The city that made the world fall in love with a monster

Next sentence Perhaps sparking a global cry of joy: A game made by a Chinese company in Vietnamese factories, designed by a Dutch artist in Belgium, inspired by Hong Kong’s indie gaming culture, and gone viral thanks to a Thai pop star, has turned into the biggest Gen Z cultural trend of 2025.

That obnoxious sentence is the story of Lapopo, the cute and terrifying stuffed monster who took the world by storm this summer. You must have seen this trend by now, but most people are still unaware of the decade-long global story that led to it. Last week I posted a A special story About my journey into the heart of Lapopo, how this moment of cultural mania came about, and where it might go from here.

It’s an international story in nature, but it’s not the first time we’ve seen it. Think about the way the world happened Pokemon Go Or Kpop bands like BTS and Blackpink. These are all examples of regional cultural industries that have succeeded in finding global audiences for their work. But what’s new about Labubu is that it’s the first time a Chinese company has been able to engineer this level of success and cultural influence.

Sure, there are always coincidences at work for a success of this magnitude, but the more I write about this story, the more I also realize the historical and economic reasons why Lapopo, and the toy company behind it, PopMart, ended up in this place. In many ways, they are similar to other Chinese technology companies that have moved from producers of counterfeit products to global name brands, moving up the value chain while turning manufacturing experience into valuable technological know-how.

Lapopo’s story in Hong Kong begins in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the city became a toy manufacturing hub. From Mattel and Disney to Japan’s Bandai, almost every major toy company has been outsourcing production to factories in Hong Kong, due to lower labor costs there.

Howard Lee, founder of a Hong Kong game studio called How2Work, told me how that period of history shaped his childhood. “Many parents go to factories and return home outsourcing work such as hand-drawing toys at home,” he says. It was also easier for people to buy cosmetically or functionally defective toys directly from factories, so a generation of children like Lee grew up with relatively easy access to defective dolls and other toys, leaving them more eager for better dolls that they couldn’t afford.