Sinophobia is on the rise in South Korea. Cafés have posted signs refusing Chinese customers, protesters regularly take to the streets to denounce the Chinese Communist Party, and comment sections beneath viral videos of misbehaving tourists quickly fill with Chinese flags – often long before anyone knows who the individuals involved actually are.
This sentiment is not confined to a vocal fringe. Since 2020, survey data has consistently shown that roughly 80 percent of South Koreans hold unfavorable views of China, a figure that peaked at approximately 85 percent in 2025. Anti-Chinese sentiment has become firmly mainstream.
At first glance, this hostility may seem unsurprising. South Korea exists in permanent tension with the North, and China’s role in the Korean War, as well as its continued support for the Kim regime, is widely understood. Generations of Koreans have grown up under the shadow of Pyongyang, and the ideological alignment between North Korea and the Chinese Communist Party is often seen as fundamentally incompatible with South Korea’s political system and security interests.
That explanation, however, falls short. If ideological rivalry or war memory were the primary drivers of public hostility, negative views of China would have remained consistently high over time. That’s not true. In both 2004 and 2016, unfavorable views of China hovered between 35 and 45 percent, and China was frequently described as one of South Korea’s closest diplomatic partners. As recently as a decade ago, hostility toward China was roughly half of what it is today.
The scale and speed of this shift point to a change not only in South Korea’s external environment, but in how political attitudes are now formed and reinforced domestically – particularly through social media.
Since diplomatic normalization in 1992, Sino-Korean relations have moved through several distinct phases. The early years are often described as a honeymoon period. Trade expanded rapidly, South Korean firms invested heavily in China’s manufacturing sector, and public opinion largely mirrored this optimism. Unfavorable views of China remained near 35 percent, while Beijing was often portrayed as a key economic and diplomatic partner.
By the early 2000s, this image began to fracture. One flashpoint was the so-called “garlic war,” when South Korea imposed emergency safeguards against a surge of low-priced Chinese garlic imports. Beijing retaliated by threatening restrictions on Korean exports, exposing many Koreans to China’s growing willingness to employ economic coercion through trade retaliation.
Another dispute proved even more destabilizing symbolically. China’s Northeast Project, launched in 2002, reclassified the ancient Goguryeo kingdom– widely regarded in both Koreas as foundational to Korean identity – as a local Chinese ethnic regime. The backlash in South Korea was swift, and elite perceptions of China deteriorated sharply following the Goguryeo controversy.
Despite these tensions, the damage proved reversible. By 2016, unfavorable views of China had fallen back into the 30-percent range, and then-President Park Geun-hye’s attendance at China’s 2015 Victory Day military parade symbolized a renewed, if cautious, diplomatic warmth.
The turning point came after 2016. Following North Korea’s hydrogen bomb test, Seoul agreed to deploy the U.S. THAAD missile defense system on land owned by the Lotte Group. China responded with informal but highly effective economic retaliation. Lotte’s operations in China were shut down through regulatory pressure, inflicting billions of dollars in losses. Restrictions on tourism and cultural exports soon followed.
These measures had a profound impact on public perceptions. In a 2022 survey,67 percent of South Koreans cited economic coercion as the primary source of their negative views toward China. Yet economic retaliation alone does not explain how episodic grievances hardened into a durable, identity-laden hostility that now permeates everyday political discourse.
What makes the current wave of Sinophobia different is not just its intensity, but the infrastructure through which it circulates. Contemporary grievances are filtered and amplified through algorithm-driven platforms that reward outrage, identity signaling, and moral polarization.
False narratives alleging Chinese interference in South Korean domestic politics have spread widely online, often amplified by misleading or manipulated content circulating through Korea’s digital media ecosystem as detailed in AFP’s fact-check reporting on anti-China disinformation in South Korea. Research published in the American Journal of Public Health has shown that threat-based elite framing can significantly intensify hostility toward perceived out-groups by linking threat rhetoric to measurable shifts in exclusionary attitudes, particularly when these narratives are reinforced through repetition and engagement-driven amplification on social media platforms.
Earlier cultural skirmishes over kimchi and hanbok illustrate this dynamic clearly. These disputes unfolded almost entirely online, where historical nuance was quickly replaced by symbolic competition and nationalist framing. In this environment, China becomes less a geopolitical actor than a civilizational antagonist – an identity easily mobilized for domestic political gain.
The rise of figures such as Lee Jun-seok, whose confrontational political style resonates strongly with younger male voters, reflects how identity-based China discourse can legitimize more polarizing political alternatives among South Korea’s youth electorate. Social media does not merely reflect these shifts; it actively structures the incentives that sustain them.
The concentration of political discourse within a small number of technology platforms poses growing challenges for democratic governance. Platforms exert disproportionate influence over agenda-setting, yet efforts at regulation are frequently framed as infringements on free speech, while their economic centrality renders meaningful intervention politically costly, according to policy analysts.
Comparative cases suggest that digital mobilization is not inherently nativist. Values-based online mobilization in the United Kingdom under Green Party leadership and anti-establishment campaigning in New York during Zohran Mamdani’s election show that social media can be used without relying on ethnic scapegoating. At the same time, poorly executed digital strategies – such as those seen in parts of British party politics – can exacerbate polarization rather than mitigate it, as critics have noted.
As rhetoric surrounding China hardens, social media has become a central arena in which foreign policy preferences are formed and constrained. If South Korea’s leadership intends to preserve diplomatic flexibility toward Beijing, it can no longer treat public opinion as an external force. Digital platforms have transformed episodic disputes into enduring identity narratives that increasingly shape electoral incentives and policy horizons.
Ignoring this terrain risks locking future administrations into adversarial postures that outlast any single crisis. Managing relations with China in the coming decade will therefore depend not only on diplomacy and deterrence, but on whether South Korea can develop credible strategies for navigating the digital politics of nationalism.
