1
Behind the Numbers: Talking Politics with Immigrant Chinese Americans
What do foreign-born Chinese Americans think of American politics and what
explains their political attitudes and behavior? This paper discusses results of in-person
follow-up interviews conducted with selected individuals of Chinese descent residing in
Los Angeles and San Francisco who were previously chosen by random to participate in
the Pilot National Asian American Political Survey (PNAAPS). Informants were asked
to express their views comparing governments in the U.S. and their respective Asian
homeland and reasons for supporting a certain U.S. political party, ideology, or type of
candidates. They were also asked to explain their political participation or the lack of it
as well as their ethnic self-identity and experiences of racial discrimination. All the
interviews were conducted in Mandarin Chinese by the principal investigator and
translated into English for analysis and interpretation. To help interpret the micro-level
findings concerning the experiences of contemporary Chinese Americans, this paper
begins with a macro-level survey of the historical formation of the Chinese community in
the United States.
The Formation of the Chinese American Community: A Brief Historical Review
Although the Chinese had a prolonged presence in the American continent, their
first significant migration to the United States did not begin until shortly after the
discovery of gold in California in 1850 (Chinn, Lai, and Choy 1969; Sung 1971; Tsai
1986; Daniels, 1988; Lai 1992a; Tchen 1999; Chen 2000; Menzies 2002). In this first
major wave of Chinese migration that ended abruptly in 1882 when Congress passed the
Chinese Exclusion Act, an estimated 220,000 young male peasants--almost all came from
the Zhujiang delta in the Guangdong province--arrived to seek opportunities as miners,
Convention