China’s Digital Humans Are Rewriting the Tourism Playbook

Of all the arenas in which China's digital human industry has made itself visible, none has proved more crowded or more public than cultural tourism. Museums, scenic areas, trade fairs, and provincial promotional campaigns have become the proving grounds where animated avatars are tested before audiences in the millions. The path from early curiosity to systematic national strategy unfolded with remarkable speed across a handful of pivotal years, propelled by converging advances in 3D modeling, motion capture, speech synthesis, and large language models, and pushed harder still by government mandates that named digital humans as essential infrastructure for a modernized tourism economy. What began as scattered experiments became, within a few seasons, an explicit instrument of cultural policy.

Some of the earliest regional ambition surfaced far from the country's technological centers. In Xinjiang, a firm called Tingguangtong Digital Technology spent nearly two years building Kunlun Xi, a cinematic-quality hyper-realistic figure rooted in Kunlun mythology and presented as a time-traveling incarnation of the Kunlun goddess. She debuted on July 3, 2023, in a promotional video for the Jianguo Music Festival, the region's first local music festival, and was hailed at the time as a zero-to-one breakthrough for Xinjiang's nascent digital human field. The achievement carried a clear signal: even China's western provinces were prepared to invest in ultra-realistic virtual figures to promote their cultural tourism. That commitment has persisted in the region, where a separate Xinjiang cultural tourism digital human, Qingniao, would later appear on a 2025 metaverse case list compiled in Tianjin.

At the national institutional level, ambition took a more polished and better-resourced form. In July 2022, the National Museum of China unveiled two virtual digital humans. Ai Wenwen, launched on the museum's 110th anniversary, served as a virtual spokesperson and cloud exhibition guide, while Tong Gujin played a virtual cultural relics restorer who partnered with her in the China Civilization Cloud Exhibition. The principal technology partner was Tencent, working through its SSV Digital Culture Lab and Tencent Cloud Xiaowei to supply multimodal interaction, 3D modeling, and speech synthesis; Fantuo Digital handled motion and expression capture, the Shandong University of Art and Design shaped the image design, and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications built the cloud platform. The underlying work drew on digital twin approaches, multimodal interaction, speech synthesis, motion capture, and VR panoramic techniques. The investment did not stop at launch. By 2024 Ai Wenwen had passed through three upgrade phases, and her knowledge base had grown to draw on more than 1.4 million items from the museum's collection.

If museums supplied the prestige, the trade fairs supplied the marketplace. The maturing industry found its showcases at a succession of expos that grew visibly denser with digital humans from one edition to the next. The 2023 cultural and science-technology fair in Nanjing, held that September across 26,000 square meters with more than 430 exhibitors, devoted an entire Cultural Metaverse zone to digital humans and digital twins, where the Nanjing Lingjing Metaverse Research Institute presented a high-fidelity figure named Xiao Hui built for venue guidance and tourism services. The Shenzhen International Cultural Industry Expo charted a similar arc: digital humans were merely present among the thousands of exhibitors at its eighteenth edition over the 2022–2023 winter, but by the nineteenth edition in mid-2023 the fair had begun using them for live broadcasting and had carved out a dedicated Digital China area, and by its twenty-first edition in 2025 artificial intelligence commanded an exhibition zone of its own. Beijing's CIFTIS told the same story, featuring digital humans prominently across more than 2,400 exhibitors in 2023, among them the Hangzhou firm FaceUnity, whose AvatarX platform could generate a personalized 3D digital human from a single photograph and offered customization across cartoon, video, ultra-realistic, lifelike, and full-reality styles.

Commercial culture moved in parallel with the institutional push. Ranmai Technology, operating under the iMaker brand, created AYAYI, billed as China's first hyper-realistic meta-human virtual influencer, and launched her in May 2021. Backed by investors including SIG and Porsche Ventures, with further support from NBCUniversal and iQIYI, she went on to work with more than thirty-five brands, among them Guerlain, Burberry, Dior, Porsche, and Alibaba's Tmall, where she was installed as a digital brand manager. Her trajectory, concentrated in luxury, fashion, automotive, and e-commerce, demonstrated that a synthetic figure could carry genuine commercial weight, and it offered the tourism sector a template for what a well-managed virtual persona might achieve.

From 2024 onward, a series of landmark deployments revealed how deeply digital humans were being woven into the country's tourism infrastructure. Dunhuang's Digital Sutra Cave, developed jointly by the Dunhuang Research Academy and Tencent, became the world's first game-technology-based time-space participatory museum, part of a broader digitization effort that had captured more than 300 caves and reached 23 million users across more than 78 countries by the end of 2024. The Capital Museum introduced an AI digital human named Jing Hui in 2024, trained over six months on its own knowledge database to guide visitors through the exhibits. In Guangxi, the figure Liu Sanjie became the country's first provincial-level hyper-realistic cultural tourism ambassador, promoting the region in English, ASEAN languages, Cantonese, Zhuang, and Hakka, and ultimately appearing on a national Spring Festival opera gala. Tying these efforts to an explicit goal, the Nüwa Plan announced in 2023 set out to create one hundred digital human IPs carrying Chinese cultural content by 2025.

The arrival of large language models deepened the integration further. MoFa, the Shanghai firm backed by ByteDance and the SoftBank Vision Fund and ranked first in 3D digital humans by IDC in 2025, deployed 3D digital guides aboard Yangtze River cruise ships in Nanjing. Mobvoi launched a physically mobile digital human that combined DeepSeek with its own models for exhibition guidance, and a cluster of tourism operators, among them Zhonglv Travel, OCT Group, and Haichang Ocean Park, completed DeepSeek integration in early 2025 for their own digital human applications. The avatars were no longer merely decorative; they had begun to converse, interpret, and answer.

The scale beneath these deployments is striking. By late 2024 China counted roughly 135.9 million virtual digital human–related enterprise registrations, a 36.9 percent rise over the previous year, with more than 41 million of those registered in 2024 alone. The core market was projected to approach 48 billion yuan, around 6.65 billion US dollars, by 2025, and the country was estimated to account for about a third of global intelligent avatar deployments. An industry of that size does not emerge from consumer enthusiasm alone.

Government policy supplied the decisive momentum. A three-year action plan for the metaverse industry covering 2023 through 2025, jointly issued in September 2023 by five ministries including those for industry and for culture and tourism, explicitly required building cultural tourism metaverse experiences around scenic areas and cultural venues, naming digital human interpretation and XR guided tours as expected products and calling for the cultivation of a batch of well-known digital humans as benchmark cultural offerings. The following May, a smart tourism action plan, the country's first national-level guideline of its kind, set out to expand the smart tourism economy by 2027 through AI, VR, AR, and the digital transformation of tourism facilities. In November 2024 the broadcasting regulator issued GY/T 411-2024, the country's first formal industry standard for digital virtual humans, defining their classification, application scenarios, and image and driving-technology requirements, with Tencent Cloud AI among its key drafters.

The ambition did not stop at the national tier. Hangzhou set itself a target of a one-trillion-yuan digital cultural tourism industry by 2027, and Wuhan aimed for a core cultural tourism metaverse scale exceeding 40 billion yuan by the same year. By the end of 2024, provincial and municipal authorities had issued nearly three hundred specialized policies touching on digital human industries, with Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, and Zhejiang the most prolific. The reach extended outward as well: in September 2024 the IEEE approved a global standard for 3D digital human modeling and driving requirements, submitted by a Chinese company, a sign that the country intends not merely to deploy this technology aggressively at home but to help write the rules by which the rest of the world builds it.