Where YouTube meets Japanese animation: the video sites giving young Chinese an escape from the tedium of everyday life
Rapid growth of sites blending role-play, film and gaming gives millennials a chance to create their own fantasy worlds
Feeling trapped in her “boring” life as a member of China’s modern workforce, “Yaorenmao” escapes online, where she prances and preens in cosplay outfits for her 1.3 million fans.
Her alternative world is Bilibili.com, a Shanghai-based video-sharing platform that has attracted more than 150 million Chinese users with its eclectic mix of user-generated videos and animation largely inspired by the Japanese world of ACG (animation, comics and games).
Spurred in part by a shortage of engaging youth-oriented content in China, where Facebook and YouTube are blocked, and media and entertainment outlets are heavily censored, Chinese ACG is developing into a multibillion-dollar industry, analysts say, drawing investment from tech titans such as Tencent and Alibaba.
With amateur video uploads booming in smartphone-addicted China, platforms like Bilibili are fuelling and capitalising on the ease with which the average Chinese armed with a camera can attain viral celebrity.
The twenty-something Yaorenmao, a pseudonym meaning “cat that bites people”, began a few years ago 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.