When Hallyu Meets Anti-Hallyu
Ji-Hyun Ahn / University of Washington Tacoma

Figure 1. The poster of KPop Demon Hunters

For more than two decades now, the Korean Wave (Hallyu) has achieved global success and popularity and has been widely celebrated as one of the most successful forms of non-Western popular culture. From K-pop, K-drama, and K-webtoons to K-food and even K-beauty, Korean media content and popular culture have traveled across regions and platforms with remarkable speed and volume, generating extensive scholarly discussions of significant topics in transnational media and cultural flow. In global media studies, Hallyu has often been positioned as a “contra-flow” to the “West-to-Rest” flow of cultural imperialism (Thussu, 2006; Kim, 2013, Jin, 2023). Viewed through this lens, the ascent of Korean cultural products—demonstrated in particular by the phenomenal success of K-pop groups such as BTS and the critical acclaim received by films such as Parasite ( Bong Joon Ho, 2019) and, more recently, KPop Demon Hunters [¹] (Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, 2025)—is decentering the contemporary global media flow. In this context, Hallyu has been perceived as a triumph of cultural hybridity in which a former colony negotiates and reappropriates Western modernity to forge distinct, globally competitive cultural products. Indeed, the role of cultural hybridity in shaping contemporary Korean popular culture has remained a key theoretical debate among Hallyu studies scholars (see Shim, 2006; Ryoo, 2009; Yoon, 2017).

However, even as Hallyu has become increasingly ubiquitous and successful in the global cultural landscape, a seemingly opposite phenomenon has emerged in the form of a backlash against Korea and Korean popular culture. It is no coincidence that anti-Hallyu sentiment is equally on the rise, particularly in Asia, where the phenomenon originated and has already achieved saturation. In Japan, anti-Korean hate speech has been a serious social issue for over a decade, often manifesting in street protests by far-right groups; in China, anti-Hallyu movements and boycotting Korean brands have been frequently weaponized under the party-state regime, most notably seen in the 2017 “Lotte boycott” and the unofficial cultural bans following the THAAD missile defense deployment; in the Philippines, the #CancelKorea hashtag movement occurred in response to some Korean netizens’ racist comments on a Filipino influencer’s tattoo. Together, these incidents demonstrate varying degrees of anti-Korean sentiment and movements across North and Southeast Asia with differing geopolitical triggers and socio-historical motivations.

Figure 2. An image of protestors in Tokyo against ethnic Koreans.

In this context, I argue that the variation in anti-Hallyu sentiment across the region deserves serious attention in order to advance critical dialogue about Hallyu and questions that scholars are struggling to answer about the simultaneous admiration and resentment it has provoked. While working on my current book project, which explores anti-Korean sentiment in postcolonial East Asia over the past decade, I have come to view the contemporary anti-Hallyu backlash not simply as nationalist reactions or regional cultural protectionism. Rather, I insist that it needs to be approached as what might be called the “post-Hallyu disjuncture” produced by subimperial displacement within an unequal global cultural hierarchy. Anti-Hallyu discourse often expresses resentment toward Korea, not because the country is a stable imperial center, but because its rising visibility has unsettled the established global cultural regime, which simultaneously privileges and challenges Western cultural authority. Put differently, the anti-Hallyu discourse critiques and, at the same time, reproduces colonial hierarchies, thereby projecting the growing social anxieties about national and global inequality onto Korea as a proximate and newly identifiable target.

Particularly revealing in the anti-Hallyu rhetoric is the fact that it often takes the form of complaints about overexposure to Korean popular culture and accusations of cultural ownership. Examples of this rhetoric include statements such as “Why is everything Korean now?” “It’s too global,” “It’s not original,” and “It borrows cultural items from others without credit.” This criticism does not necessarily involve the complete rejection of Korean popular culture but, rather, expresses a certain level of discomfort with what is perceived to be an inescapable presence. The notion that Korean popular culture is “too global” often implies that its current popularity is undeserved or unearned and, thus, points to the deeper contradiction that global cultural legitimacy is granted only conditionally. 

