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Most Asian Americans in the US, including Indians, view their ancestral homelands favourably, except Chinese Americans, reveals the findings of a survey by polling agency Pew, which offers new insights into the thinking of Asian Americans: a category that includes immigrants as well as people born in the US but tracing their ancestry to India, China, the Philippines, South Korea, Japan, and other Asian countries.
The Indian diaspora across the world, including the US, has been wooed aggressively by the Narendra Modi government and is seen as a force multiplier in raising India’s image globally.
Seventy-six per cent of Indian American adults have a favourable opinion of India but when asked whether they would ever move to India, 65 per cent Indian adults say they would rather stay in the US, compared with 33 per cent who say they would like to move back.
Immigrants who have been in the US for less time are likely to be open to moving back, relative to those who have been in the US for longer. Nearly all US-born Indian adults say they would not move to India (85 per cent). Half of Indian adults who say they would move to India would do so because of its lower cost of living (52 per cent).
Some 59 per cent of Indian American adults say they have an unfavourable opinion of China, including 32 per cent who report very unfavourable opinions of the country.
Overall, Indian adults are 12 percentage points less likely than other Asian adults to say their opinion of China is favourable.
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The reverse is true as well. The ratings of India are particularly negative among Chinese and South Korean adults in the US, the survey shows.
Education plays a role in making a judgement: of all Asian Americans, when it comes to views of India, 42 per cent of those with a postgraduate degree have favourable views of the country, compared with 35 per cent of those with a bachelor’s degree and 27 per cent of those with less formal schooling.
The pattern is reversed, though, when it comes to China.
Asian Americans with lower levels of education tend to feel more positively about China than those with more formal schooling. For example, 17 per cent of those with at least a bachelor’s degree have positive views of China, compared with 23 per cent of those who did not complete college.
About half of Asian Americans (53 per cent) say the US will be the world’s leading economic power over the next decade. About one-third (36 per cent) of Asian adults say China will be the leading economic power globally in the next 10 years and a much lower share says the same about India and Japan.
Views on the next decade’s top economy vary by place of birth, age, and gender. Indian adults are most likely to say India will be the world’s leading economic power, with 15 per cent holding this view. No more than 2 per cent of any other origin group in the report say the same.
The report has interesting insights into the way Chinese Americans see America and the rest of Asia. Chinese and Vietnamese adults are the only origin groups in the report to express more favourable views of other places in Asia than their ancestral homelands.
Chinese adults see Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea more favourably than they do China. Vietnamese adults see Japan more favourably than they do Vietnam. As tensions rise between Mainland China and Taiwan, Chinese Americans’ favourability of Taiwan over China is particularly notable: 62 per cent of Chinese Americans say they have a favourable view of Taiwan, higher than the share who say the same about China (41 per cent).
Conducted July 5, 2022, through January 27, 2023, among 7,006 Asian adults living in the US, the survey finds fewer than half of Chinese Americans (41 per cent) hold a favourable opinion of China. Chinese adults who say they would move to China would do so to be closer to family and friends (27 per cent) and because they are more familiar with Chinese culture (24 per cent).
Fifty-three per cent of Chinese Americans name the US as the top power, compared with 40 per cent who name China.
