The huli jing belongs to a family of East Asian fox-spirit beliefs rather than standing alone. Japan's kitsune and Korea's kumiho draw on the same root idea, an aging fox acquiring power and human shape, and centuries of cultural contact between China, Korea and Japan make it difficult to say which regional version came first or borrowed from which. The three are not identical, though, and this atlas keeps them as separate entries rather than collapsing them into one, because each developed its own distinct emphasis.
Japan's kitsune became entangled early with Shinto belief, most visibly through Inari, the deity of rice, fertility and prosperity, whose messengers are conventionally depicted as foxes; a kitsune in Japanese tradition can be read as sacred as easily as it can be read as a trickster. Korea's kumiho, by contrast, is told in far darker terms in most surviving folklore, most often as a predatory nine-tailed fox that must consume human organs to remain in human form, with far fewer sympathetic tellings than the huli jing's genuinely mixed record. The Chinese huli jing sits between these two poles, capable of Inari-adjacent benevolence in some stories and kumiho-adjacent predation in others, without settling into either as its default.
What the three share, and what distinguishes the whole family from most Western shapeshifter legends, is the emphasis on age and accumulated power rather than curse or bloodline: the fox is not born supernatural, it becomes so, slowly, the same logic that governs a great deal of East Asian folklore about long-lived animals more generally.