Articles
This series by Marcus L. Endicott maps the rise of “digital humans” - AI-powered avatars - as a load-bearing layer of China’s emerging techno-social order. Rather than treating them as a single product, it follows them across culture and commerce, classrooms, hospitals, tourism and government, and into the infrastructure, patents and strategy beneath them. The most recent pieces turn to law and licensing: how China decides what a virtual performer is, who owns it, and who answers when it misleads. Its real subject is less a technology than a method: how one country is using avatars as connective tissue across culture, commerce, governance, and, finally, physical embodiment.
- China Spent October Deciding Who Owns a Face
- Behind Every Chinese Digital Human May Lurk the Mind of an Ancient Greek
- China’s AI Doctors Are Always Available but Still Don’t Know How to Care for You
- Everything the West Missed About China’s First Licensed Virtual Idol
- The Month China Decided Its AI Stars Legally Do Not Exist
- China’s Digital Humans Reached Prime Time and the Statute Book
- TaoMate and the Limits of China’s Real-Time Avatar Convergence
- Tencent Built a Digital Human From 30k Documents and 5k Porcelain Shards
- The Real-Time Turn in China’s Digital Humans
- The Week China Said Goodbye to Its AI Companions
- Copyright, Not Trademark, Is How China Protects Digital Humans
- China’s Digital Human Industry Grew Up in the First Half of 2026
- The Executive Behind China’s Most Commercial Digital Human
- China, the West, and the End of Work as the Price of Survival
- China Is Cloning Its Best Professors to Teach Millions Online
- Inside the AI “Media Brain” Turning a Chinese Province’s News Into Immersive Worlds
- Digital Humans and the Rise of China’s AI Micro-Drama
- When AI Brings the Dead Back to Speak at Their Own Funerals in China
- How Digital Humans Became the Beating Heart of China’s Red Metaverse
- China’s Vision of an Intelligent Society Is Being Built Around the Rise of the Digital Human
- China’s Digital Humans Walk Into the Gallery on International Museum Day
- China Tourism Day Is Starting to Look a Lot Like Digital Human Day
- Inside WeChat’s Mini-Program Stack Where Digital Humans Now Greet China’s Travelers
- Digital Humans Are Reshaping China’s 2.14 Trillion Dollar Smart Tourism Market
- China’s Metaverse Industrial Map Comes Into Focus
- China’s Digital Human Patents Quietly Pivot from Novelty to Production
- China’s Quiet Restructuring of the Classroom Around Digital Humans
- China’s Mental Health Digital Humans Are Being Built Into an Integrated Model of Social Governance
- How Cyber Civilization Shapes China’s Digital Human Industry
- Digital Humans Take Over China’s Tourism Sites
- How Digital Humans Took Over Chinese Esports
- China Is Building Its 6G Network Around Digital Humans
- Inside China’s Hospital Avatar Revolution
- OpenClaw and the Digital Human Layer in China’s 2026 AI Agent Boom
- China’s Social Deployment of Digital Humans Prefigures Humanoid Robots