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On August 25, 2022, a technology company in Fuzhou announced that one of its businesses would henceforth be run by someone who had never drawn a breath. NetDragon Websoft, a gaming and education firm listed in Hong Kong under the code 0777, declared that Tang Yu — an artificial-intelligence-powered virtual humanoid it had built in-house — would serve as Rotating CEO of its flagship subsidiary, Fujian NetDragon Websoft. Within hours the story had leapt from Chinese outlets to the international press, almost all of it reaching for the same irresistible framing: a Chinese company had appointed a robot to the corner office. The claim was accurate in the narrow sense that mattered for a headline, and it was the first time a virtual digital person had been named chief executive of a Chinese firm. But the more one examines what actually changed inside NetDragon on that date, the clearer it becomes that the appointment's real product was never a decision-maker. It was a story — and as a story it has proven remarkably durable.
The company making the announcement was not a startup chasing novelty. NetDragon had been founded in 1999 and built its early fortune in online games, launching titles such as Conquer Online and Eudemons Online, before diversifying into education and, for a period, aggressively into metaverse and blockchain ventures. By 2021 its annual revenue approached 7 billion yuan, roughly half of it still coming from gaming. This was a substantial, publicly traded enterprise with a human leadership structure that the Tang Yu announcement left entirely intact. The rotating-CEO title applied to a subsidiary, not to the listed parent; Dr. Xiong Li remained chief executive of NetDragon Websoft Holdings and Dr. Dejian Liu remained its chairman. No human executive was displaced, and no board handed strategic authority to an algorithm. What the company did was give a name, a face, and a C-suite title to an internal automation system it had been developing for years.
Tang Yu was not, in fact, new. Her official employment start date within NetDragon was September 6, 2017, and before her promotion she had carried the title of AI Vice President. She had a public career of sorts long before the CEO announcement, appearing in April 2020 alongside Tsinghua University for a pandemic-era virtual recruitment event, exhibited in physical robot form at the Fourth Digital China Construction Summit in 2021, and even bestowed a ceremonial title, Shanggong Ritual Music Envoy, at a Confucian ritual-music conference in 2020 — a designation drawn from the tradition of female officials in the imperial palace. She also did not work alone. NetDragon had populated its AI management ecosystem with other synthetic staff, including an AI assistant named Tang Xiaoqing and an AI project-management manager named Tang Sheng. Tang Yu was the visible apex of a small bureaucracy of software agents.
What that bureaucracy actually did is the crux of the matter, and NetDragon's own disclosures are unusually candid about it. By the time of the CEO appointment, the AI team led by Tang Yu had processed more than 300,000 instances of document approval, issued nearly 500,000 reminders and early warnings, administered 1,288 internal rewards and punishments, and conducted more than 40,000 employee training sessions in a year. These are the metrics of human-resources and administrative automation — approvals, nudges, performance monitoring, compliance reminders — not the metrics of executive judgment. The distinction was confirmed by NetDragon's own digital human program director, Yu Le, who acknowledged in December 2022 that Tang Yu still required a long process of data accumulation before she could develop independent learning and decision-making abilities. At that point, ninety percent of leave reviews ran through the AI team. Tang Yu, in other words, was an extraordinarily busy clerk wearing a chief executive's title, and the people who built her said as much.
For its intended purpose, the arrangement worked beautifully. NetDragon's shares traded in the range of fourteen to sixteen Hong Kong dollars around the announcement, held near sixteen into March 2023, and reached a fifty-two-week high of roughly twenty-three dollars amid the wider excitement that followed the launch of ChatGPT. The company had positioned itself, at almost no operational cost, as a forward-thinking artificial-intelligence enterprise at the precise moment the world's appetite for that story was peaking. Coverage in Business Insider, The Independent, Slashdot, and elsewhere framed the appointment as a genuine experiment in the future of corporate governance, and the framing stuck. The narrative was the asset.
The business beneath the narrative, meanwhile, was contracting. Revenue fell from about 7.1 billion yuan in 2023 to 6.0 billion in 2024, and then to 4.5 billion in 2025, a two-year decline driven largely by difficulties at the education subsidiary Mynd.ai and by cuts within gaming. The AI-plus strategy that Tang Yu personified doubled as a cost-discipline story: the company reported roughly 100 million yuan in staff-cost savings from continuing operations in 2024, raised its dividend, launched a 600-million-Hong-Kong-dollar shareholder return program in 2025, and saw its MSCI ESG rating upgraded from BBB to A. Yet the share price followed the fortunes of the broader Chinese technology sector and the company's shrinking top line rather than the promise embedded in its virtual executive. By late 2025 the stock had fallen to around ten Hong Kong dollars, and by early 2026 it traded between eight and ten, roughly half its 2023 peak, with a market capitalization near 643 million US dollars. Tellingly, the company's own strategic language migrated over the same period, quietly abandoning the metaverse and blockchain branding of 2021 and 2022 in favor of AI-plus-gaming and AI-plus-education — a pivot that tracked the industry-wide cooling of the metaverse story and left Tang Yu as one of the few artifacts of that era still standing.
And she is still standing. Tang Yu has remained Rotating CEO of Fujian NetDragon Websoft continuously since August 2022, with no reported removal, resignation, or change of title. She was named China's Best Virtual Employee of the Year in April 2024, and NetDragon collected metaverse-industry honors of its own that November. What is most revealing, however, is what has not happened around her. In nearly four years, no other major Chinese company has copied the model. The virtual human industry has expanded enormously — one estimate placed its core market at 33.9 billion yuan in 2024 — but that growth has concentrated overwhelmingly in outward-facing roles: virtual livestreamers, influencers, and customer-service agents that sell and serve. Not one has been appointed to a corporate executive position. The Tang Yu experiment was singular when it began and remains singular now.
It is also, notably, unregulated. China has assembled one of the world's most developed frameworks for governing synthetic media and artificial intelligence — the deep synthesis provisions of January 2023, the interim measures for generative AI of August 2023, mandatory content-labeling rules in September 2025, and draft provisions on human-like interactive AI services floated in December 2025. Every one of these instruments is aimed at consumer-facing services: content generation, deep synthesis, chatbot interactions, the protection of ordinary users. None addresses, permits, or forbids a virtual human sitting in a corporate C-suite. As an internal management tool with a ceremonial title, Tang Yu falls into a gap that the regulators have not yet had reason to close.
That gap is the whole story in miniature. The Tang Yu experiment occupies a singular position precisely because it hovers between categories — a governance innovation that governs nothing of consequence, a chief executive who reviews leave requests, a symbol of the AI future maintained by a company whose core business is shrinking. It has endured, unrescinded and unreplicated, because it costs almost nothing to keep and continues to return value as a communications vehicle. Whether it ever becomes more than that depends entirely on whether Tang Yu acquires the autonomous decision-making her own creators admit she lacks. Until then she remains what she has been since 2022: a highly visible emblem of ambition, a capable processor of routine administrative work, and the only virtual CEO in China.