2022 Theses Bachelor's

The Transcendence of Political Views Across National Borders: The Relationship Between Chinese Immigrants’ Attitudes Toward the CCP and their Western Partisan Preferences

Vaisse, Lorelei

With the growing number of migrants across the world, the study of how ideologies translate from one political spectrum to another will become increasingly valuable. This thesis acts as a pioneer to this pertinent topic in Political Science by comparing individuals’ agreeability to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with their allegiance to Western political parties. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with 30 first-generation Chinese immigrants to the United States, Australia, and France, we manage to position the CCP relative to some of the most prominent parties in these three countries. Focusing on the “Children of the Reform,” or those who left after the CCP’s great transformation of 1978, we find that immigrants who agree most with the policies of the Communist Party tend to be more socially conservative and economically liberal. However, when mapping the CCP alongside Western parties on a political grid, we find that Chinese immigrants consider the Communist Party quite conservative, both economically and socially. These findings can help predict how Chinese individuals moving abroad will influence the political climate in their receiving country, and provides a frame of reference to understanding the CCP through Western political ideology.