The App at the Heart of the Movement to End Affirmative Action
OiYan Poon stumbled upon WeChat largely by accident.
Poon is a professor at Colorado State University who studies the racial politics of higher education. For years she had consistently found that most Asian Americans supported affirmative action, but in 2014, something surprised her: A fledgling network of politically savvy Asian Americans had derailed a Democrat-backed ballot initiative in California that would’ve rescinded the state’s long-standing ban on race-conscious admissions. These activists—with their loud, recurring demonstrations, scathing op-eds, pro-Republican canvassing, and roundtable discussions on Chinese-language talk shows—had materialized unexpectedly, at least to Poon.
Determined to learn more, Poon in 2016 took to her typical research methods—convening a team of students and colleagues to help her pore through court filings, news stories, social-media posts, and the like—in an effort to track these dissenters down. But the few activists who did have an online footprint didn’t respond to Poon’s inquiries. The professor continued to flounder until she took the advice of an acquaintance and opened an account on WeChat, the popular messaging app based in China. The
