Chinese Culture

Cosplay in Chinese culture
As anime is becoming more popular in China, Chinese have started to become involved in cosplay, as the Japanese and the Western countries.
Taiwan
Beginning–1990
Taiwan’s first cosplays with the form similar to present started in 1990, but the people involved is only for temporary, and without specializes, and there is too few people to participate cosplay, so there were not so much details being recorded.
1991–1997
Between this period, most of the cosplayers started to make their costumes themselves. But it’s still too few professionals.
During 1992-1993, the time was harsh, but this allows them to make costumes by themselves, even the accessories.
In 1994 to 1997, the environment of cosplay began to grow. There were almost a few hundred cosplayers in Taiwan.
In 1997, the once a two-year doujin event started, and cosplay has becoming more popular.
1998–2005
This is how cosplay become more popular and well-known. Cosplayers’ community rises sharply. Most of them started to go private photo takings, other than public events. The Yam blog and Wretch blog for assembling people with the same interest rise abruptly. At the same time there is the launch of the discussion on the differences between several splendid attire culture such as cosplay dressing and various styles of lolita fashion.
2006–present
A magazine only introducing cosplay COSmania was first published in 2006 February. Cosplay becomes much popular then. Most of the Taiwanese was well-known with the word cosplay, but the animadversion on cosplay’s concept still exists.
Hong Kong
The cosplay sphere in Hong Kong are separated as two sides, with one mainly including Chinese citizens (sometimes Japanese also included) and one mainly including non-Chinese citizens (such as Europeans and Americans). The ambience between two sides are different at all, since the status of Chinese-citizen-mainly side has been turning.
1990s
For local Chinese citizens, Cosplay first showed up with the form similar to present in Hong Kong in 1993, which was a group of people that rented a kiosk, and one of them wears a costume on some animations to attract people passed by.
Since 1997, more and more local events are held, such as Comic World HK.
2000–present
After the 1990s, the multimedia started to keep an eye on cosplays. Most of the universities in Hong Kong also launched their own cosplay events, and the most popular one is the Cosplay Party by Hong Kong University. Nowadays there are almost 20 events held with cosplay sessions every year in Hong Kong.
With an aid of easy accessibility of multimedia and the Internet, cosplay has been being far more popular and familiar. The number of people taking part in cosplay has also increased sharply.
However, some of the conservative cosplayers think that, the standard and behavior of the new-coming cosplayers with less experiences or morals are unacceptable, and consider those are interfering the conservatives’ public image. Some of those immoral conservatives began to do attack in speech, even creating violent rebellions or triad-society-like behaviors to approach their external political purposes. Moreover, someone created several biased words to describe for those who cosplay with the discrepancy between the appearance of the cosplayer and the character, and for those who cosplay without able to understand the character that he/she is impersonating, even unilaterally fabricating themselves-centred inflexible so-called definitions of cosplay to force all the people to obey it without condition.
This makes the conflict among some cosplayers, and threatens the harmonious and rational environment of Chinese-citizen-mainly side cosplay sphere in Hong Kong. Such the conditions have been criticized by other cosplayers, netizens and some citizens. Some of the Hong-Kong-resided cosplayers even change to participate the cosplay events in other cities, such as in Macau and Guangzhou.
Events in Hong Kong
Commercial Events
Rainbow Gala
Comic World HK
ACGHK
Asian Game Show
Events held in universities
Art Festival (藝墟) by Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Autumn Festival (秋祭) by City University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong University Cosplay Party
The Never Ending Vow (未完之約) by Chinese University of Hong Kong
Dating at UST (科大之約) by Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Private events
It is not really an event, but someone inviting other cosplayers (mostly impersonating the characters from the same issue) privately, and go together a place to cosplay. The purpose for this kind of gathering is mainly for photography. The relatively popular places for such the functions in Hong Kong could be such as Tai Po Waterfront Park or Kowloon Park.
Mainland China
The topic of cosplay in mainland China is mainly from Chinese classical issues and modern Japanese anime issues. Sometimes other exotic issues are also included.
Guangdong Province
In 2002, the YACAanimation organization was founded, and began a stage for cosplay. Afteron, there is some public cosplay events held every year in Guangzhou.