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.

1. China’s Digital Humans and the Values That Shape Them - Examines how a state-articulated value framework is deliberately threaded, from the outside in, into the behaviour and function of China’s avatars, anchors, AI doctors, and synthetic idols.
2. China’s Digital Humans Are Rewriting the Tourism Playbook - Follows the rapid conversion of museum and scenic-area avatars from scattered experiments into an explicit instrument of national cultural policy.
3. Digital Humans Sell Everything in China While the West Still Watches - Uses a six-hour, fifty-five-million-yuan livestream by a digital Luo Yonghao to show the avatar salesman as an effective commercial reality rather than a marketing stunt.
4. China’s VTuber Fandom and the Rise of Virtual Idol Culture - Argues that grassroots fan co-creation and commercial youth-marketing are two faces of a single circuit, with the friction at their seam the industry’s defining tension.
5. China’s Virtual Beings and the Bonds They Break - Traces virtual beings from subcultural curiosity to the emotional and commercial centre of millions of lives, and the parasocial bonds that ascent has forged.