The Emergence of the Chinese American Far Right

Last month, hundreds of immigrant Chinese residents from the San Gabriel Valley just west of Los Angeles turned up outside a meeting of the Rosemead City Council. Many of them were wearing Donald Trump campaign apparel. They were there to protest the expansion of temporary shelters for single mothers facing domestic violence. A local far-right California State Assembly candidate, the Taiwanese American lawyer Long David Liu, had helped to mobilize the protesters. Many showed up just because they learned about the supposed dangers of the project circulating on the Chinese messaging app WeChat.

I was among a smaller group of counterprotesters rallying in support of the shelter proposal. We were outnumbered, surrounded, and harassed for hours by majority-Cantonese-speaking protesters. I was the only Cantonese speaker on our side, and I tried my best to reason with people even as some accused me of bringing in crime and endangering our communities. Our allies attending the city council meeting were eventually able to pass the measure, but only after a night of debate until four in the morning. They were also heckled by the protesters as they departed.

This type of right-wing mobilization by immigrant Chinese residents is not new in the San Gabriel Valley—the largest ethnoburb (a suburb with a large concentration of an ethnic minority group) for Chinese and other Sinophone diaspora in the nation. Temple City residents organized to successfully stop a proposal to convert a local motel into a shelter for the unhoused in 2017, followed by a similar outburst in the adjacent city of Arcadia in 2021. Protests have also sprung up in other immigrant Chinese communities nationwide. Earlier this summer, the first Chinese American New York City Council member from Brooklyn, Susan Zhuang, led a demonstration against emergency shelters for the unhoused in the ethnic enclave of Bensonhurst. Last year, Chinese residents in Brighton Park on the South Side of Chicago rallied against a planned migrant shelter.

These incidents reflect a dangerous trend in national politics: the growth of an organized Chinese American far right pushing for exclusionary policies around housing and increased policing in the name of “public safety,” which both the Democratic and Republican politicians are keen to support. And these communities are not just protesting—they’re also voting. Many heavily Chinese American areas shifted sharply to the right in the recent presidential election.

This emerging constituency is becoming a robust arm of national right-wing politics. They are building mass power in ethnoburbs and ethnic enclaves—where organized politics and levels of mobilization have traditionally remained weak.

The phenomenon shows that the most organized wing of our communities are immigrant Chinese American “petite bourgeoisie”—small-business owners, self-employed residents, and other professionals. Recent economic anxieties are inducing a crisis among the petite bourgeoisie, causing them to further identify with their white counterparts as a key social base for the far right. The racialized experience of Chinese Americans, who are also concentrated in large numbers in ethnic enclaves, allows petite bourgeoisie–led politics to identify shared points of connection with less politically conscious parts of the working class as well. To counter this trend, we must organize Chinese Americans around multiethnic campaigns that are tailored to their actual lived experiences—all with the goal of building working-class economic and political power.

Asian Americans, including Chinese Americans, have long occupied an ambiguous position in the US racial hierarchy. Neither Black nor white, they have still faced a long history of structural oppression. More distinctively, however, they have often been used as a wedge by white supremacy—typically by being framed as “model minorities”—to justify the subordination and contain the political mobilization of other non-white communities. Scholar Claire Jean Kim calls this “racial triangulation,” in which Asian Americans are afforded some social and economic advantages relative to other non-white people—even while still facing alienation and racism.

Historian Charlotte Brooks shows how Asian Americans’ relative privilege works in practice by contrasting the historical experiences of Asian and Black Americans in challenging housing discrimination in the suburbs. In the 1950s, Olympic gold medalist and Korean American veteran Sammy Lee championed racial inclusivity as an all-American ideal, while brandishing his anti-Communist credentials from speaking in State Department tours in South Korea, in part to win the approval of white residents in California’s Orange County to allow him to buy a house in their community. A year later, when a Black veteran, Harold Bauduit, tried moving into the same neighborhood, he was threatened with violence by a mob of white homeowners.

Thus, the then-overwhelmingly conservative residents of Orange County embraced Asian American immigration just as they hardened their opposition to Black people moving into their communities. Brooks writes that since the Cold War, majority-white suburban communities began to think that “Asian Americans’ cultural differences made them better neighbors than members of other minority groups” and “began to contrast them to the lack of values and the alarming militancy they attributed to other nonwhite people, particularly blacks.”