Cosplay in Chinese culture (Hong Kong)

1990s

For local Chinese citizens, cosplay first showed up in a form similar to that of the present in Hong Kong in 1993, when a group of people rented a kiosk and one of them wore a costume on some animations to attract people passing 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-centered 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, bedizens 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.
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