CHINESE-AMERICANS’ POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT: FOCUSING ON THE IMPACT OF MOBILIZATION

Abstract

Abstract. This study examines the factors that explain Chinese-Americans' political engagement. Many studies of Chinese-Americans have focused on areas other than their political attitudes/behavior and have been mainly conducted on populations outside the U.S. The present study pays special attention to the effect of political mobilization. Drawing on segmented assimilation theory, the present study regards the mobilization of immigrants by political parties or organizations into mainstream political process as one of the contexts of reception. As a result of China's nondemocratic political systems, Chinese immigrants might have different political values and different ideas about taking part in the political process. Thus, special efforts are needed to encourage Chinese-Americans to become more politically active. The regression results show that the mobilization variables consistently displayed a significant impact, regardless of the different modes of political engagement. Party contact encouraged nonvoting activities, voter registration, and voting among Chinese-Americans, and organization contact led to stronger interest in politics and more active participation in nonvoting activities. Keywords: Chinese-American, political participation, mobilization, party, organization 1. Introduction This study examines the factors that explain Chinese-Americans' political engagement. In the U.S., Chinese-Americans are categorized as Asian-Americans. Greater numbers of Asian-Americans are increasingly playing a role in various aspects of the country. Although previous studies have examined the political attitudes and behaviors of Asian-Americans, most have tended to assume that Asian-Americans are a homogenous, monolith group (DeSipio, Masuoka, and Stout 2008). Therefore, they have framed Asian-Americans as a unified block vote. As noted in an earlier study (Ong and Scott 2009), given the increased diversity within Asian-American communities, additional analyses are needed to yield a deeper understanding of the individual subgroups of Asian-Americans, as well as that of other minority groups, such as blacks and Latinos. The present study starts from the idea that the political attitudes/behaviors of Asian-American subgroups differ greatly from each other and that these subgroups must be disaggregated based on ethnicity and examined separately in depth. Chinese-Americans are the largest segment of the Asian-American population in the U.S. Their numbers increased from 2,432,585 in 2000 to 3,347,229 in 2010 (U.S. Census Bureau 2000, 2010).The Chinese were one of the first of the immigrant populations in Asia to emigrate to the U.S. in the 1880s (Kim, Linton, and Lum 2015). Given the long history of Chinese-Americans in the U.S., the extremely scant research on the political attitudes and behaviors of Chinese immigrants is surprising. This is not to say that there has been no scholarly attention given to Chinese-Americans. However, many studies of Chinese-Americans (Lu, Samaratunge, and Hartel 2013, Guo 2013, Kim, Linton, and Lum 2015, Ng et al. 2015, Chung 2013) have focused on areas other than their political attitudes/behavior (e.g., education, employment, work experience, family life, and social mobility). For example, Lu, Samaratunge, and Hartel (2013) investigated professional Chinese immigrants' acculturation attitudes in the workplace. They found that among the four types of acculturation attitudes (assimilation, integration, separation, and marginalization), the majority of Chinese immigrants exhibited attitudes of separation and marginalization, which are related to low affective workgroup commitment. From an economic perspective, Guo (2013) argued that recent Chinese immigrants have encountered multifaceted barriers in employment and language and that these barriers have resulted in unemployment, poor economic performance, and downward social mobility. Chung (2013) studied the impact of family roles on ethnicity among the children of Chinese immigrant families. …