Is Affirmative Action interfering with the Chinese dream in America? Exploring WeChat users’ views on Affirmative Action in US. college admissions

ABSTRACT

As a fast-growing population in US. society, Asian Americans, particularly Chinese Americans, have started to engage more actively and amplify their presence in the recent legal challenges to affirmative action in college admissions. In order to get a deeper understanding of how US.-based Chinese view affirmative action, we conducted a textual content analysis informed by Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) to analyze comments on several articles surrounding affirmative action published on a WeChat news outlet, ChineseAmericans. Findings centre around misconceptions of affirmative action driven by different translations of the term from English to Chinese, along with Chinese cultural exceptionalism. This study adds to an emerging body of literature on public perceptions of affirmative action within the Chinese and Chinese immigrant community, whose voices have either been overlooked completely or critiqued as solely pawns in a larger quest to eliminate affirmative action.

KEYWORDS:

• Affirmative action
• Chinese Americans
• college admissions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).