As one would expect, my motivations (and I suspect many of my classmates may have the same experience) are superficially simple, but significantly more complex upon inspection. Moreover, the assumptions they make are as informative as they are themselves — it would seem that my motivations are as deeply rooted in my assumptions as my assumptions are in my motivations. And like an onion, my motivations have multiple layers that need to be peeled away to reveal deeper truths. A superficial motivation for my research is to increase understanding about China, but, one layer deeper, my goal is to increase understanding across the US-China relationship. Lastly, my ultimate motivation is to make the world more peaceful (since tending to what is shaping up to be the most important bilateral relationship in the 21st century is a worthy cause to that end).
My largest introspective revelations, though, came in my assumptions. First, my motivation to increase US-China understanding assumes that China is not a revisionist power because if my ultimate goal is peace, that goal will be severely hampered in the long run if China ends up going to the extreme of attempting to overturn the world order (also making the assumption that overturning the international order of the status quo will increase the risk of war). But more deeply, my motivation to make the world more peaceful assumes that peace is good and a worthy cause, which (along with the assumption that the status quo is preferable) makes the typical liberal assumptions that war is harmful and preventable through cooperation and interdependence.
These motivations and their respective assumptions have manifested themselves in my methodology in my choice of small-n case study analysis and in the disproportionate attention that I plan on (and am) paying to the case of the anti-South Korea protests. Since the process-tracing aspect of case study research allows us to uncover causal mechanisms and complex or multifaceted relationships between variables, it is especially useful for my goal of “gaining an understanding” of China. Also, the anti-South Korea case (because it is the most different and the most recent) is the most important to that goal of understanding, which explains my plan for an asymmetrical case study focusing on that case as that seems to be the way to gain the most useful information from a single case. Finally, because my goal is to generate information that is useful to foreign policy calculation, generalizability is certainly an asset and neopositivist research consequently more attractive as a methodological asset.