Will Republicans keep or Democrats flip the House? In about eight days, we will get the answer. Both parties are proactively encouraging voters to show up on election day. While race and cultural identity have become the holy grail of Democrats in their war against Republicans, one minority group seems to be ignoring the Democrats’ call; They support President Trump and vote for Republicans.
They are Chinese dissidents who escaped the persecution of the Chinese Communist regime and became naturalized U.S. citizens. As a Chinese national and a political dissident, I found three commonalities – love of freedom, resentment toward communism, and appreciation of traditional American values – that motivate these Chinese Americans to eagerly vote for Republicans.
In the U.S., extreme Democrats want socialism. Their rhetoric – government should control everything – sounds familiar to Chinese dissidents. If you experienced the Communist regime in China, you know that the core of socialism is to hate the rich rather than to help the poor. In other words, the government tells people how to live a utopian life but fails to improve the lives of people. The worst is that socialism creates a dysfunctional culture in which hard-working people are discouraged, and success through hardworking is hated.
In China, free health care is a bad joke. One general practitioner has to take care of 6,666 patients; the standard of the World Health Organization is one for every 1,500 to 2,000 people. One specialist needs to see as many as 200 patients a day. In contrast, the officials of the Chinese Communist Party have special, advanced and premier medical institutions and are treated by medical experts who only serve these officials.
Nearly a decade after the rollout of an ambitious $130 billion universal health care plan that claimed 95 percent of the Chinese population would be covered, millions of people cannot afford the treatments they need for serious illnesses. Tong Gongwei, a young pharmacist who just graduated from medical college and started his job at a public hospital in the city of Hengyang, found out that he had stomach cancer. While he had medical insurance, he could not afford the treatment. Worried that he, the only child of the family, would be a huge financial burden to his parents who earned just $150 a year farming rice, he vanished (most likely committed suicide) after he left a letter to his parents asking for forgiveness.
Free education is also a lie in the Chinese socialist system. At a time when the Chinese economy seems to be booming, some 60 million students in rural schools have become “left-behind” children, who are cared for by their grandparents as their parents seek work in faraway cities. However, the Chinese government makes no effort to build better and more schools for these children. On the contrary, the gap in educational opportunities is getting huge between students from rural areas and those from cities.
While many of their urban peers attend schools equipped with state-of-the-art facilities and well-trained teachers, rural students often huddle in decrepit school buildings and struggle to grasp advanced subjects such as English and chemistry amid a dearth of qualified instructors. According to a recent report from the World Bank, more than 70 million people in the countryside live on less than $1 a day, and many children eat poorly and have no way to go to school. In Shaanxi province, at a group of farmsteads isolated in a remote valley, a 27-year-old mother of two said that she would like to send her children to preschool. But she would have to rent an apartment in town to do so—a prohibitive expense.
Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.” Chinese dissidents witnessed the darkness of Communism and the lies of socialism. Against all odds, they were blessed with the opportunity to become citizens of the United States, a great nation that believes in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all. As U.S. citizens, Chinese dissidents enjoy the freedoms granted by God and this country, and carefully consider their votes for what they feel is the best for America.
“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”