President Donald Trump’s repeated use of anti-China rhetoric like “kung flu” and “China virus” to describe Covid-19 quickly became a customary part of the election cycle. Soon after, his word choice prompted analysis around how it could affect Asian American voters.
For the most part, Trump’s discriminatory language hasn’t done him many favors with Asian American voters. A survey released in September shows that a majority of the electorate is supporting Joe Biden, at 54 percent, while about 30 percent is backing Trump. But the community’s depth and diversity can’t be explained in one statistic.
Asian Americans as a whole have trended left in recent elections, but research shows that some populations have shifted toward the right, specifically Vietnamese Americans and, to a lesser extent, Indian Americans. In some cases, that’s because of the rhetoric that many fear has emboldened people to attack those in the community.
Experts say a coalescence of cultural and historical baggage and the fragmented nature of Asian America have helped lead to that shift.
These groups haven’t necessarily been exempt from the pandemic racism. And advocates say that to get groups to understand the reality of Trump’s policies, outreach should come from a place of empathy.
“We can and should continue to challenge people’s assumptions and views, but when we do it with empathy, we make space for our communities to come together, instead of further divide,” said Thi Bui, a Vietnamese American author who is campaign strategist at the nonprofit Progressive Vietnamese American Organization.
The Vietnamese community has made a significant move toward the right compared to the past election cycle. In 2016, it voted for Hillary Clinton at a far higher proportion than for Trump. But the recent survey shows a reversal, with about 48 percent of Vietnamese Americans saying they would vote for Trump, while 36 percent said they would vote for Biden if they had to choose today. Trump’s habit of blaming China for the pandemic and his continued use of the discriminatory language, Thi said, could have helped spur the change.
Vietnam has had a long, contentious relationship with China, spanning thousands of years, before the French occupied the country in the late 1800s. Its history is lined with several periods of Chinese colonization. Animosity toward Beijing only persisted with a series of bloody border wars in the late 1970s. Today, tensions still reverberate throughout the region, even though relations between the two countries were normalized in 1991. Last year, a Chinese survey vessel engaged in a standoff with Vietnamese ships after it entered Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone.
“It’s kind of part of the Vietnamese identity to be anti-China only as a former annexed state of China,” Thi said. “This relationship continues with China’s conflicts with Vietnam over borders and fishing rights and various things. … And many people right now fear that China will swallow Vietnam unless a strong leader stands up to them.”
Trump has taken a hawkish stance toward China, claiming that it will “pay a big price for what they’ve done to the world.” Thi said that hearing “Trump, the strong man,” voice such ideas is appealing to a population that is processing its history.
“The Republicans have been very adamant about pushing that anti-China rhetoric, if only to deflect from Trump’s many failures in domestic policy, but even if it’s not completely true, it is what they want to hear, because it’s such a source of fear for them,” Thi said.
Dr. Anh-Thu Bui, chair of the Progressive Vietnamese American Organization’s Election Committee, said many in the Vietnamese community — a predominantly refugee population who arrived in the U.S. following the Vietnam War — still have memories of persecution under a communist regime. Those experiences often pull them toward the Republican Party, she said, because they are baked into the language.
“Even the name of the Democratic Party, ‘Đảng Dân chủ,’ brings up the old history of those groups that supported the eventual victory of the Communist Party, including Đảng Dân chủ Việt Nam,” she said. “The old Republic of Vietnam, ‘Việt Nam Cộng hòa,’ is the old country that no longer exists, for which the Vietnamese refugees abroad still yearn. The Republican Party is translated into ‘Đảng Cộng hòa,’ the same name as the old republic, with clear favorable association.”
She said the older generations of Vietnamese Americans favor Trump, particularly because his “tough on China” talk feels reminiscent of President Ronald Reagan’s aggressive approach to communism. Reagan famously supported anti-communist resistance movements to counter the Soviet Union. Dr. Anh-Thu Bui said that ultimately, the stances of many Vietnamese Americans stem from a reaction to intergenerational trauma from a colonial history of Chinese domination.
“It’s not rational, because Vietnam is currently under threat of territorial expansion by mainland China, and Viet refugees are against communist Vietnam but still want to defend their homeland against invasion by China,” Dr. Anh-Thu Bui said.
