The Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action this July, marking a victory for Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), a legal advocacy group whose supporters include a large number of Asian Americans, especially Chinese Americans. Since the decision, many critics have argued that the Asian American complainants and supporters of SFFA effectively acted against their own interests. “The small number of Asians against affirmative action,” accused the nonprofit group Asian American Advocacy Fund, had been used as ‘pawns’ by “the white supremacist agendas behind those lawsuits.”
Had Chinese-American SFFA members and sympathizers really been used by more powerful political tides? Oxford Political Review (OPR) spoke to a few of them to investigate. Their responses paint a clear picture: Chinese American politics have not been hijacked. Rather, SFFA’s victory marks not only the growing political force of Asian Americans but their diverging political views.
In the past few years, pundits have noticed the growing electoral importance of Asian Americans. The Census Bureau noted a historic high in Asian-American voter turnout in 2020 which reached 60%, and Asian Americans were instrumental in turning the tide of some extremely close elections in the 2022 midterms. In particular, Chinese-American political participation far exceeds the national average both overall and for Asian-American voters: a recent report found that around 73% of Chinese Americans voted in the 2020 presidential elections.
Most observers have maintained that Asian Americans remain a predominantly progressive force. The Asian American Pacific Islander Civic Engagement Fund, in a report published after the 2022 midterm elections, found that “Asian American voters favor progressive policies and candidates.” While this may be statistically true, it is also apparent from SFFA’s Supreme Court victories that Asian Americans, and especially Chinese Americans, are also playing a growing role in right-wing movements and organizations.
Affirmative action policies, and whether they unfairly disadvantage Asian applicants, have long been an unusually divisive topic within Asian American communities. The Asian Americans that do oppose affirmative action, however, have proven to be a vital part in lobbying the US Supreme Court to strike it down. As Eva Guo, a former board member of SFFA, explained to the OPR, “We Asian communities have actually been very active and have done a lot of work to help SFFA, including holding big rallies in front of the Supreme Court.”
Chinese Americans were especially vocal in their support for SFFA. Public records show that, as of 2019, the only Asian board members of SFFA were all Chinese American. And, as members told OPR, SFFA often organizes using WeChat, the dominant Chinese social media app. Chinese-American opposition to affirmative action is not surprising given their recent rightward shift. Some of this trend follows a rightward shift among Asian Americans in general: a survey conducted by Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote showed that Asian-American support for Trump increased from 19 percent in 2016 to 35 percent in 2020.
Another symptom of the growing prominence of the Chinese-American right is the spread of right-wing ideas in many Chinese-American online communities. The BBC reported calls for donations to white-nationalist groups in Chinese-American Telegram channels, and right-wing disinformation has been prevalent on WeChat. OPR found, in one neighbourhood discussion group for Chinese parents on WeChat, over a dozen links promoting right-wing narratives on LGBTQ+ policies, election fraud, and COVID-19. If Chinese Americans are being co-opted by the right, then, it is on a wider range of issues than affirmative action alone.
However, Chinese-American opposition to affirmative action is not a symptom of out-group influence. Rather, it fits squarely within long standing Chinese-American cultural and political values.
Many Chinese American parents’ opposition to affirmative action seemed to arise out of an overall frustration with the state of American education. “The spirit of affirmative action is great, but it’s been 60 to 70 years,” Kan, a parent from Washington state, exclaimed to the OPR. Kan, like many others, further worried that affirmative action was being used to treat the symptoms of deeper issues, obfuscating the need to address these deeper issues directly. He helped lead a successful campaign to overturn Washington’s I-1000 initiative, which protected Affirmative Action within the state. The initiative was rejected in a referendum by under 11,000 votes in large part due to organizing by Asian-American groups such as that led by Kan.
This criticism extended to many other areas of Democratic education policy. Chuan, a parent from Maryland, criticized Montgomery County Public Schools’ proposed ‘Bus In Bus Out’ program, in which students would be bused to schools outside of their zone to address overcapacity and improve equity: “I think they really do have good intentions,” she said, “but there needs to be more discussion about implementation.” She further added that, in general, “it’s important to provide equal opportunities, but this cannot be conflated with equal outcomes.”
Though many respondents attributed their strong focus on educational policy to what they felt was an East Asian cultural emphasis on education, this was not the sole reason why so many Chinese Americans were fixated on striking down affirmative action.
