ChinaJoy
- Chinese name
- 中国国际数码互动娱乐展览会
- Organizer
- China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association (中国音像与数字出版协会)
- City
- Shanghai
- Held
- August
- Cadence
- annual
- Websites
- 1798143541
ChinaJoy, formally the China Digital Entertainment Expo & Conference (中国国际数码互动娱乐展览会), is the largest gaming and digital entertainment exhibition in China, held annually at the Shanghai New International Expo Center. The 23rd edition ran from 31 July to 3 August 2026 under the theme “Level Up With AI”. It is the venue in this list that covers the virtual idol and ACG cohort — a segment the policy-and-trade circuit around it largely misses. Where CIFTIS and the Digital China Summit present digital humans as service-delivery endpoints, ChinaJoy is where they appear as performers, characters and game systems.
The clearest recent instance is Yuehua Entertainment (乐华娱乐) — which had previously acquired the virtual idol group A-SOUL from a ByteDance unit — launching HeyDream, a new AI-driven idol group that debuted at the show with AI-generated singing and dancing performances described as comparable to human idols. The 2026 edition also carried digital humans into games and production tooling: Tencent (腾讯) Games showcased AI-powered titles including “Digital Jingdezhen: Porcelain Capital Young Artisan”, built on AI digital humans and 3D generation, while the Snapdragon Theme Pavilion ran a Digital Avatar Workshop where attendees generated a 3D digital twin on site. ByteDance’s gaming division Nuverse (朝夕光年) featured “Asking No Commonplace” (不问凡尘), an ultra-realistic AI cultivation work built with Seedance 2.5 that lets players upload their own images to generate exclusive character posters or replace NPCs for deep interaction. On the production side, AniShort — a one-stop AI film and television production collaboration platform integrating script generation, storyboard planning and automated video generation — was featured at the 2026 show, with reported clients including Yitong Production (壹同制作), Ruosen Digital (若森数字) and Chongqing Bola (重庆博拉).
The show has served this role across editions rather than recently: at ChinaJoy 2023 the digital human Yingying, custom-developed by Zhongying Niannian (中影年年), demonstrated real-time AI-driven avatar generation and on-screen interaction with attendees, before being named to the inaugural roster of digital residents of Guangzhou’s Haizhu District in March 2023. Robotics increasingly shares the floor: the 2026 edition featured Unitree Robotics’ G1 humanoid performing combat manoeuvres and dance routines while autonomously recovering from being pushed, and Magic Atom (魔法原子) showing consumer robots for entertainment and guided-tour applications.