Politics
Chinese Americans are divided among many subgroups based on factors such as age, nativity, and socioeconomic status and do not have uniform attitudes about the People's Republic or the Republic of China, about the United States, or about Chinese nationalism. Different subgroups of Chinese Americans also have radically different and sometimes very conflicting political priorities and goals.
Nonetheless, Chinese Americans are clustered in majority-Democratic states and have themselves trended Democratic in recent presidential elections – polling just before the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election found John Kerry was favored by 58% of Chinese Americans and George W. Bush by only 23%, as compared with a 54/44 split in California, a 58/40 split in New York, and a 48/51 split in America as a whole on Election Day itself.
Chinese Americans were an important source of funds for Han revolutionaries during the later Qing dynasty, and Sun Yat-sen was raising money in America at the time of the Xinhai Mutiny which established the Republic of China. During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese Americans, like all overseas Chinese, generally speaking, were viewed as capitalist traitors by the People's Republic of China government. This attitude changed dramatically in the late 1970s with the reforms of Deng Xiaoping. Increasingly, Chinese Americans were seen as sources of business and technical expertise and capital who could aid in China's economic and other development.
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Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God’s infinite mercy, a last resort.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.”
—Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)
“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)