Water Digital Twins of China: Hype or Revolution

A virtual replica of a sluice. Source: Cimpro on CSDN.

If you ask Chinese water managers about the most popular phrase in their sector in the past few years, perhaps most of them would tell you it’s ‘digital twins’.

A digital twin, according to McKinsey, is “a digital replica of a physical object, person, system, or process, contextualised in a digital version of its [realtime] environment”. This definition highlights two key elements of the concept: digital replica and realtime context.

The concept was relatively new to the Chinese water sector. If you search for “digital twins” and “water conservancy” in Chinese on CNKI, China’s centralised database for academic publications, you will notice that the concept only began attracting substantial attention after 2021. Publications on this topic grew quickly to exceed 1,000 in 2025. The abruptness of this shift reflects how research and technical priorities in China’s water sector can be rapidly reoriented towards concepts endorsed by senior political leadership, in this case through Water Minister Li Guoying’s visible interest in digital twins.

Monthly publications recorded by CNKI. If you search for 'Digital Twin' (数字孪生) and 'Water Conservancy' (水利) on cnki.net, the number of publications found grew quickly after 2021.

Minister Li is zealous in digital twins of river basins. After becoming China’s water minister in early 2021, he brought digitisation and smart systems, as one of the keys to his shake-up plan, to the top of the ministry’s agenda. For his understanding of smart water management, digital twins of river basins are cornerstones to build everything on. They should be “full-factor digital mappings of the physical river basins with dynamic real-time interaction and fusion of information between the physical and the digital sides.” Enthusiasm from the top leadership quickly turned into real-world investment in the field. Though public data is difficult to collect, procurement and bidding records show a clear peak in investment at the end of 2024, but quickly turned into a sharp decline in 2025.

Monthly investment (in million Chinese RMB) and number of projects in water digital twins in China. Data are based on public procurement and bidding records collected by Qianlima.com. The investment reached its peak in 2024 and started a sharp decline in 2025. The data collection includes procurements with disclosed price only.

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