Her fans approach her amateurish work "with a generous heart and encourage me because they want to see me getting better and better. "I worked like a normal person after graduation (from university), but normal life and work are just too boring," she said, withholding her real name and occupation to keep her two lives separate.įans accumulated, often sending gifts or money, which she ploughs back into increasingly elaborate costumes and settings, including a 10,000 yuan ($1,500) trip to Japan to shoot videos during the picturesque cherry blossom season.
She dances to saccharine-sweet tunes in the clips, acting out an unfulfilled childhood dream of becoming a dancer. 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. 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 multi-billion-dollar industry, analysts say, drawing investment from tech titans such as Tencent and Alibaba.Īnd 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. Her alternative world is, 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). 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.