China–ASEAN Expo
- Chinese name
- 中国—东盟博览会
- Organizers
- China's Ministry of Commerce
- Trade ministries of the ten ASEAN member states (东盟十国经贸主管部门)
- ASEAN Secretariat (东盟秘书处)
- City
- Nanning
- Held
- September
- Cadence
- annual
- Website
The China–ASEAN Expo (中国—东盟博览会) is an annual trade exposition held in Nanning, Guangxi, alongside the China-ASEAN Business and Investment Summit. Within this circuit it occupies a position nothing else does: it is where digital humans are deployed multilingually and outward, aimed at Southeast Asian markets rather than domestic ones.
The 22nd edition, held 17–21 September 2025, is both the best-documented and the point at which AI moved to the centre of the event. Its theme was “Digital Intelligence and Innovation empower Development”, and it introduced three firsts: an AI-themed pavilion, an “AI for Exhibitions” intelligent agent, and the first China-ASEAN Ministerial Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence. The edition drew more than 3,200 enterprises from 60 countries and signed 155 projects, of which 44 were “AI+” projects. The digital human deployments there were operational rather than demonstrative.
Guangxi Cloud (广西云) fielded a dedicated virtual presenter providing intelligent matchmaking services between Chinese and foreign merchants, and a Guangxi-based intelligent technology firm presented multilingual real-time subtitling alongside digital human emcees, positioning the technology as conference and cross-language communication infrastructure. Shiyou Technology (世优科技) operationalised virtual beings at the same edition for on-site multilingual generation, AI live streaming, cross-border digital marketing and influencer-economy tooling, while Tianxiaxiu (天下秀) demonstrated on-site generation of multilingual ASEAN digital humans through its Linggan Island platform. A multilingual “ASEAN-language medical avatar” was shown as a practical bridge for doctor–patient dialogue across languages in clinical settings — an unusually concrete use of the multilingual capability the expo exists to serve.
Cultural tourism is the other consistent thread. People’s Daily Online (人民网) developed “Guilin Ling Er”, a hyper-realistic 3D-modelled digital humanoid deployed as a tourism guide that supplies real-time destination information for Guilin, recommends personalised itineraries, answers visitor questions and connects audiences to virtual reality experiences via QR codes, placing it directly into museum, pavilion and exhibition visitor flows. In the expo’s tourism exhibition area, visitors have used handheld controllers to “enter” the Palace Museum’s Yangxin Hall and toured Guangxi by following a Liu Sanjie (刘三姐) digital human, alongside other “AI + cultural tourism” applications such as holographic-image travel photography — the regional folk figure rendered as a synthetic guide being a recurring pattern in Guangxi’s digital human programming.