In 2025, Super Junior celebrated their twentieth anniversary, marking two decades of my own K-pop fandom. As a Chinese fan, K-pop produces ambivalent feelings of distance and intimacy: our cultural roots are entwined with Korea, yet our media walls are taller than ever. We love deeply but are often unseen; we give endlessly but receive little recognition from cultural producers. For Chinese K-pop fans, what does it mean to be a fan across shifting borders, persisting in affection even when that affection meets obstruction?

As South Korea’s close neighbor, mainland China was quick to embrace K-pop. Its popularity in China can be traced back to the late 1990s, when Korean music and television began to circulate widely through imported media. In 2000, the boy group H.O.T. held one of the first large-scale K-pop concerts in China, marking a milestone in the genre’s transnational expansion. [1] When Super Junior debuted in 2005, the group included Han Geng, the first Chinese member of a major Korean idol group, whose presence symbolized a new stage of cultural exchange. In 2008, the subunit Super Junior-M officially debuted, adding two Mandarin-speaking members and positioning itself as a “localized” K-pop group. Before 2016, K-pop idols were a familiar presence in mainland China. They appeared on popular variety shows, endorsed local brands, and performed at music festivals broadcast on national television. For many mainland Chinese fans, these moments of physical proximity made fandom feel tangible: the connection between idols and fans was sustained not only through digital messages but through shared space, gestures, and collective experience.

Following the Korean government’s decision to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in 2016, [2] the relationship between China and South Korea transformed, with China perceiving THAAD as a serious threat to its national territorial security. Although no enforced laws have restricted Korean artists from performing in China since 2016, Korean artists’ marketing activities in China have been cancelled by local companies. [3] Idols stopped appearing on Chinese screens, and their previously active Weibo accounts went silent. While Korean agencies and artists increasingly turned to platforms like YouTube and Instagram to reach global audiences, Chinese fans found themselves locked out of the global fan network by linguistic, infrastructural, and political borders. Still, desire persisted. Fans began travelling abroad—to Seoul, Tokyo, Bangkok, and Singapore—to attend concerts or fan meetings, often spending staggering amounts on flights, accommodation, and tickets. In my survey, more than one-fourth of respondents reported spending over 100,000 RMB (approximately 14,000 USD) a year on K-pop, a considerable amount relative to their reported monthly income. Despite these costs, Chinese fans contribute substantially to global album sales, digital rankings, and online visibility. 

Figure 1:Since 2019, several K-pop groups quietly resumed small-scale fan sign events in mainland China-yet public concerts are still not allowed.

However, affection coexists with disillusionment. Many interviewees expressed that, despite their financial and emotional investment, Chinese fans remain peripheral in the eyes of South Korean entertainment companies. While idols often learn Japanese or English to appeal to other markets, few make genuine efforts to engage Chinese fans beyond rehearsed greetings. This uneven relationship reveals the complex nature of the fan-idol relationship in transnational fandom: deeply felt yet structurally constrained. Here, I use the term ‘love’ not as a purely personal emotion but as an affective relation mediated by infrastructure and ideology-an attachment that binds fans to idols through care, labor, and repetition.

An incident that crystallizes this tension emerged during a recent event at a BOYNEXTDOOR concert in Thailand, which was abruptly cancelled after an earthquake. Many Chinese fans had flown to Bangkok for the show, investing heavily in flights, accommodation, and gifts. When the earthquake struck, some fans temporarily lost contact with friends at the venue and Chinese K-pop fans began posting missing-person messages on social media, seeking information and reassurance. Yet on X and Weverse, Chinese fans were met not with empathy but with criticism from international users, who accused them of “overreacting”, some international users posting: “Why Chinese K-pop fans are so problematic…I hate them.” “Please do not go China.” Such comments reflect how geopolitical tensions are refracted through everyday fan discourse, transforming affective connection into moral judgment. Meanwhile, based on my data, on X, posts written in Chinese saw their visibility sharply reduced, while fragments of controversial or sensational content were recirculated by accounts seeking engagement.

