in Changchun, incorporating the system into a public electronic screen networked broadcast and control project built on independently controlled technology. Hangzhou has launched an initiative to identify a second batch of recognised "technology specialty products," with virtual digital humans listed among the qualifying categories in the human-computer interaction and emotional companionship segment.

April 01 News

Entertainment and Media: BesTV (百视通) deployed a digital human anchor named Shangwenxuan (尚文萱) in a purpose-built virtual studio for the 2026 Major League Baseball season broadcast, marking the digital host's first appearance in a professional sports broadcast environment alongside human hosts Zhao Lu and Guo Can and celebrity guest Lou Yichen. The virtual studio was described as enabling multi-scenario interactive viewing experiences, with Shangwenxuan serving as a supplementary on-air presence designed to bring a distinct visual energy to live game coverage. China Ruyi (中国儒意, HK:00136) disclosed its use of AI to generate high-precision three-dimensional digital characters for film and television production, employing content-understanding algorithms including CLIP to automatically annotate character behavior within simulated real-world environments, supporting rapid 3D digital human asset generation for its AIGC content pipeline.

The AI virtual stand-up comedian Qiaoqiaozi (脱口秀演员桥桥子) attracted significant online attention through a short-video persona rendered in an AI virtual form with a short-hair design delivering original lifestyle comedy material. The account accumulated nearly 200,000 followers and exceeded 30 million total views, gaining 30,000 followers within a single 24-hour period. The character's creator, known as Xiaojiu, a coffee shop owner and AIGC practitioner, publicly stated that AI cannot yet genuinely understand human humor and expressed interest in obtaining an official Beijing virtual human identity credential for the character. Actor Wang Xun (王迅), vice chair of the Sichuan Provincial Federation of Literary and Art Circles and vice chair of the Sichuan Filmmakers Association, publicly endorsed AI digital human licensing at an event in Chengdu on March 30, declaring immediate willingness to authorize his likeness and expressing hope that AI technology would benefit Sichuan's film and television sector. The short drama industry more broadly has registered anxiety about AI digital human performers, with short drama actor Wang Liyu publicly stating he had considered changing careers in response to the proliferation of AI-generated performers, and Xi'an's short drama sector described as having entered a period of acute structural disruption driven by digital human substitution.

At the 2026 China Science Fiction Convention, a virtual human named Huanhuan (幻幻) replaced a traditional human host to lead the opening ceremony audience into the convention program, framing the virtual host as emblematic of the convergence between science fiction and emerging AI-driven technology.

Tourism and Cultural Heritage: The Guizhou tourism digital human Huang Xiaxi (黄小西) made its upgraded debut at the 20th Guizhou Tourism Industry Development Conference in Guiyang. Originally launched as a virtual digital human at the 19th conference the prior year, the upgraded version extended beyond screen-based interaction to physical-venue deployment, adding four functional modules covering hotels, scenic areas, dining, and personalized travel assistance, enabling visitors to receive comprehensive travel guidance through a single AI-driven conversational interface. Singer Gong Linna, present at the conference, expressed direct interest in the character's one-stop travel guidance capability upon learning of its expanded functions.

A Li Bai virtual digital human supporting real-time conversational dialogue was showcased at the China Network Media Forum using AI digital interaction, dynamic restoration, and virtual performance technologies, with coverage reported by both Yunnan and Shandong provincial media outlets. The historical game Ming Jian Wan Li (明见万历), deployed at the Ming Tombs scenic area in Beijing, uses digital characters for on-site narrative explanation, combining cinematic plot design with virtual human presentations to guide visitors through the full construction history of the Thirteen Tombs.

Healthcare and Memorial: Lingxi Bio (灵析生物) developed a chronic disease management platform integrating wearable continuous blood pressure monitoring with a doctor AI avatar (医生AI分身) system, positioning the doctor avatar as a personalized health management presence extending clinical expertise beyond the point of care. Professor Zhang Yuanting, founder of non-invasive continuous blood pressure monitoring and academician of the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering, was appointed Lingxi Bio's chief scientist in January of this year and is directly associated with the development of this combined platform. The Fujian Health News (福建卫生报社) deployed a digital avatar (数字分身) for its health ambassador program, describing the avatar not as a question-answering tool but as an extension of the medical practitioner's professional expertise and an expression of the intent to serve patients more broadly, framing the deployment as part of the organization's implementation of the national "AI+" strategy.

