China is K-pop's second biggest export market. It is also one of its most complicated.
In 2025, Chinese fans spent $69.7 million on K-pop album exports alone, putting the country just behind Japan in the global rankings. On Weibo, hashtags tied to Korean idols regularly trend. Last year, "Seoul Syndrome" became a widely used phrase on Chinese social media, with users describing a specific kind of longing for the city after visiting. By almost any measure, K-pop's hold on Chinese fans is real and deeply rooted.
{img}And yet the disputes keep coming.
In 2020, Mamamoo's stage costumes drew accusations of borrowing too heavily from Hanfu, China's traditional clothing. Two years later, IVE's Jang Won-young described a phoenix motif hairpin at Paris Fashion Week as "very Korean-style" — a comment that sparked immediate pushback from Chinese users who see the phoenix as a symbol from Chinese mythology. These arguments are not new, and they are not going away.
Irene Jin, a Chinese fan who has followed K-pop for over a decade, remembers the pandemic era well. Groups were being called cultural thieves on Chinese social media. BLACKPINK, her favourite group at the time, was among those targeted. She felt conflicted. She also kept listening.
"I wasn't sure how to judge the cultural appropriation debate, and I didn't want to criticise the idols I liked," she said. "But eventually I learned to treat it simply as a source of entertainment."
{img}That experience — staying a fan while wrestling with the criticism — turns out to be fairly common. A study by researchers Wang Shiqi and Liu Hailong from Renmin University found that many Chinese K-pop fans navigate a middle ground during these disputes rather than choosing a side. Some treat controversies as misunderstandings. Others argue publicly that cultural exchange between the two countries is a good thing. Very few simply walk away.
Choi Jung-kiu, a partner at Boston Consulting Group Singapore and the author of a book on K-pop, attributes this resilience partly to timing. K-pop first took root in China in the 1990s through artists like Kim Wan-sun and Park Nam-jung, and was cemented by first-generation idol groups like H.O.T. Three decades of that kind of cultural presence builds something that a single political dispute does not easily undo.
He also points to China's own entertainment industry as a factor. Strict content regulations limit what domestic pop culture can say and show. K-pop, with its comparatively open range of stories and aesthetics, fills a gap.
Seo Kyoung-duk, a professor at Sungshin Women's University, sees the tension as partly a product of K-pop's own success. As Korean culture has grown in global prominence, he says, a form of cultural unease has emerged in China. The online criticism, in his reading, is less a rejection of K-pop and more a reaction to the sense that the cultural centre of gravity in Asia is shifting.
{img}For fans like Eloise Liu, who has followed Monsta X for two years, none of this changes the basic appeal. "Even if relations between China and Korea come under strain, I wouldn't deliberately pay less attention to Korean idols. I like them for who they are as people."
Jin puts it even more directly. K-pop led her to Korean films, literature and history. It changed how she thinks. "Despite all the criticism of K-pop on Chinese social media, it has become an important part of my cultural life," she said.