Across 2019–2025 these trade publications show a clear shift in how China’s digital human sector is framed and measured, moving from community observation and entertainment-centric tracking toward industrial systematization, governance, and market instrumentation. The 2019 community signal functions as an informal aggregation layer, but by 2020 the agenda consolidates into early industry “white paper” framing that treats digital humans as an emerging commercial domain rather than a niche creator scene. In 2021 the emphasis narrows to virtual idols, reflecting the dominance of platform-led entertainment use cases and the need to document creator pipelines, agency models, and platform dynamics. During 2022 the output becomes infrastructure-heavy and market-facing: repeated ecosystem and value-chain maps, technology panoramas, and top-company rankings indicate active vendorization and categorization of capabilities, while commercialization research and forward outlook pieces suggest a transition from pilots to scalable deployment narratives, alongside platform-specific lists that track where consumer attention and monetization are concentrating. In early 2023 the focus expands to institutional signaling and competitive benchmarking via awards and updated technology mapping, followed by a late-2023 industry research orientation that reads like market sizing plus segmentation, implying deeper investor and enterprise demand for comparable metrics. In 2024 the movement becomes more formal and policy-adjacent: conferences, annual development reporting, and a sector white paper align the field around common taxonomies and priority application domains, and a national technical standards draft signals that interoperability, safety, and definitional boundaries are becoming central to adoption in regulated and enterprise contexts. By 2025 the scope stretches outward and upward: a global atlas positions China within an international industrial landscape while an influence index-style report implies maturation toward ongoing performance measurement, brand/effectiveness evaluation, and competitive monitoring—evidence that the sector is being treated less as a collection of experiments and more as a managed industry with comparable benchmarks, governance expectations, and export-oriented narratives.
2025, Sep: Technical requirements of large model enhanced digital human system
2024, Nov: NRTA Technical Standards Draft for Digital Virtual Humans
2024, Nov: White Paper on the Development of China’s Virtual Digital Human Industry in 2024
2024, Sep: 2024 China Digital Human Conference
2024, Jun: Top 50 Virtual Digital Human Companies in 2023-2024
2023, Nov: 2023 China AI Digital Human Industry Research Report
2023, Oct: Digital Human Standards Working Group
2023, Aug: 2023 Digital Human Practice Cases Top 10
2023, Aug: 2023 China AI Digital Human Enterprise Power Ranking
2023, Jul: Digital Human Development Promotion Forum
2023, Feb: China Virtual Human Industry Innovation Force Award
2023, Jan: China Digital Human Industry Technology Panorama Map
2022, Dec: Top 10 Digital Technology Application Trends 2023
2022, Dec: Research Report on Industry of Virtual Humans in China in 2022
2022, Aug: Weibo Virtual Idol Companies
2022, Aug: Virtual Digital Human TOP50 Ranking
2022: Aug: Beijing Digital Human Industry Action Plan (2022-2025)
2022, May: China Virtual Digital Human Industry Ecological Map
2022, Apr: China Virtual Human Industry Chain Map
2022, Apr: 2022 China Virtual Human Industry Commercialization Research Report
2022, Mar: Short- and Long-Term Outlook for Virtual Digital Humans
2022, Feb: China Virtual Digital Human Influence Index Report
2021, Sep: 2021 China Virtual Idol Industry Development and Research Report
2020, Dec: 2020 Virtual Digital Human White Paper
2019, Jan: Virtual Beings Facebook Group