Will respond to your other points elsewhere later to avoid derailing this thread further. I agree with you on how Reaganism is perceived among many AAPI voters.
Part 1- will add sources later. This felt like the most appropriate thread to necro, given how it touches on how it touches on historical and spatial factors leading to certain routes of socioeconomic development.
Participated in the UK with US-style parties and vice versa thread some time ago so I feel qualified to answer.
The one demographic I have any confidence a CA Conservatives-type right-of-center party would overperform against the US Republicans would be ethnic Chinese. (This isn't to say that Chinese Americans would actually favor the hypothetical Conservative party over the Liberals or the NDP.) Canada has a higher proportion of non-indigenous visible minority groups than the US does and the CA Tories probably need to pander to those ambiguously brown people with funny accents and weird food more than the US GOP does. But I do actually think there are cultural factors inherent to Chinese culture- and the areas of greater China that are overrepresented among the Anglosphere diaspora- that would make Overseas Chinese more receptive to right-of-center political parties than the other Confucianist East Asian groups, let alone non-Confucianist East Asians or South Asians. Recent shifts and trends within local NYC politics seem to suggest this, as do pre-pandemic voting patterns among Chinese Canadians.
I'm not going to say this is purely wrong, but it's a huge oversimplification that glosses over a lot of the drivers of political affiliation. Because quite frankly, I strongly suspect these cultural factors are less Chinese and more specific to certain subgroups.
The Conservatives in Canada, especially in British Columbia, have historically done significantly better with Chinese voters than American conservatives. But a lot of that is Vancouver Chinese being disproportionately people who moved from Hong Kong before handover. Not only are they disproportionately likely to be conservative or anti-Communist, on net aggregate, Cantonese are also somewhat more mercantile/ bourgeoise and socially traditionalist relative to other Chinese. Vancouver is a Cantonese-dominant city, which is pretty much not true of anywhere in the United States besides small, very old Chinatowns.
What NYC and to an extent Canada both indicate is that Chinese voters can shift like mad if you engage in explicitly anti-Chinese politics. There are good estimates that the Conservatives under O'Toole collapsed to single digits among Chinese voters due to racebaiting against Chinese. Democratic policies on crime and education were widely viewed as specifically targeting Chinese. In those circumstances, there was a stampede against the party perceived to be racist.
Other than that, they tend to vote like...how you'd expect based on socioeconomic class and religion.
I'll respond to your commentary on Chinese Canadians in BC first- Metro Vancouver is the only part of Canada I have more than a little familiarity with, and I happen to have relatives who live there.
Cantonese culture is more mercantile and bourgeois, and it's been remarked in many corners of the Internet that Cantonese have a reputation for stronger in-group consciousness and a strong emphasis on familial ties. However, the Yangtze Delta also has a strong reputation for entrepreneurship (Shanghai historically was and still is the center for Chinese capitalism and bourgeois culture). This region of China also seems overrepresented among both KMT-affiliated exiles to Taiwan and Hong Kong (many of whom later immigrated to the US), and among post-Mao immigrants from Mainland China. The latter group of socio-cultural stereotypes aren't exclusive to Cantonese either- they also apply to other Chinese linguistic subgroups in South China like Hakkas, Teochews, Taiwanese speakers, and Fuzhounese speakers.
I remember seeing on Wikipedia that 20th-century Guangdong landlords were relatively egalitarian and more likely to come from peasant backgrounds themselves. Seems connected to the kind of just-world worldview and big-L liberal environment that would give rise to the Guangdong model of socioeconomic development.
I think the perceived social conservatism of Cantonese speaking communities in the US is due to Chinatown enclaves not being filtered for postgraduate-educated immigration (this is arguably even more true for Fuzhounese communities in the Northeastern US). Even if we exclude Taiwanese and Hong Kongers, Chinese Americans are still disproportionately of Guangdong and Fujian ancestry partly due to chain migration to Chinatowns, with the Shanghai region also being overrepresented.
Anyways, the cultural factors I was alluding to mainly have to do with a particularly strong cultural belief in meritocracy, a more secular cultural identity less tied to major world religions, and a general inclination towards being apolitical and not having strong political opinions. None of these seem Cantonese specific to me. I also suspect the conservatism of Vancouver's HK emigres has as much to do with class selection, religion, and other HK-unique factors rather than factors inherent to Cantonese culture.
Agree mostly. My mistake on the confusion - I didn't mean social conservatism relative to other Americans - I meant social conservatism relative to other Chinese groups. In particular, the well-known divide between North China and South China on
collectivism vs. individualism - and secularism vs. religiosity.
For the religion thing, I don't have a good source for that, but I think it's pretty well-known that Buddhism is
much stronger in Southern China. Same with ancestor worship. Joss paper is something you see in stores in Southern China/Taiwan, but not in Northern China. Though I do think you're right that Buddhist Chinese don't strongly use their religion as a political identity the way say, many Burmese Buddhists do.
Also, I think most landlords everywhere in China were peasants. The median landlord in pre-revolutionary China was a peasant who owned his plot and the plot next over (and rented it out to one guy). Something like 10% of China were landlords in that sense. Online Communists love to go "we need to kill the landlords like Mao did", but landlord-icide was only possible because the Communists defined all anti-Communist landlords (or landlords that people already lynched) as landlords, and all other landlords as "well-off peasants." Landlord-icide only killed like...2% of the landlords (lol).
As an aside, the higher historic religiosity of South China is also why I think in the modern era, weird cults like Falun Gong and White Lightning are much more popular in the North than the South - established religious traditions inoculate societies against weirdo cults, lol.
That being said, the mercantile/coastal/sorta cosmopolitan nature of Guangdong I think makes it significantly more socially liberal than other rice-agriculture Confucian regions, like inland Southern China - or for that matter, Vietnam or Korea. But North China is honestly just a psychological aberration in Asia.
Funny enough in countries where Chinese immigrants disproportionately come from the North, the political reputation is very different. In South Korea for example, Korean-Chinese vote so monolithically left-liberal (probably in %s exceeding US blacks), Korean conservatives have imported American conservative talking points about Korean-Chinese vote-by-mail fraud to "rig" every election a Korean conservative loses.
Also yes, I think Cantonese and Shanghaiers have a reputation for not being political, but Northern Chinese have a reputation for being
extremely political. Probably a result of the government being much bigger up there - Northeast China for example basically runs government as a % of GDP numbers comparable to Cuba.
