China Unicom's Digital Human Ambitions Outpace Its Market Position

There is an apparent contradiction at the centre of China Unicom's digital human programme, and the most useful way to read the whole of it is as an exercise in dissolving that contradiction rather than resolving it in the ordinary commercial sense. By almost every metric an analyst would reach for, the company looks like a marginal player. Its digital human business is expected to turn over something in the region of a hundred million yuan, roughly 2.4 percent of a domestic market valued at 4.12 billion yuan in 2024 and forecast to grow sixfold to more than twenty-five billion by the end of the decade. It appears on no serious independent ranking of the country's leading digital human firms, a field led without much argument by Baidu, Huawei Cloud, and Xiaoice, and even among the three state telecom carriers it trails China Mobile in visibility. And yet the same company has assembled one of the more complete digital human operations anywhere in China, with a proprietary creation platform, a multi-tier product line, its own large model, and thousands of avatars already in service. The way to hold those two facts together is to notice that they are measured against different purposes. Unicom's ambition and its market position diverge because they were never pointed at the same target.

The company's first public-facing virtual figure captures the gap exactly. In October 2021 it unveiled An Weixi, a hyperrealistic avatar whose name was assembled to suggest an unknown future met with hopeful composure, built at Unicom's 5G and AI imaging centre from performance animation, real-time motion capture, voice synthesis, and facial modelling, and openly floated as a candidate virtual idol with singing, dancing, and emotional interaction in her repertoire. As a demonstration of what the company could manufacture, she succeeded. As a virtual influencer she barely registered: her debut video drew a little over a thousand views on Bilibili, no brand campaigns followed, and no viral moment ever arrived. An Weixi worked as a proof of concept and almost nothing else, and the lesson Unicom appears to have taken from her is the one that governs everything after. It stopped competing for cultural attention in an open consumer market it was poorly placed to win, and turned its manufacturing capability inward.

COCO, the digital human that followed, shows what that turn looks like in practice. First put to work on Winter Olympics news broadcasting in early 2022 and given a public debut at that year's China International Import Expo, she was never positioned as an idol to be adored but as a functionary to be deployed. Paired with a second virtual anchor, she moved across news reading, event hosting, and customer service, and by 2024 she was greeting attendees and fielding service queries as an AI customer representative at the company's own partner conference. The platform beneath her offers neural text-to-speech, natural language processing, and integration with very large language models fused to knowledge graphs, along with voice cloning and image customisation as standing services. The distinction between An Weixi and COCO is the distinction the whole programme turns on: not spectacle but service, not a personality to be sold to the public but a tool to be installed wherever a human interface would otherwise sit.

That instinct scales into a structured product matrix spanning six price tiers, and its shape tells you who the intended user really is. At the most accessible level, a personal digital human can be generated from a single photograph in seconds for as little as ten yuan. In the middle sit broadcast-anchor and livestream products that render unattended figures around the clock onto the major commerce platforms. Higher up are interactive digital humans driven by large language models and industry knowledge bases, deployable through web interfaces or paired with hardware kiosks for government offices, hospitals, airports, and exhibition halls, and at the summit a fully bespoke hyperrealistic pipeline running from concept art through modelling and rigging to ultra-high-definition output. The revealing figure, though, is not any price on that ladder but the count of internal installations: Unicom has put roughly seven thousand digital humans to work inside its own operations. The matrix is genuine and saleable, but the company's largest customer is plainly itself.

Underneath the products sits infrastructure the company built rather than rented, which is what allows it to treat digital humans as fixtures rather than experiments. An imaging system handles high-resolution capture, ultra-high-definition livestreaming, naked-eye 3D, and augmented reality alongside avatar creation, while a low-code platform stitches together 3D content, motion capture, and livestreaming and bridges the major game engines with building and geographic information systems. At the centre is the Yuan Jing large model, unveiled at Barcelona in early 2024 and upgraded within months, a multimodal foundation offering image generation and one-shot voice cloning, filed with the Cyberspace Administration and certified at the highest domestic level, running on a national compute fabric of more than sixty nodes woven into edge computing and a content delivery network. As with the other state carriers, the purpose of owning every layer is independence: an avatar built on compute the company controls end to end can be placed wherever it pleases, without asking a platform vendor's permission.

It is in government and cultural work that this self-sufficiency converts into genuine advantage, because these are precisely the arenas a pure technology company cannot as easily enter. In March 2023 Unicom launched a hyperrealistic version of Liu Sanjie, a legendary folk figure of the Zhuang people, as Guangxi's digital cultural-tourism ambassador, the first provincial-level hyperrealistic tourism ambassador in the country and later cited as a model case in an industry development report. Avatars modelled on real prosecutors have delivered legal education and public-service updates in counties across Guangdong; a museum guide was launched for the National Museum of China's cloud exhibition in 2025; and multilingual tourism figures were shown at Barcelona the same year. Behind these showcases sits the scale that makes Unicom formidable in this domain and nowhere else. It serves more than twenty national ministries, thirty-one provincial digital-government projects, over 750 smart-city schemes and 17,000 administrative villages, and it runs the largest centralised customer contact centre in the industry, where more than ten thousand agents handle over 120 million calls a month for 420 million users at a satisfaction rate above 98 percent. A digital human that can absorb even a fraction of that traffic is worth more to the company than any quantity of idol followers.

Unicom has also cast itself as a convener, a role available to it precisely because of its state standing. In December 2022 it formalised a metaverse strategy resting on a domestically built platform and an industry alliance it leads, whose founding membership runs to around a hundred organisations, including Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, ByteDance, iFlytek, and Xiaoice alongside major research institutions. It has partnered directly with Baidu on service-oriented digital humans and with iFlytek on platform solutions, and in 2024 it wrapped its consumer and industrial offerings beneath a single digital-culture umbrella. None of this makes Unicom a market leader in the sense the rankings measure, but it makes it something the rankings do not capture: an institutional anchor around which a good deal of the rest of the industry organises.

The regulatory turn now underway confirms that position rather than threatening it. In April 2026 the Cyberspace Administration circulated draft measures for digital virtual human services, a framework mandating a prominent and continuous label, explicit consent for the use of sensitive personal information in modelling, prohibitions on unconsented likenesses of real people and on virtual intimate relationships offered to minors, and respect for intellectual property in the content avatars deliver, with oversight distributed across a long roster of ministries. For a consumer platform, rules of this kind arrive as friction to be managed. For a state carrier whose digital humans already operate inside government service, they arrive as something nearer to ratification of the ground it was already standing on.

Read as a business competing for the open digital human market, then, China Unicom is a minor participant, and the metrics say so plainly. But that is a misreading, because it was never quite running that business. Its ambitions outpace its market position only if market position is the right measure, and for a state-owned carrier applying digital humans across its own colossal service estate and into the machinery of provincial governance and cultural diplomacy, it is not the right measure at all. The company is best understood not as a would-be rival to the platform giants but as something they are not equipped to be: an operator quietly embedding synthetic interfaces into the state's own dealings with its citizens, where a small share of a commercial market counts for far less than a large share of the government's work.