Engineering Presence: Digital Humans and Sensory Regimes on China's AI-Driven Social Media Platforms

This study investigates how digital humans reconfigure sensory experiences and sociocultural meanings within China's platformised cultural economy. Adopting a sensory culture framework, the study integrates semi-structured interviews with industry practitioners, non-participant observations of emerging applications, and multimodal discourse analysis of digital human artefacts. The findings reveal that developers deploy three analytically distinct immersion strategies – perceptual, narrative, and emotional – to actively engineer user presence. When mapped onto specific digital human archetypes, these strategies materialise into three distinct sensory regimes: gendered healing, nationalist futurist, and transparency-driven trust cultures. These configurations illustrate how digital humans serve as expressive sociotechnical interfaces that operationalise scalable intimacy, articulate national ideology, and institutionalise platform trust. Ultimately, this study theorises presence not as a purely technical property, but as a relational construct negotiated at the intersection of technological mediation, institutional governance, and cultural imagination.