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In October 2023, a state-owned cultural enterprise in Beijing announced an initiative that captured, in a single gesture, the full sweep of China's ambitions for the digital human: the Nvwa Plan, a program to create one hundred digital human IPs rooted in Chinese cultural heritage and destined for global circulation. The name was chosen with care. Nvwa is the goddess who, in Chinese creation mythology, shaped the first humans from river clay, and the plan proposed to do in the digital realm what she accomplished in legend—to bring into being an entire population of figures embodying the richness of Chinese civilization. Two and a half years later, the plan's own 2023 to 2025 timeline has expired, and the most striking fact about it is how little can be verified to have happened. There are no progress reports, no milestone announcements, no revenue figures, and no formal assessment of whether any meaningful fraction of those hundred figures was ever built. The Nvwa Plan offers an unusually clean case study in the distance between institutional ambition and operational delivery, and in what that distance reveals about how China's cultural-technology projects are actually structured.
The plan's provenance is the first thing to understand, because it explains both its authority and its limits. It was launched by Zhongchuan Cultural Tourism, a subsidiary of China Cultural Media Group, a central state-owned cultural enterprise established in 2009 and supervised directly by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The parent group owns the China Culture Report, the ministry's official newspaper, operates the Wenlu China digital platform, and by September 2024 held designation as a Central Key News Organization. This lineage lends the Nvwa Plan a quasi-governmental credibility that a typical corporate venture could never claim. And yet the plan is not a State Council directive, nor a policy issued by any ministry. It is a business initiative from an SOE subsidiary—a distinction that turns out to matter a great deal when the question becomes one of binding force and enforcement.
That ambiguity was on full display at the launch itself. The plan was unveiled on October 19, 2023, at the Second Ecosystem Conference of Cultural Tourism China Metaverse in Beijing, where Zhongchuan's general manager, Ran Hang, presented it during a sub-forum. At the same event, Vice Minister of Culture and Tourism Du Jiang jointly inaugurated the broader metaverse platform alongside the group's chairman and officials from national journalism and heritage associations, and the ministry's Industry Development Department provided formal guidance for the umbrella project. This is the characteristic posture of China's central SOEs: ministerial endorsement without ministerial authorship, high-level political backing paired with commercial flexibility in execution. The plan enjoyed the imprimatur of the state while remaining, in legal terms, an enterprise's own undertaking.
The architecture Ran Hang laid out was genuinely thoughtful, and it is the plan's most durable contribution. The hundred digital humans were to be sourced through a tripartite structure. Twenty would be derived from China's top-tier cultural tourism IPs—nationally recognized heritage brands, scenic landmarks, and major institutions. Thirty existing digital human IPs already operating in the domestic market would be invited to join the ecosystem and take up residence in a metaverse "Center City." The remaining fifty would be co-created with local cultural tourism institutions across the country and jointly operated with them. This twenty-thirty-fifty breakdown was a hedge against the sheer difficulty of building a hundred high-quality digital humans from scratch on a compressed schedule; it blended original creation, aggregation of existing assets, and distributed co-production. The middle thirty, in particular, represented recruitment of figures that already existed rather than the manufacture of new ones—a quiet acknowledgment that the headline number depended partly on absorbing what others had already made.
The financial logic was equally deliberate. Rather than simple royalty splits, the plan proposed a co-investment model in which Zhongchuan would fund between twenty and eighty percent of a given project's cost, with the ratio calibrated to the IP's assessed commercial value, the partner's contribution of resources, and the derivative potential of the resulting figure. Revenue was projected to flow from social media operations, livestreaming sales by digital anchors, derivative products, and the integration of digital humans into cultural tourism language models for automated guidance and news broadcasting, with profits shared under a "co-win" framework. A companion blockchain system, the China Cultural Tourism Chain, was to handle intelligent revenue splitting and copyright sharing. And the Nvwa Plan did not stand alone: it was paired with a Pangu Plan, named for the deity who separated heaven and earth, which aimed to create a hundred digital-twin scenes. The mythological pairing was intentional—having joined hands to create people, the partners would also open heaven and earth, populating an ecosystem organized around the triad of people, scenes, and things.
The scaffolding assembled around all this was substantial. Formal agreements were signed with Baidu for computing infrastructure, with Ant Group for blockchain support, and with China Telecom through a cultural subsidiary. Unity China, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, and a federation arts center joined as ecosystem partners, and the broader alliance had reportedly grown past five hundred member organizations by late 2023. The vocabulary throughout echoed the national policy architecture—the National Cultural Digitization Strategy, the metaverse three-year action plan issued by five ministries in September 2023, the Digital China layout of early 2023—positioning the plan squarely within Beijing's stated priorities. On paper, few cultural-technology ventures have entered the world so richly appointed.
Against all this apparatus, the record of actual output is almost bare. Only a single digital human has been publicly identified as a product of the plan: Hua Shiyuan, a figure whose name evokes poetry and distant places, the culturally resonant phrase that unites culture and travel. Positioned as a digital employee, tour guide, and host, Hua Shiyuan was described at launch as still in early research and development, and no later reporting confirms that it advanced beyond prototype. No other specific figure has ever been attributed to the plan, and no announcement has explained how many of the hundred were achieved, whether the timeline was extended, or what became of the co-investment commitments. A single commendation—recognition of the broader metaverse platform as a newspaper-industry innovation case in July 2024—referenced the platform in general terms and said nothing of the Nvwa Plan at all.
Several forces plausibly account for this silence. The global metaverse narrative cooled sharply after 2023, as technology firms worldwide scaled back or rebranded their metaverse divisions, and in China generative AI and large language models rapidly displaced the metaverse as the dominant investment story through 2024 and 2025. Institutional attention and capital followed the new narrative. The regulatory ground also shifted: in April 2026 the Cyberspace Administration drafted measures requiring clear labeling of AI-generated digital humans, informed consent for the use of real likenesses, and restrictions on interactions with minors—rules that added compliance weight to precisely the kind of project the Nvwa Plan had been.
The name itself has since become crowded, which compounds the difficulty of tracking the plan's fate. Kuaishou runs a commercial Nvwa Digital Human Platform for AI livestreaming; the Chinese Academy of Sciences maintains an unrelated NyuWa genome project; and assorted software efforts share the label. Meanwhile, the cultural digital human landscape has filled with figures developed entirely independently of the plan—the National Museum's Ai Wenwen and Tong Gujin, the Peking Opera Theater's You Zixi, the Dunhuang-inspired maiden Tianyu, and China's first Laozi digital human, unveiled in Henan in May 2025. The heritage-to-avatar work the Nvwa Plan envisioned has proceeded briskly; it simply proceeded elsewhere, under other banners.
What remains, then, is a plan whose most lasting legacy may be conceptual rather than operational. It articulated a coherent framework for converting civilizational heritage into interactive digital IP at national scale, gave that framework a flexible investment structure and a mythopoetic branding that bound China's digital future to its ancient past, and secured the endorsement of a vice minister and the partnership of major technology firms. But it never carried binding policy status, and when the metaverse narrative that animated it evaporated, there was no mandate compelling anyone to see it through. Whether its quiet reflects unreported execution, a strategic pivot toward AI-native methods, or simple failure is a question the available record cannot resolve. For anyone tracking a digital human market projected to surpass 640 billion yuan in industry-driven value by 2025, the Nvwa Plan is a useful reminder to weigh documented aspiration against documented result—and to notice how often, in this field, the two diverge.