UC Irvine

According to the 2016 National Asian American Survey, the support for affirmative action has declined dramatically among Chinese Americans while it has remained stable among other Asian Americans. How do we explain the deepening divergence in Asian Americans’ support for affirmative action and the growing opposition to such policy among Chinese Americans and recent Chinese immigrants? Why does such sentiment resonate far stronger with the Chinese community in particular? And what are the prospects for Asian American pan-ethnic identity in politics and for Asian American politics more broadly? In this dissertation, I employ qualitative analysis and text analyses to unearth the factors that emerge and take shape as Chinese Americans become racialized and politicized around affirmative action, and how those processes defy conventional thinking about Asian Americans as political actors. I use the case of Senate Constitutional Amendment (SCA5) and affirmative action more generally to demonstrate the fragility of Asian American panethnicity in the face of changes in the dynamics of Asian American immigration. More specifically, I argue that the fourth-wave Chinese immigrants are more dubious of affirmative action policies than are Chinese immigrants who arrived in earlier waves, US-born Chinese Americans who trace their ancestry to earlier migration waves, and other Asian Americans. The more recent Chinese immigrants are, thus, closer to the modal position of whites than they are to other racial and ethnic minorities. Moreover, broad anti-racist and anti-xenophobic messaging does not work well for this growing population who mostly see themselves located at the periphery of America’s racial hierarchy. Instead, the Republican Party’s message of hard work, capitalism, and freedom more makes sense to this segment of immigrant population. This has implications for the growing alliance between Asian Americans and the Democrats. I also find, for these Chinese newcomers, the term “Asian Americans,” in fact, seems to hold no significant meaning other than a racial classification and political category to advance their interests. In all, this dissertation contributes to providing the fourth-wave Chinese Americans with the space to articulate what race, ethnicity and politics means to them and reflects a critical mix of their racial positioning, adherence to racial, ethnic and “classically American liberalism” political ideologies, internalization of values and norms from place of origin, and their fraught relationship with the model minority myth when it comes to the debate of affirmative action.