AI digital human technology was applied at the 2026 National Human Organ Donation Memorial and Awareness Event held in Jinan, Shandong, where digital human presentations recreated the likenesses and personal testimonies of deceased donors, including the restored image of Zhang Junqiao, recognized as a "Qilu Model of the Era," and his wife, who were the first married couple in Jinan to jointly donate their bodies. In Hangzhou, Zhejiang Anxian Garden (浙江安贤园) showcased a newly developed AI digital human photo frame product capable of recording and recreating the appearance and voice of deceased individuals as a memorial object, building on the cemetery operator's existing track record of ecological burial innovation since 2000. In Wuhan, Hubei resident Wang Zhe had an AI digital human reconstruction of his deceased mother deliver a wedding address at his ceremony, fulfilling a commitment his mother had been unable to keep before her death.

Government and Public Services: The Yinchuan Municipal Administrative Approval Service Bureau (银川市审批服务局) in Ningxia launched a digital human named Yinxiao Fu (银小服) at the city's citizen service hall on March 30, introducing AI-driven virtual human interaction as the new standard for government service delivery in the city. The Postal Savings Bank of China's Liaoning branch (邮储银行辽宁省分行) deployed a digital human for customer-facing banking services, reporting coverage of 99 percent of high-frequency banking transactions including intelligent product explanation and business process guidance. Nanjing created a medical insurance digital human named Xiao Jinling (小金灵) to serve the city's 8.96 million insured residents, providing accessible interactive access to medical insurance information and services, with the system described as having brought direct convenience to residents navigating insurance queries. At a political theory education event in Nantong, Jiangsu, digital humans named Tongtong (通通) and Xuanxuan (暄暄) participated alongside six human youth lecturers in a structured dialogue on the spirit of the 2026 National Two Sessions. Southeast University's Nanjing Alumni Association launched a digital human named Ning Xiaodong (宁小东) to represent the association at the AI+ Industry Innovation Summit and Alumni Association General Meeting.

Education: The AI Taiyan (AI太炎) digital human was developed to explain Chinese character origins, meanings, and cultural content for overseas Chinese-language learners, enabling students abroad to study Chinese characters without requiring physical access to China-based educational resources. A practitioner in Gansu province working in the intangible cultural heritage of Longdong Daoqing (陇东道情), a six-hundred-year-old traditional performing art, collaborated with local universities to develop a digital human lecture system for this art form, combining the digital presenter with modern musical adaptations to make the tradition accessible to younger audiences. Guangxi Medical University was the site of the second national campus stop for Kejian Bang (课件帮), a platform offering customized digital human teacher functions for educational courseware, following its first stop at a university in Nanchang, Jiangxi. In Inner Mongolia, digital humans were deployed in smart library environments within schools as part of science and technology education outreach. At Zhengzhou No. 11 Middle School in Henan, a teacher incorporated an AI digital human into a civic and legal education lesson structured around 2026 National Two Sessions current affairs, using life-scenario cases to teach constitutional principles through an AI-driven interactive presentation. Students from Hebei Geological University participated in mock job interviews with a digital human at the 2026 National Hundred Cities Thousand Schools Ten Thousand Enterprises Employment Promotion Event, using the interaction to practice for positions in software engineering.

Kejian Bang (课件帮), accessible at kejian365.com and operated by Beijing Tianyuan Dike Network Technology Co., Ltd. (北京天源迪科网络科技有限公司), is a one-stop AI-powered courseware creation platform that positions digital human technology as its central delivery mechanism for educational content. The platform enables users to generate PPT slideshows with a single click, then automatically convert those slideshows into digital human presenter videos, with the system extracting lecture scripts page by page and eliminating the need for manual recording or editing. The digital human presenter's appearance, voice, and background are all customizable, and the platform supports batch video generation at scale, targeting use cases across enterprise internal training, marketing training, Party building education, and academic subject instruction. A design priority noted in product coverage is the shift away from generic, template-bound digital human avatars toward more personalized presenter identities, directly addressing educator complaints that standard digital human tools produce undifferentiated on-screen figures with cumbersome customization workflows. Within the Chinese digital human ecosystem, Kejian Bang represents a focused vertical deployment of synthetic presenter technology, applying it narrowly but systematically to the high-volume instructional content market rather than pursuing the broader commercial avatar or virtual influencer applications dominant among larger platform players. 

