First-Generation Chinese Americans’ Support of the Republican Party

• In Event: Poster Session: Predicting Political Preferences & Civic Engagement
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Predicting Political Preferences

Abstract

Multiple national surveys show that Asian Americans are overwhelmingly more inclined towards the Democratic Party than the Republican Party. The existing political science scholarship explains Asian Americans’ Democratic partisan identification by their perception of the parties’ attitude towards immigrants and ethnic minorities: Asian Americans perceive the Democratic Party to be less xenophobic and more supportive of immigrants and ethnic minority groups’ rights (Kuo 2014). However, since 2015, a group of fanatic Chinese American supporters of former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party emerged and gained mainstream media attention for the huge influence they exerted upon Chinese social media and the Chinese American community. Many Chinese American fans of Trump and the Republican party are well-off first-generation immigrants that came from mainland China to the United States. They supported Trump and the G.O.P because of their shared conservative cultural values, anti-communist sentiment, preference for low tax, strong opposition against affirmation action programs, and support of tough police measures on crimes. While no scholarly research has been made to investigate the recent rise of Chinese Americans’ Republican partisan identification, political scientists have studied the sizable number of non-white supporters of Trump, arguing that it is their embrace of traditional racial hierarchies and gender norms that lead to their support of Trump and the Republican Party (Geiger and Reny 2023). All these explanations for Chinese Americans’ Republican partisanship make sense. However, one factor is neglected in current journalistic and scholarly discussions on the causes of first-generation Chinese Americans’ partisan identification, namely, “relative deprivation”, a sociological term that refers to “a feeling that you are generally ‘worse off’ than the people you associate with and compare yourself to” (Longley 2021). This term has been used to account for the domestic white majority’s right-wing populism in America and Europe (Pettigrew 2017; Cena et al 2022). Our proposed research “First-Generation Chinese Americans’ Affiliation with the Republican Party: A Relative Deprivation Explanation” plans to expand the use of “relative deprivation” to explain ethnic minorities’ support of the right-wing party. First-generation Chinese Americans immigrated to the USA mostly for better economic conditions rather than for political liberty (Huang et al 2019; Huang 2021). They left China for America in the 1980s and 1990s when China was in extreme poverty. Their income was indeed raised after arriving in America. However, their lack of linguistic proficiency and the glass ceiling for ethnic minorities prevent them from gaining elite status in America. Contrary to their expectation, China’s economy was booming for the last four decades since they left China. Many of those first-generation Chinese Americans’ peers who stayed in China turned out to be the largest beneficiaries of China’s economic prosperity and have advanced into the elite social class. As a result, a sense of relative deprivation emerged among first-generation Chinese Americans when they compare themselves with their peers in China. Our hypothesis is: the first-generation Chinese Americans’ relative deprivation compared with their peers in China is correlated with their partisan identification with the Republican party. They take side with the G.O.P, because the G.O.P’s harsher anti-China policy could contain China’s rise and reduce their sense of relative deprivation. We plan to use survey research to test our hypothesis. Considering the potential reluctance to admit their lower socioeconomic status relative to their peers in China, we will use “list experiment,” a survey method that employs an indirect and unobtrusive questioning technique to elicit truthful answers from respondents on sensitive topics. Our control variables are income, age, occupation, education level, experience of discrimination in the US, attitude towards affirmative action, LGBT, African Americans, police brutality, etc.) that may also shape their partisan attitude. The control variables are not the variables of interest in our research. But they may also influence Chinese Americans’ partisan identification. Therefore, they will be controlled by holding constant in my regression analysis in order to explore the real relationship between Chinese Americans’ sense of relative deprivation and their Republican partisanship. To the best of our knowledge, our research is the first empirical study of Chinese Americans’ Republican partisan attitude that can extend the explanatory power of “relative deprivation” for the rise of right-wing authoritarianism populism from the white majority to the non-white ethnic minority and complement existing studies on immigrants’ politics and provide fuller understanding of the sources of immigrants’ embrace of authoritarian populism.

Authors

• Gengsong Gao, University of Richmond

• Yue Hu, Tsinghua University