These considerations call attention to the fact that the global success of Korean popular culture is only affirmed and praised when it passes through a series of familiar mechanisms of validation, such as global streaming rights, Anglophone media coverage, international charts, and the awards circuits, where “world-class” status is conferred through recognition by Western institutions. By contrast, when Korean popular culture appears to claim cultural authority on its own terms, it is perceived as excessive and culturally arrogant. This disjuncture is particularly evident in the anti-Hallyu discourse in which the notion of cultural hybridity is often framed as evidence of Korea’s inability to produce “truly” original cultural products, maintaining a hierarchical view of global culture that places Western influences above Korean creativity. 

Figure 3. NBC/Peacock advertisement for the Billboard Music Awards featuring BTS.[²]

In this context, cultural hybridity is perceived differently, and it functions as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the cultural hybridity of the Korean Wave is celebrated for fostering artistic innovation and creativity and offering a compelling alternative to Western-centric cultural narratives. On the other hand, critics—both within and outside the anti-Hallyu forces—have frequently responded to this hybridity with skepticism based on the accusations of cultural plagiarism, appropriation, and lack of originality. This ambivalence recalls the colonial logic of mimicry, in which the colonized subject is desirable when it is “almost the same” but becomes threatening when the similarity approaches parity (Bhabha, 1994). Thus, Korean popular culture is welcomed as a global phenomenon provided that it does not appear capable of overturning global cultural hierarchies. The charge of being “too global” thus functions less as an empirical description than as a boundary-setting device for reasserting entitlement to define the terms of global popular culture and, thereby, what remains derivative and provincial. Put differently, non-Western pop can be welcomed as “global” only when it performs globality in ways that reinforce Western cultural authority.

I also want to emphasize that the anti-Hallyu discourses that are articulated through these languages and logics participate, often unintentionally, in the maintenance of colonial conditions of global cultural hierarchy. Even when expressed as local resentment or regional rivalry, critiques that delegitimize Korean popular culture because it is not remaining in its presumed place tend to reaffirm the assumption that genuine global cultural authority must still be judged and affirmed elsewhere, implicitly by Western standards. In this sense, the anti-Hallyu discourses have the potential to reproduce the very hierarchies that they appear to contest by redirecting dissatisfaction with global inequality toward a proximate cultural actor and away from the structural conditions that continue to govern cultural recognition. Hence, the decolonization of Hallyu depends on recognition of Korea’s ambiguous status as a former colony that has evolved into a global cultural power. By examining this ambiguity, we can better understand the tensions within coloniality that the anti-Hallyu movements have encapsulated. 

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Image Credits:

1. The poster of KPop Demon Hunters
2. Image of protestors in Tokyo against ethnic Koreans
3. NBC/Peacock advertisement for the Billboard Music Awards featuring BTS

References:

Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. Routledge.

Kim, Y. (Ed.). (2013). Korean Media Go Global. New York: Routledge. 

Jin, D. Y. (2023). Theorizing the Korean Wave: Introduction to New Perspectives. International Journal of Communication, 17, 1-8.

Ryoo, W. (2009). Globalization, or the Logic of Cultural Hybridization: The Case of the Korean Wave. Asian Journal of Communication, 19(2), 137-151.

Shim, D. (2006). Hybridity and the rise of Korean popular culture in Asia. Media, Culture & Society, 28(1), 25–44.

Thussu, D. K. (2006). Media on the move : global flow and contra-flow. London, UK: Routledge.

Yoon, K. (2017). Global Imagination of K-Pop: Pop Music Fans’ Lived Experiences of Cultural Hybridity. Popular Music and Society, 41(4), 1–17. 

Notes:

1. There has been debate over whether KPop Demon Hunters should be considered Korean content, given its production by Sony and its co-direction by a Korean-Canadian and an American filmmaker. This debate itself, however, highlights a significant evolution in Korean popular culture. For extended discussions of KPop Demon Hunters, see Flow, Volume 32, Issue 2.. [↩]
2. BTS took home three prizes at the 2022 Billboard Music Awards. The repetition of such narratives of Korean artists winning major awards within West-facing award systems raises the question of who has the power to define what counts as global popular culture.. [↩]