This notice announces that the 2025 “China Digital Human Influence Index Report” (2025年度《中国数字人影响力指数报告》) has been officially published and distributed by the Communication University of China Press. It is described as the fourth full release in the series, after having previously appeared at the 12th China Internet Audio-Visual Convention. The report was compiled by the State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence and Communication at the Communication University of China and the university’s Digital Human Research Institute, and jointly released with the China Netcasting Services Association, the university’s School of Animation and Digital Arts, and Yuanli Trend Network.
The report is structured into six parts: research background, influence rankings, emotional intelligence, digital assets, applications, and frontier views plus industry outlook. It introduces a new comparative design by adding 164 leading overseas digital-human IP samples and comparing them with 360 domestic digital-human IP samples. It aims to present domestic and international development conditions, pathways for implementing empathic capabilities, digital-asset uses, development trends, and industry challenges. It also argues that “digital human” has become a common shorthand for terms such as “virtual digital human,” so the title removes the word “virtual” to reflect widespread usage associated with increasingly ubiquitous application.
For the fourth consecutive year, the report publishes three core ranking lists for China’s digital-human industry. These cover virtual idols focused on IP operations, virtual anchors undergoing transformation under policy and platform governance, and “digital employees” positioned as industry enablers. The report states that it collected and analyzed digital-human related network text from five platforms—Weibo, Douyin, Bilibili, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu—by using a customized keyword system and multi-threaded crawling to capture more than one million total data items from 2024. It describes subsequent cleaning steps such as deduplication, advertising filtering, and emoji conversion, followed by multi-dimensional analysis of volume, engagement, and sentiment value, and cross-platform comparison.
The influence evaluation combines platform data, expert scoring, and user voting. The report uses a three-dimensional influence framework described as communication power, product power, and social power, with expert scoring for some dimensions by specialists associated with the Communication University of China, the China Netcasting Services Association, and the Internet Society of China. It also incorporates 303,371 user votes to apply a communication-weighted adjustment to digital IP influence.
Based on these methods, the report states that 30 leading domestic IPs appear across the three lists, and it provides examples such as Luo Tianyi, Liu Yexi, Xing Tong, Hu Lili, Gu Xiaoyu, Guan Xiaofang, Eassy, Du Xiaoxiao, and Liu Sanjie. It characterizes the 2024 virtual idol track as a “pyramid” market in which top IPs dominate, while mid-tier IPs are eliminated due to severe homogenization and high operating costs. It says commercialization has centered on brand endorsements and cultural-tourism promotion, while collaborations have expanded into sectors including culture and tourism, entertainment, fast-moving consumer goods, automotive, education, fashion, and related areas, with collectibles and digital merchandise described as new growth points.
The report describes the 2024 virtual anchor track as developing in a more structured way, with leading agencies using resource integration to maintain market dominance and smaller anchors seeking differentiation through narrower vertical niches. It says policy standardization and market demand have jointly pushed applications beyond basic content delivery into commercial contexts such as e-commerce and gaming, while platform regulatory policies continue to deepen. For the “digital employee” track, it claims industrialization and intelligent capability have advanced, with technology firms, telecom operators, and traditional vendors forming a broader “digital employee+” ecosystem. It argues that large-model integration is moving digital employees from basic customer service to professional areas such as financial analysis and product design, and that future development will shift from tool-like deployments toward ecosystem roles that connect enterprise services and “smart living.”
The notice says the report analyzes annual industry development and impact using industry data, policy, intellectual property, industry mapping, and case studies of key application scenarios. It cites data attributed to Tianyancha indicating that China’s digital-human industry continues to expand, stating that by the end of 2024 there were about 1.359 million active or surviving enterprises related to “virtual digital humans,” representing 36.9% year-on-year growth, with more than 413,000 new registrations in 2024. It says the largest concentrations are in Guangdong, Zhejiang, and Shandong, and that the sector is concentrated in cultural entertainment and information technology services, with more than 57% of enterprises established within the last five years.
The notice links policy support with industrial layout. It claims that by the end of 2024 there were 21 provincial-level units and 40 city-level units that had issued nearly 300 special policies and plans related to the sector, and it highlights Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, and Zhejiang as jurisdictions that have issued policies over multiple consecutive years. On application scenarios, it argues that digital humans are moving from functional uses toward deeper explorations of “life forms.” It lists continued presence in e-commerce, media, education, and healthcare, while describing emerging scenarios such as digital immortality and virtual romance, and exploratory directions such as AI psychological healing and metaverse social NPCs seeking new business models.
The notice also claims that investment and intellectual property trends show a dual logic of deeper technical development and broader ecosystem expansion. It states that capital is shifting from single-technology investment toward full value-chain positioning, and suggests that firms with ecosystem coordination capacity may shape competitive boundaries. It cites figures attributed to China’s National Intellectual Property Administration, stating that in 2024 there were 641 patent applications in the digital-human field and 340 authorized and published patents, which it describes as a sharp increase over 2023, and it adds that invention patents account for about 96% of total applications.
In its domestic–overseas comparison, the report says it monitored 360 domestic digital-human IPs and 164 overseas digital-human IPs, and it argues that globalization and product diversification are prominent. It gives “digital Barbie” as an example, describing cross-market audience coverage and collaborations with major pop-culture figures and brands. It contrasts this with the Dunhuang digital human Tianyu, which it says pursued overseas-facing exploration through a short drama series that embeds traditional cultural elements, while also seeking cross-industry collaborations including film IP tie-ins and cultural-tourism projects.
The report includes a dedicated chapter on emotional intelligence. It presents emotional intelligence as the key driver for digital humans moving from “instrumental agents” to “emotional partners,” arguing that earlier forms of interaction were mechanically limited and insufficient for deeper emotional connection. It proposes an underlying architecture built on emotion model construction, multimodal perception and fusion, and dynamic generation and feedback. It also outlines a three-stage closed loop for human–machine empathy described as emotion recognition, emotion understanding, and emotion response, augmented by personalization and cultural adaptation.
The digital assets chapter argues that deeper integration between digital humans and digital art assets is creating a new commercial ecosystem. It points to the creator economy and shared co-creation models, including “agent asset operations,” as drivers of change. It also discusses how technology clusters such as AIGC and blockchain may reshape the digital-asset value chain. The notice cites an IDC forecast that the global digital economy will exceed US$23 trillion in 2025, and it claims that China’s digital-human industry will drive related market scale beyond RMB 600 billion, with digital humans and digital art assets positioned as a key growth engine.
In the “frontier views and industry outlook” section, the notice says representatives from a set of institutions and companies shared industry perspectives around themes such as AIGC, innovation, agents, and enablement. It includes remarks attributed to senior academic leads that agentic AI is pushing digital humans toward autonomous decision-making and intelligent collaboration, and that AIGC can improve realism and scenario adaptability. It also states that “embodied intelligent” digital humans will be a focal point in 2025, and it notes a claim that large-language-model-driven humanoid robots may introduce a new form of human–machine coexistence alongside ethical issues requiring attention.
The notice concludes by stating that the report series has attracted wide attention from regulators, media, industry, and enterprises, and that it has been cited by authoritative departments and included in blue-book compilations. It adds that the Communication University of China Press has opened a pre-sale for the report with a limited quantity of 100 copies.