An unlikely treasure-trove of donors for Clinton

By John | Monday, October 22, 2007 | View Comments

In “An unlikely treasure-trove of donors for [Hillary] Clinton,” The Los Angeles Times reports on New York’s Chinatown and its support for Hillary:

“All three locations, along with scores of others scattered throughout some of the poorest Chinese neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, have been swept by an extraordinary impulse to shower money on one particular presidential candidate — Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton… And Clinton’s success in gathering money from Chinatown’s least-affluent residents stems from a two-pronged strategy: mutually beneficial alliances with powerful groups, and appeals to the hopes and dreams of people now consigned to the margins. Clinton has enlisted the aid of Chinese neighborhood associations, especially those representing recent immigrants from Fujian province… Many, on the other hand, said they gave for reasons having more to do with the Chinese community than with Clinton. He Duan Zheng, who gave $1,000, said of the Fujianese community: “They informed us to go, so I went. “Everybody was making a donation, so I did too,” he said. “Otherwise I would lose face.”

There are some references to the legality of some of these contributions, considering many in Chinatown are recent immigrants, poor, not legal residents, not registered to vote or do not speak English. Surprisingly though, there was no reference to the illegal bundling contributions by Norman Hsu to Hillary. Apparently, a key community leader has been Chung Seto, who came to the U.S. when she was young from Canton province and has been a long-time supporter of Bill and Hillary Clinton since the 1990s.

8 Asians

An unlikely treasure-trove of donors for Clinton

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