ABSTRACT
In the post-COVID era, the prevalence of "fandom nationalism" on Chinese social media has led to the development of two distinct attitudes toward Squid Game among Chinese netizens. Some nationalist netizens are dedicated to accusing Squid Game of plagiarism or dismissing it as a "cultural invasion." Another group of fans, due to the ever-tightening Chinese Internet governance, use fandom nationalism as a disguise to protect themselves against cyberbullying by declaring an anti-Korean political stance before posting positive comments about Squid Game. Therefore, two such divergent attitudes eventually led to a negotiation between fan culture and state power, where on the one hand fandom nationalistic practices were accepted by the mainstream for party-state propaganda, but on the other, in order to prevent being censored, fan culture had to be subordinated to the state's governance.