As BOYNEXTDOOR and its agency remained silent, concern turned into frustration. Hashtags calling for boycotts trended on Chinese platforms, and some fans publicly denounced the group. What intensified the anger was not only the lack of communication, but the sense of exclusion produced by infrastructural barriers. This moment marked a rupture in the parasocial relationship between K-pop fans and their idols. Horton and Wohl first coined the term “parasocial relationship” in the 1950s to describe the one-sided emotional bonds formed between audiences and media performers. [4] A key feature of parasocial interaction is “intimacy at a distance”, in which feelings of closeness are constructed through performance cues like eye contact, gestures, and conversational tone. [5] As Joanna Elfving-Hwang (2018) argues, these dynamics often evolve into parasocial kinship, where fans perceive themselves not just as spectators, but as protectors or family figures emotionally responsible for the well-being of the idol. [6} On Chinese social media platforms, it is common for fans to refer to idols as ”sons”,” daughters” “mothers,” or “fathers,” employing emotionally charged kinship metaphors that position the idol within a symbolic family structure. [7] These para-kin relationships between fans and celebrities further intensify fans’ sense of responsibility, control, and expectation toward the idol, making emotional entanglement and moral judgment more deeply embedded in everyday fan practice.

While parasocial relationships are common to global fandoms, for Chinese fans they are shaped by an additional layer of infrastructural and political effort. To sustain connection, fans need to overcome the “Great Firewall,” navigate fragmented platforms, and often travel abroad to participate in concerts and fan events. These acts are not merely logistical—they are a form of affective labour that transform emotional attachment into value. Following Sara Ahmed’s notion of affective economy, [8] we can see how emotion gains weight as it circulates through obstacles: each barrier crossed, each ticket purchased across borders adds to the affective surplus that defines the fan–idol bond. This surplus makes Chinese fans’ parasocial intimacy both more intense and fragile, accumulating affective value. Faced with mounting obstacles, such accumulated affect turns into a sharp sense of disillusionment. Affective attachment here becomes not only an act of connection but an economy of endurance—its strength measured by the labor it demands, and its pain magnified when reciprocity fails.

As Berlant argues, such attachments often persist even when they become obstacles to the very satisfaction they promise, a condition they term “cruel optimism.” [9] The affective attachment that sustains Chinese K-pop fans is not simply a source of joy but a structure of endurance. Despite repeated obstructions, cancelled concerts, limited access, and silence from idols, fans continue to hold on, because letting go would mean losing not only the object of affection but also the emotional world built around it. In this sense, their optimism becomes cruel: it keeps hope alive through the very mechanisms that deny fulfillment.

For such fans, to love is to navigate interruptions, to keep feeling across borders, platforms, and silences. Each act of affection, each click and translation, moves through systems that both connect and confine. Through this mediated intimacy, closeness is sustained by distance, devotion shadowed by obstruction. Emotion here circulates and accumulates, gaining weight even as it meets resistance. It becomes a form of cruel optimism-an attachment that endures precisely because it cannot be fulfilled. What the paradox of Chinese K-pop reception reveals is that fandom has never been a refuge from reality, but its most intimate reflection.

Footnotes

[1] Ki, W. (2020). K-POP - The Odyssey. New Degree Press. Retrieved from https://www.perlego.com/book/2938925/kpop-the-odyssey-your-gateway-to-the-global-kpop-phenomenon-pdf (Original work published 2020). Return to text.

[2] Zhang, Q., & Negus, K. (2020). East Asian pop music idol production and the emergence of data fandom in China. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 23(4), 493–511. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877920904064 . Return to text.

[3] Zhang, Q., & Fung, A. Y. H. (2017). Fan Economy and Consumption: Fandom of Korean Music Bands in China. In T.-J. Yoon & D. Y. Jin (Eds.), The Korean Wave Evolution, Fandom, and Transnationality (pp. 129–144). Lexington Books. Return to text.

[4] Horton, D., & Wohl, R. R. (1956). Mass communication and parasocial interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance. Psychiatry, 19(3), 215–229. Return to text.

[5] Cohen, J. (2003). Parasocial Breakups: Measuring Individual Differences in Responses to the Dissolution of Parasocial Relationships. Mass Communication and Society, 6(2), 191–202. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327825mcs0602_5. Return to text.

[6] Elfving-Hwang, J. K. (2018). K-pop idols, artificial beauty and affective fan relationships in South Korea. In A. Elliot (Ed.), Handbook of Celebrity Studies (pp. 190-201). Routledge. Return to text.

[7] Yan, Q., & Yang, F. (2020). From parasocial to parakin: Co-creating idols on social media. New Media & Society, 23(9), 146144482093331. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820933313; Li, X., & Hiramoto, M. (2025). Address terms in Chinese popular music fandom: Exploring stancetaking in social media discourses. Discourse, Context & Media, 63, 100837. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100837. Return to text.

[8] Ahmed, S. (2004). Affective Economies. Social Text, 22(2), 117–139. Return to text.

[9] Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press. Return to text.