China Meta Guide

Global Digital Economy Conference

Chinese name
全球数字经济大会
Organizers
City
Beijing
Held
July
Cadence
annual
Website

The Global Digital Economy Conference (全球数字经济大会) is an annual Beijing conference on the digital economy, co-hosted by the People’s Government of Beijing Municipality, the Cyberspace Administration of China, the National Data Administration, Xinhua News Agency and the United Nations Development Programme. It has run five sessions as of 2025, when it opened on 2 July at the China National Convention Center under the theme “Building a Digital-Friendly City”. Its significance to digital humans rests on a policy rather than a showcase. Its 2022 edition was the public release venue for the Beijing Action Plan for Promoting the Innovative Development of the Digital Human Industry (《北京市促进数字人产业创新发展行动计划（2022-2025年）》), issued on 8 August 2022 by the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology (北京市经济和信息化局) and described in official Chinese commentary as the first municipal-level policy in China dedicated specifically to the digital human industry, and more broadly as the country’s first industry-specific support policy for the sector (国内出台的首个数字人产业专项支持政策). The plan set a target of growing Beijing’s digital human industry scale beyond RMB 50 billion by 2025, the figure against which subsequent Beijing initiatives — including the Beijing Municipal Digital Human Base (北京市数字人基地) in Chaoyang District — have been positioned.

Later editions function as a launch and demonstration platform. At the 2026 conference Shengshu Technology (生数科技) formally released Vidu S1, described as the first real-time interactive video large model, supporting voice conversation with AI characters whose lip movement, micro-expressions and gestures synchronise at latencies below 0.3 seconds, with indefinite dialogue duration and character consistency maintained throughout. The same edition carried a medical health special forum at which Shanghai Yinghe Medical Pulse Intelligent Technology (上海影禾医脉智能科技有限公司) presented its Xiaojun Doctor 2.0 cranial CT agent, and saw Guanwei Intelligent Technology (观薇智能科技(北京)有限公司) demonstrate a health-detection instrument guided by a digital human on a large screen that walks users through facial and ocular examination in more than ten languages. Other 2026 releases included Red Song Group (红松集团)’s “Red Pine Time Diary” (红松时光日记), an AI lifestyle-recording product for elderly users in which a digital human assists with content creation from photographs or voice, and an AI digital employee engineering delivery platform announced by Beijing Future Chaotu Technology (北京未来潮汐科技有限公司) founder Liu Yefei for building proprietary digital employees at small and medium enterprises. NetEase (网易) opened a global submission call for AI short drama videos under the 2026 conference, framing digital human performers as an emerging replacement for low-budget human actors in that format.