China goes through the looking glass as cosplay revolution takes off 

Her alternative world is bilibili.com, a Shanghai-based video-sharing platform that has attracted more than 150 million Chinese users with its mix of user-generated videos and animation inspired by Japanese ACG (animation, comics and games).
Spurred by a shortage of engaging youth-oriented content in China, where Facebook and YouTube are blocked and media and the Internet heavily censored, Chinese ACG is developing into a multibillion-dollar industry, drawing investment from tech titans such as Tencent and Alibaba.
And with amateur video uploads booming in smartphone-addicted China, platforms like bilibili are capitalising on the ease with which anyone armed with a camera can attain viral celebrity.
The twenty-something Yaorenmao, a pseudonym meaning “cat that bites people”, began to upload brief DIY videos from her home in the southwestern city of Chengdu in 2011. She dances to saccharine-sweet tunes in the clips, acting out an unfulfilled childhood dream of becoming a dancer. 

You can never leave 
    “I worked like a normal person after graduation from university, but normal life and work are just too boring,” she says, withholding her real name and occupation to keep her two lives separate.
Fans accumulated, often sending gifts or money, which she ploughs back into increasingly elaborate costumes and settings, including a Bt50,000 trip to Japan to shoot videos during the picturesque cherry blossom season.
Her fans approach her amateurish work “with a generous heart and encourage me because they want to see me getting better and better. It’s as if they are getting better and better themselves,” she says.
Based on hugely popular Japanese ACG sites like Niconico, bilibili hooks many with its live-comment feature, with waves of user remarks flowing across the screen in real time, often obscuring the videos being commented on.
Bilibili chairman Chen Rui says Chinese millennials born in the Internet age are increasingly inhabiting the virtual world.
“Everyone is afraid of loneliness and everyone wishes for a better world where you can speak your mind and don’t have to see people you don’t like,” Chen explains.
“Once you’ve seen the world bilibili created, you can never leave.”
Analysts estimate China’s ACG world has more than doubled in the past four years to around 300 million fans whose spending within the subculture averages more than 1,700 yuan (Bt8,600) per year, and some predict the industry could one day rival its Japanese forebears.

Going mainstream 
    Bilibili offers a bewildering array of material – 70 per cent of it user-generated – including role-playing, quirky personal videos like Yaorenmao’s, amateur commentary on lifestyle, tech, beauty, fashion and entertainment, games, and of course Japanese anime series.
Even the Communist Youth League has opened a bilibili feed containing videos extolling the ruling party.
Tencent launched its own bilibili-like site, Tencent Comics, in 2012, and is now partnering directly with bilibili to produce animated videos. E-commerce giant Alibaba, through its streaming site Youku Tudou, led a $50-million investment in bilibili rival Acfun in 2015.
Market analysis firm CIConsulting said recently China’s ACG market had become a fast-growing multibillion-dollar industry.
In 2013, just 800 people visited Bilibili’s Shanghai convention. This year’s event in July attracted more than 100,000, many dressed in comic-character costumes.
Zeng Hang, chief executive of a military-themed online programme called “Crazy Warfare-Show”, says the virtual realm is rapidly replacing the real world for countless Chinese millennials grappling with the country’s rapid economic, technological and social changes.
“They now live in tall buildings in Shanghai and they may not even know the kid next door,” Zeng says.
Bilibili’s often-frivolous content is a salve, he says.