Tl; dr: Potato from the New World seemed to attract little attention from the East Asians, either in good reputation or in bad reputation (as you asked in OP), compared with the bursting popularity of sweet potato and maize in China.

The following citation is an excerpt from my old post (references are also shown in the linked post):

On the other hand, the potato also came to East Asia about the same time as the sweet potato, but it did not attract much attention from Asians soon as the sweet potato. To give an example, potato's Japanese name, Jagaimo is said to be derived from Java, Indonesia, then the base of VoC (established in 1602), but the traditional arrival date of the potato in Japan (the end of the 16th century) actually predates that of the first Dutch ship in Japan (1600). Nevertheless, the cultivation of the potato in colder climate also became popular in Japan (and China as well) in course of 17th and 18th century, albeit slowly.

I can also point out that potato did not mentioned once in the the famous Chinese agricultural treatise, Nong Zheng Quan Shu (Complete Treatise on Agriculture) in Late Ming period, in contrast to sweet potato. On the other hand, AFAIK there was no reluctance to potatoes itself found in the East Asian sources.

The general tendency/ target area of the agricultural expansion in East Asia may have had something to do with this general negligence to potatoes in Asia: South and Southwestern China saw many new land cultivated in late Ming and early Qing period, and it was not until 19th century that the (mainland) Japanese began to settle in Hokkaido, the northernmost big isle in Japan, in large-scale. In other words, the Asians could cultivate sweet potatoes and maizes in the most of their newly cleared land, located in not so cold climate as their European counterpart.