For these Chinese Americans, affirmative action represented not just poor education policy, but also broader legal failures in the US. Especially telling was how many staunch supporters of SFFA attended Stop Asian Hate demonstrations, which rallied against a rise in anti-Asian sentiment and violence in the wake of COVID-19.
These respondents’ concern for ‘law and order’ contributed both to their support for Stop Asian Hate and to their disdain for race-based policies, even when many may deem such policy necessary to redress racial disparities. “If people complain of widespread systemic discrimination, the government should enforce the law to address these instances of discrimination instead of implementing another set of discriminatory policies to compensate,” emphasized Kan. “Everybody should be equal under the law.” Another parent, who informed us that neither of his children applied to Ivy League Institutions, told us that he thought “this affirmative action ruling probably won’t help Asian applicants all that much,” but that striking down affirmative action was “a matter of principle.”
The cultural trauma suffered by many first-generation Chinese-American immigrants has also heightened their sensitivity to any perceived unfairness. Experiences such as political persecution during the Cultural Revolution and extreme inequality during the Great Leap Forward were brought up often in OPR’s interviews with SFFA supporters. Kan told the OPR, for instance, about the nepotism that characterized Chinese education and employment systems, and he criticized identity politics. “We suffered from a lot of mistreatment. When my mother applied for college, they looked at your family background. If you had a favored family background, you get into college, otherwise you don’t.” Kan was active in China’s 1989 student protests, which responded to a lack of political freedoms and rapidly growing inequality as China modernized. “Maybe those from highly unequal countries are more sensitive to inequality,” Kan remarked.
Experts and pundits have taken this as evidence that Chinese-American opposition to affirmative action is rooted in ignorance of the history and systems of the US. In an article by NBC News in 2022, Oiyan Poon, then-director of the Race and Intersectional Studies for Educational Equity (RISE) Center at Colorado State University, argued that Chinese Americans often “are not really understanding” educational disparities as “a systemic problem that requires systemic solutions.” Sally Chen, education equity program manager at the non-profit Chinese for Affirmative Action, likewise told NBC that “These institutions are trying to course-correct, in some ways, for a system that has always been unfair. If you’re holding on to this concept of meritocracy, it can be hard to accept or understand that.”
This seems to be an accurate assessment of at least some of SFFA’s supporters. Ms. Guo, when asked whether she supports affirmative action based on socioeconomic status, told the OPR, “As Chinese immigrants, our own stories prove that socioeconomic conditions should not be an excuse for why they cannot achieve the American dream. When we were in China, we were much poorer than people here; why have we now become so successful? From my own first-hand experience, socioeconomic conditions are a beautiful excuse to promote affirmative action, and this is not right.”
However, arguments that many other SFFA supporters provided to the OPR against affirmative action were various and reflected a much better understanding of privilege, equity, and American historical wrongs than many experts posit. When the OPR asked respondents directly whether they felt that students of certain racial and socioeconomic backgrounds have less opportunities, most agreed. Chuan even added that “it’s very important we consider how students overcame psychological, socioeconomic, and other hurdles given the context of their circumstance. That’s what really shows ability.”
Meanwhile, on the topic of privilege, another parent, Cheng explained to the OPR: “Institutions like Harvard are focused on their status of serving the elite class. That’s why, despite emphasizing diversity, they still give the vast majority of their spots to the wealthy and privileged. They don’t really care about children from underprivileged backgrounds or for increasing social class mobility.” Cheng serves as an advisory board member of a non-profit that provides mentorship programs and services to low-income, first-generation college students. He told us that he donated to SFFA not because opposing affirmative action was the highest political priority for him, but because he felt that it was important to support other Chinese Americans on issues that they thought were important.
Chinese Americans may be moving towards the right, but their stances on specific issues like affirmative action arise from different sets of underlying assumptions. The common themes in their politics are, more often than not, rooted in uniquely Chinese-American cultural values.
Asian-American voices who deem their anti-affirmative action peers ‘pawns’ may be making the same mistake as politicians who have traditionally treated the demographic as a monolithic electorate. As these so-called ‘pawns’ raise their voices on the national stage, it is imperative that we treat seriously the underlying causes and implications of their rightward shift.