An Awakening Community: Repelled by progressive policies, Asian-American New Yorkers look to the other side of the aisle.

Three in four Asian New Yorkers are immigrants. They have long been considered reliable Democratic voters, but lately, many seem more animated by opposition to Democratic policies. The extent of the shift became clear in the New York City elections last year, when Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa, as well as some candidates for city council, scored well in Asian-heavy districts. While Democrats try to figure out what this means, Republicans hope to capitalize this year—and beyond.

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Asians constitute about 15 percent of New York City’s population—about half of these Chinese—but they weren’t known for being vocal on civic issues until 2015, when thousands protested against the indictment of Peter Liang, a rookie cop who, while on patrol, accidentally shot dead an unarmed black man, Akai Gurley, in a Brooklyn housing project. In the eyes of the protesters, Liang, a Chinese-American, was a scapegoat for public anger resulting from non-indictments of some white cops involved in killings of black people.

Asian voices have only grown louder since then. They fought against former mayor Bill de Blasio’s specialized high school reform proposal that, they worry, would reduce the chance of admission for Asian students; the borough-based jail project that would bring an expanded jail to Manhattan’s Chinatown; the state’s marijuana legalization; and bail reform and the defund-the-police movement, which cut against their public safety concerns.

With each protest movement came the emergence of community activists new to politics. Phil Wong is one. An immigrant from Hong Kong and a father of three, Wong participated in protests for the first time in 2018 against specialized high school reform. Now he’s a civic leader mobilizing Chinese parents to fight affirmative action and critical race theory. “The atmosphere at schools here is more and more like China’s cultural revolution that encourages students to cancel teachers and parents, all in the name of equality,” Wong says.

Yanling Zhang is another, a volunteer for Vickie Paladino, a Republican who won the city council seat in District 19. “When I heard Vickie talking at a party, I thought she represents the traditional American values that attracted me to the U.S.,” says Zhang, who came to the U.S. for graduate school more than 20 years ago and had not participated in politics until she joined Paladino’s campaign. “But now this country has changed. Personal freedom is eroded by overbearing governments, and the media ignores the voices of ordinary people.”