[We should] increase our efforts to cultivate … [metaverse] talent, like attracting metaverse businesses from leading domestic or even international enterprises to settle in Xiamen … or promoting cooperation between schools … through resource sharing or joint curriculum development.
Guo Shihui (郭诗辉), Xiamen University’s School of Information Science and Engineering, in “Xiamen Publishes Three-Year Action Plan for Metaverse Industry Development: Enterprises Innovate Independently and Develop the Metaverse Industry” (厦门发布元宇宙产业发展三年行动计划：企业自主创新 发展元宇宙产业), Xiamen Television, April 10, 2022
Local governments are experimenting with emerging digital concepts like the metaverse not simply to chase trends, but to draw talent and technical capacity, domestic and foreign, into carefully structured, regulated, and strategically aligned digital environments.
Another Chinese city has moved deeper into the metaverse, this time Xiamen, with the release of a new three-year action plan (here, here, and here) aimed at building a locally anchored metaverse industry.
Jointly issued on March 18, 2022 by the Xiamen Municipal Bureau of Industry and Information Technology and the Xiamen Municipal Big Data Administration, the Xiamen City Metaverse Industry Development Three-Year Action Plan (2022–2024) (厦门市元宇宙产业发展三年行动计划) reflects a broader pattern now visible across China: municipal governments using the “metaverse” as an organizing framework to attract external capabilities (talent, intellectual property, and advanced technical know-how) into domestically governed digital ecosystems.
The plan identifies five core objectives:
- Cultivate a metaverse industrial ecosystem by 2024, supporting innovation and experimentation;
- Attract revenue-generating enterprises that have mastered key metaverse-related technologies;
- Promote collaborative R&D among enterprises, universities, and research institutes;
- Develop metaverse application scenarios, including use cases incorporating Xiamen-specific cultural and economic elements; and
- Strengthen regulatory governance, including the establishment of a metaverse industry alliance.
Although the plan does not single out foreign firms or experts in headline language, several of its priorities, particularly enterprise attraction, collaborative research, and ecosystem formation, implicitly depend on drawing in non-local and foreign talent, advanced platforms, and globally relevant technical standards. This mirrors a familiar pattern in China’s emerging technology policy: openness at the talent and capability level, combined with local institutional anchoring and Party-state oversight.
Xiamen’s move is also best understood in the context of inter-city competition. With the metaverse still loosely defined at the national level, local governments are racing to stake early claims, establish pilot ecosystems, and position themselves as future hubs for next-generation digital industries.
Notably, while the National Development and Reform Commission did not designate the metaverse itself as a category or subcategory of New Type Infrastructure (NTI) in April 2020, many of the technologies required to support metaverse development, cloud computing, data platforms, and advanced networking, are already core components of the NTI framework. In this sense, municipal metaverse plans like Xiamen’s are less speculative bets than capability-attraction vehicles operating squarely within China’s existing digital infrastructure and governance system.
Taken together, the Xiamen plan illustrates how local governments are experimenting with emerging digital concepts not simply to chase trends, but to draw talent and technical capacity, domestic and foreign, into carefully structured, regulated, and strategically aligned digital environments.