Enterprise and Commerce: Shenzhen Zhongtong Electronics (深圳市证通电子股份有限公司) presented AI digital human solutions alongside its LightBeeOS medical product suite at the Shenzhen Medical HarmonyOS Ecosystem Supply-Demand Matching Conference, positioning the digital human as part of its open-source HarmonyOS-based healthcare technology portfolio. Meitu (美图) integrated AI digital human production into its AI operations team architecture, assigning digital human content creation as a discrete function within a broader AI-driven workflow that also encompasses AI photography and AI editing teams. Kaiyun Software (开普云) has developed virtual digital human voice-driving capabilities within its metaverse business alongside automated text content generation and text-to-image functions. Wangda Software (网达软件) has built a digital human face-customization system and government-facing metaverse applications as part of its metaverse product portfolio, also developing a metaverse meeting platform with virtual digital human components. Shanghai Mobile and Migu (咪咕公司) jointly applied AI intelligent modeling and digital human rendering technology to the Suhe Half Marathon in Shanghai, building a full-process digital event service system that generated personalized digital experiences for individual participants. Zhejiang Lao Nian Bao (浙江老年报) created a digital human persona called Rock Grandpa (摇滚爷爷数字人) to narrate stories of social and generational change for elderly readers. Hangzhou Bank (杭州银行) developed a digital human financial advisor named Xiao Xin (小信) for investment advisory services within its wealth management product ecosystem.

OpenHarmony (开源鸿蒙), at openharmony.cn, is an open-source distributed operating system incubated by the Open Atom Open Source Foundation from Huawei's 2020 code contribution, now functioning as the primary domestic infrastructure alternative to foreign OS stacks for Chinese enterprise and institutional device deployments. Its relevance to digital humans derives from several converging properties: its distributed architecture enables one-time development across heterogeneous device types, its native AI capabilities support the multimodal interaction pipelines that interactive digital humans require, and its security framework satisfies the compliance requirements of regulated sectors such as finance and healthcare where digital human terminals are increasingly deployed. The search data confirms that the OpenHarmony-digital human connection is actively present in the Chinese technical and commercial discourse — the Huawei Cloud marketplace hosts content specifically on "数字人开源技术" (digital human open-source technology) framing OpenHarmony-based all-in-one devices and AI interaction hardware as the delivery platform, and at the 2025 Open Atom Developer Conference, Zhongtong Electronics presented on OpenHarmony and AI as a dual-drive architecture for bank hall integrated scenarios. The ecosystem player 深开鸿 (Shenzhen OpenHarmony entity) has additionally published content directly linking the platform to digital human applications, and OpenHarmony's first open-source robot OS, M-Robots OS, extends the same stack toward embodied and robotic digital human forms. Taken together, OpenHarmony is not a peripheral consideration for digital human deployment in China but rather the OS layer around which a structured domestic digital human hardware and software ecosystem is actively consolidating. 

Ethical and Legal Contexts: Police in Fujian province identified a social media account using an AI-generated virtual persona to fraudulently attract followers and solicit money, with the scheme involving a fabricated virtual identity and exaggerated promotional claims. Officers intervened to prevent an elderly person who had traveled a long distance to meet the perceived influencer from falling victim to the fraud, marking the case as part of a broader pattern of anti-fraud warnings issued around AI-generated virtual identities. Separately, the growing realism of AI-generated virtual appearances has created detection failures on content platforms, with users reporting that original human-created content is being incorrectly flagged as AI-generated by automated review systems as virtual human imagery continues to narrow the visual gap with real persons, prompting industry analysis of the limitations of current AI-detection algorithms. The viral success of Qiaoqiaozi also generated a wave of unsolicited private messages directed at the AI virtual character, with the creator identifying this behavior as illustrative of broader gender-related difficulties faced by virtual idol personas when audience boundaries are unclear.

Qiaoqiaozi (巧巧子) is a Chinese virtual persona used in short-form social media content, particularly on platforms such as Douyin and Bilibili, characterized by a human-like animated or AI-assisted presence with a stylized, personable identity typical of online culture; rather than being a single officially defined digital human, it functions as a flexible character label that can be adopted or interpreted by different creators, placing it within the category of lightweight virtual influencers rather than high-fidelity, company-developed digital human systems.