China’s Digital Humans and the Values That Shape Them

China occupies an unusual position in the global landscape of artificial intelligence. By most measures it ranks second only to the United States, yet on several it leads outright: in recent years Chinese institutions have accounted for nearly seventy percent of granted AI patents worldwide, produced close to a quarter of all AI research publications and citations, and originated nine of the ten most capable open-weight models in circulation. The country installs more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined. What distinguishes the Chinese trajectory, however, is not raw capability but the explicit and deliberate way a particular value system has been threaded through the technology's governance. Nowhere is this clearer than in the country's digital humans — the animated avatars, virtual anchors, AI doctors, and synthetic idols that have begun to populate Chinese screens, classrooms, and clinics. These entities are not value-neutral artifacts. They are shaped, from the outside in, by a framework the state has been remarkably candid about.

That framework begins with the Core Socialist Values, a set of twelve principles formally articulated at the Communist Party's 18th National Congress in 2012. Arranged across three tiers — national aspirations such as prosperity and harmony, social commitments such as freedom, equality, and the rule of law, and personal virtues such as patriotism, integrity, and friendliness — these values function as a kind of civic catechism. What is striking is how systematically they have migrated from the realm of moral exhortation into the machinery of technology regulation. The interim measures for generative AI services, which took effect in 2023, require in their fourth article that providers uphold the Core Socialist Values. When regulators drafted a dedicated rule for digital virtual humans, released in 2026, they reproduced precisely the same mandate in precisely the same article position. A separate draft governing human-like interactive AI went further still, requiring that the very datasets used to train such systems be consistent with socialist core values and reflective of excellent traditional Chinese culture. The country's leadership has reinforced the linkage personally and repeatedly, framing cyberspace as a position to be held for thought guidance, moral cultivation, and cultural inheritance.

Beneath this overt ideological layer runs a quieter philosophical current. Scholars who study Chinese AI governance have noted a pronounced Confucian dimension, even though the state itself seldom uses that word, preferring the broader and more politically supple phrase "excellent traditional Chinese culture." The concept that recurs most insistently is harmony. China's earliest governance principles for the technology, issued in 2019, named harmony and friendliness as their first principle; the Beijing AI Principles of the same year invoked harmony and cooperation, and a 2021 ethical code promoted harmony and safety. This is not incidental vocabulary. It signals a model of governance that prizes collective welfare and government-led stewardship over individual autonomy, and that reads social order through a lens of humaneness, appropriateness, and hierarchical responsibility — a recognizably Confucian inheritance, whatever the official terminology.

It would be easy to assume from all this that Chinese digital humans are somehow programmed at the level of code to recite approved values. The reality is more subtle and, in a sense, more far-reaching. The regulations do not prescribe how a digital human must be built; they impose legal obligations on the companies that provide and operate them. The 2026 draft on digital virtual humans, with its twenty-seven articles, requires providers to uphold the Core Socialist Values, preserve national security and the public interest, and conform to prevailing social morals, while prohibiting content that touches separatism, terrorism, ethnic discrimination, violence, historical nihilism, and falsehood. It mandates a continuously displayed label identifying the avatar as a digital human, demands consent for the use of a person's biometric likeness, and erects special protections for minors, including a ban on virtual intimate relationships for anyone under eighteen. None of this is a design specification for the avatar itself. It is a description of the environment in which the avatar may lawfully exist. The values shape the entity indirectly but pervasively, by shaping what its makers are permitted to release into the world.

This regulatory architecture did not arrive all at once. It accreted in layers, each more specific than the last: provisions on deep synthesis that first defined digital characters and required the labeling of generated content; the broader generative measures that brought text, image, audio, and video under a filing regime through which hundreds of services have now passed; and finally the standalone rule that gave the digital human its own legal definition. Under that definition, a digital human is a virtual image that simulates human appearance and is endowed with voice, behavior, interactivity, or personality — a threshold that deliberately excludes the purely textual chatbot, which is governed elsewhere. The progression reveals a state learning to regulate a moving target with increasing precision, always anchoring the exercise to the same underlying value commitments.

Where those values become most visible is in the deliberate enlistment of digital humans as carriers of cultural heritage. State media has openly described them as new messengers of traditional Chinese culture, and the examples are pointed. A digital reconstruction of the Peking opera master Mei Lanfang, built by leading drama and engineering institutes, drew tens of millions of views with a single New Year's greeting. A digital Confucius now converses with primary-school children in Hebei, and platforms allow students to hold natural-language dialogues with virtual scientists and sages. Avatars inspired by the Dunhuang murals and Tang dynasty figurines animate a national project to digitize the country's cultural resources within the next decade. The governing formula for all of this is creative transformation and innovative development — a phrase that frames these initiatives not as a neutral bridge between antiquity and technology but as the purposeful reanimation of a heritage in service of present ends.

The same value orientation surfaces in the technology's most consequential applications. In healthcare, AI doctor agents and digital avatars of real physicians have been deployed across hundreds of hospitals, trained on vast disease databases and reaching diagnostic accuracy in the mid-nineties on standard benchmarks, with the state mandating AI-assisted diagnosis throughout the country's top-tier institutions. The emphasis on broad, collective access to medical expertise echoes the governance preference for shared welfare over individual exceptionalism. In education, digital mentors extend personalized instruction into rural classrooms, and the state has set itself the goal of full AI coverage in primary and secondary schooling by the end of the decade, having already trained millions of teachers and built hundreds of specialized teaching tools. These are not merely efficiency plays. They are expressions of a vision in which technology serves a socially cohesive, state-stewarded order.

That vision does not stop at China's borders. The country has worked actively to shape the international rules of the road, advancing a global governance initiative built on people-centered development, respect for sovereignty, and opposition to technological monopoly, and winning broad support at the United Nations for a resolution on AI capacity building. It participates in the international standards bodies where the technical grammar of these systems is written, and its own digital human regulation explicitly encourages engagement in international rulemaking and cooperation. The ambition is unmistakable: not only to build digital humans according to a particular set of values, but to help define the norms by which the rest of the world builds its own.

Taken together, these threads describe something more coherent than a collection of rules. China's digital humans are the visible surface of a value system rendered in policy, regulation, and cultural design — entities whose appearance, permissible behavior, and very reason for being are inflected by the Core Socialist Values, by an undeclared but unmistakable Confucian sensibility, and by a state that treats the animation of culture as a strategic act. They are, in the end, less machines that happen to carry values than values that have been given a human face.