China Digital Human Knowledge Base

Start here · The guide — five domains, twenty-five chapters, read top to bottom. 

1. Strategic Foundations - Frames China's digital humans within the state's larger AI ambition, tracing the strategy, ideology, and soft-power design that treat synthetic figures as national infrastructure rather than novelty.

2. Infrastructure, Regulation, and Standards - Presents the governed stack — compute, networks, technical standards, legal architecture, and talent pipelines — that makes large-scale, state-aligned deployment of digital humans possible. 

3. Industry, Platforms, and Application - Situates the digital human as a maturing commercial sector in which technology suppliers, state telecoms, and dominant content platforms industrialise, monetise, and normalise virtual personas.

4. Culture, Society, and Public Life - Examines digital humans as cultural actors that shape tourism, commerce, fandom, and values, and the intimate bonds people increasingly form with virtual beings. 

5. Political, Symbolic, and Ethical Frontiers - Reads digital humans as instruments through which the state tests governance, identity, and power, and against which China's model is measured comparatively and ethically.

Go deeper · The evidence the guide points into — browse by place, entity, or source.

• The Provinces - digital-human timelines, province by province

• The Companies - the firms, agencies, and institutions building the industry

• Industry Reports - market studies, white papers, and rankings

• Tourism Cases - heritage and destination deployments

• Academic Papers - the yearly best-of research base

The News - a running record: monthly news, feature articles, and year-by-year timelines from 2019 on.

Resources - external tools and directories: Chinese LLMs, image search, trade shows, metaverse links, and open-source projects.

In focus:

China's 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030), unveiled at the National People's Congress in March 2026, establishes AI as the central driver of the country's next phase of economic development, with the term appearing 52 times in the document and a stated goal of integrating AI into 90 percent of the economy by 2030. For the digital human sector specifically, the plan creates both the opportunity and the obligation that the April 3 draft regulations are designed to address. The plan's emphasis on embodied intelligence, multi-modal AI, agent-based systems, and AI-driven service industries defines exactly the technological conditions under which digital humans are proliferating, while its explicit call for legal and regulatory frameworks covering algorithm registration, deepfakes, data misuse, and AI-generated content signals that sector-specific governance instruments like the digital human management measures are not incidental additions but planned components of the overall architecture. The plan's dual mandate — aggressive AI adoption alongside tightened state control over information, identity, and content — maps directly onto the dual character of the digital human regulations, which simultaneously protect the industry's development path and draw firm lines around national security, minors, consent, and the boundaries of virtual identity.