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Articles

This series by Marcus L. Endicott maps the rise of "digital humans" (AI-powered avatars) as a load-bearing layer of China's emerging techno-social order, tracing their deployment across an unusually wide span of domains rather than treating them as a single product category. Individual installments examine cultural and ritual uses (AI micro-dramas, funeral resurrections of the deceased, museum guides), the tourism stack from policy days and WeChat mini-programs up to the 2.14-trillion-dollar smart tourism market, and institutional embeddings in classrooms, hospitals, mental-health services tied to social governance, and esports. Other pieces zoom out to infrastructure and industrial strategy — the "red metaverse," the metaverse industrial map, patent trajectories shifting from novelty to production, 6G network design organized around digital humans, and the OpenClaw-era agent boom projected into 2026 — while framing essays on "cyber civilization" and "intelligent society" supply the ideological scaffolding. The arc closes by reading China's social rollout of digital humans as a rehearsal for humanoid robots, so the overall scope is less about a technology than about how one country is using avatars as a connective tissue across culture, commerce, governance, and physical embodiment.

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