2026 Pujiang Innovation Forum Culture and Technology Integration Special Forum was held in Shanghai

China News Service, Shanghai, September 12 (Feng Jun) The 2026 Pujiang Innovation Forum was held in Shanghai from September 11 to 14, with Hunan serving as the guest province. On the afternoon of September 11, as the first special forum independently hosted by the guest province since the forum was founded, the 2026 Pujiang Innovation Forum Culture and Technology Integration Special Forum was held at Shanghai Zhangjiang Science Hall.

On September 11, the 2026 Pujiang Innovation Forum Culture and Technology Integration Special Forum was held in Shanghai. Photo courtesy of Hunan Provincial Department of Science and Technology

The special forum is hosted by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Hunan Provincial People's Government, and the Shanghai Municipal People's Government, and hosted by the Hunan Provincial Department of Science and Technology and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Experts, scholars, representatives from enterprises and government departments at home and abroad gathered at the scene to communicate around the global trend of the integration of culture and science and technology, China's path and Hunan's practice, and jointly explore the development path of new cultural productivity.

The integration of culture and technology is rewriting the underlying logic of the cultural industry. In recent years, Hunan Province has insisted on taking culture as its soul and science and technology as its wings, implementing technology-empowered cultural industry innovation projects, focusing on audio and video content, audio and video equipment, digital cultural museums, animation and games and other advantageous areas to make precise efforts. Hunan has laid out the construction of high-level platforms such as the Malanshan Audio and Video Laboratory, gathering more than 5,000 upstream and downstream enterprises and more than 68,000 industrial talents; it has built the world's first large-scale Chinese historical cultural museum model "Mountain and Sea Xuanji", and completed the digital reproduction of 79,000 precious cultural relics. In 2025, the province's audio and video industry revenue will reach 290 billion yuan.

At the forum, many experts dissected the trend of the digital audio-visual industry from a technical perspective. Ding Wenhua, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and chair professor of Shenzhen University, shared the title of "New Generation Digital Creative Technology Empowers the Development of Digital Audiovisual Industry". He believed that artificial intelligence is becoming the core enabling point of the digital creative industry and promoting revolutionary changes in content production methods. Marc Aurel Schnabel, Dean and Professor of the School of Design at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, proposed the concept of "cultural intelligence" to explore how human-machine collaboration can generate new creative practices and cultural innovations. Li Jiaping, vice president of strategic development of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, believes that what artificial intelligence lacks is not computing power, but culture. "Artificial intelligence needs to understand human culture and civilization."

AI is driving a scale leap in content production. Hunan Radio and Television recently launched China's first AIGC long drama "Journey to the West", which received over 3 billion views on the entire network within 5 days of its launch. Tu Yongfeng, director of the Malanshan Audio and Video Laboratory, said that the laboratory's AI video translation has completed 13,000 short plays, and the AIGC content production platform serves more than 100 companies.

Many guests attending the meeting believed that AI governance is not to put the brakes on innovation, but to put a safety belt on innovation. It should promote the healthy development of the industry with standards first and hierarchical mutual recognition. Hunan’s pioneering exploration provides a fresh example of China’s path to the integration of culture and technology. (over)