Political, Symbolic, and Ethical Frontiers

Reads digital humans as the terrain where questions of governance, identity, and power are worked out, and against which China’s model is measured comparatively and ethically.

1. China’s AI Governance and the Human Face It Wears - Positions the digital human as the public-facing side of China’s broader AI governance strategy, and asks what its deployments reveal about how the state intends AI to meet the citizen.
2. China’s National Avatar Strategy Reshapes Society While the West Hesitates - Treats Beijing’s August 2022 Action Plan as the datable origin of a national decision to build digital humans into public life as industrial-policy infrastructure.
3. China’s Regulation of Virtual Beings and the Social Credit Mirage - Separates the genuine regulatory contest over identity, jurisdiction, and privacy from the mirage of a social-credit dystopia imported wholesale into the metaverse.
4. NetDragon’s Four-Year Experiment with Tang Yu as China’s Only Virtual CEO - Revisits the appointment of the virtual CEO Tang Yu to show its real product was never a decision-maker but a remarkably durable story.
5. Three Roads to the Virtual Human: Japan, China, and South Korea - Compares three national paths to the virtual human to isolate what is singular in China’s model — volume, standardisation, and the coordinating hand of the state.