Scholars have long disagreed as to why authoritarian states allow antiforeign protest when they have the ability to suppress them, with some calling them a threat to the regime (actually forcing leaders’ hands) and others calling them a way to bolster legitimacy. Weiss uses signal theory to propose an ambitious cost-benefit model of nationalist protest as a way for authoritarian states to signal resolve, but she does not analyze in depth the “benefit” side of her model (why and when autocrats want to signal resolve). This study builds on Weiss’s model to explore when authoritarian leaders signal resolve by allowing demonstrations and which foreign powers they choose to leverage. Specifically, it uses the different perspectives of Chinese news sources (The People’s Daily, The Global Times, and The South China Morning Post) and the analysis of scholars inside and outside of China to test for variables at different points in a sequential, structured case study analysis of three different widespread nationalist demonstrations (against the United States in 1999, Japan in 2005, and South Korea in 2014). I argue that Chinese leaders not only consider their immediate situation in their decision to allow protest but also their ability to influence the policy of the foreign power in the long-term, with older foreign administrations being less malleable, and so more attractive targets. Even marginally expanding knowledge the tools that China uses to shape foreign perceptions (such as allowing protests) can improve understanding of Chinese foreign policy.
Month: February 2018
Dr. Field Meeting #1
I met with Dr. Field on February 2, 2018, from 2:30 to about 3:05, so approximately 35 minutes. Our conversation was mainly about my interpretation of comments I received from the collective advising workshop that day. The problems that I am particularly focused on are the researchability of my current project and the broader methodological decisions I have made. Both of those go hand-in-hand, of course, and I feel like either my methodological choices need of change to accommodate my research question or my research question to accommodate my methodology. Perhaps I could get some insight into Chinese government decision-making for protests that took place at least a decade ago (such as those of 2005 and 1999) from retrospective leaks and memoirs, but getting insight to the black box of decision-making for a protest that took place less than a year ago is challenging, if not impossible.
This was probably the main reason for the skepticism my project received at the workshop, and the solutions with which I approached Dr. Field were that I first banish the term “decision-making” from my vocabulary because even Jessica Chen Weiss, a scholar with much more experience and resources than are available to me, acknowledges the difficulty of illumination decision-making is a regime as opaque as that of China.(1) Also, I am considering completely changing my research question so that instead of inquiring about decision-making, I am asking about why China obtained diplomatic concessions in some cases, but not in others. This would completely change my research question and make two-thirds of my literature review superfluous. Dr. Field suggested that I not become too methodologically attached so early in the process of actual research and that I talk to my mentor about my dilemma. She also suggested that I look at cases where protests got suppressed. This very problematic, though, as it makes the dependent variable very difficult to detect (how does one find protests that never happened). Overall, though, I think that my methodological dilemma (of using protest as either a dependent or independent variable) is my largest problem and one that I will be considering moving forward.
(1) Jessica Chen Weiss. Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014: 31.
Research Portfolio Post #3: Grappling with Ethical Naturalism and Positivism
Gorski is right in asserting that there are not just “value-laden facts” — which interpretive methodologies are predisposed to addressing — but also “fact-laden values” — which no contemporary methodology is designed to approach directly.(1) It is indeed somewhat contradictory that we are more comfortable (in the world of the social sciences) attempting to investigate spillover from our values to our facts that we are investigating that from our facts to our values, which might be even more constructive than the former interaction.(2) However, I think he exaggerates the divisions between the positive and normative worlds and discounts their utility. It might not be possible for a scholar confined to the methodologies of today’s social sciences to directly investigate our values in search of those coveted fact-laden values, but there is no convention that bars scholars from considering the implications of their research or resulting policy recommendations (in their conclusion, or even outside of their paper). If we did allow or encourage scholars to consider the philosophical elements of their research in a more rigorous way, readers would find it strange and probably superfluous and scholars would find it arduous. I do not think that these necessarily transition pains either — scholars always need to divide labor to cover the wide frontiers of human endeavor.
I am not sure that McBrayer proposes a complete model for his vision of the social sciences (probably because he was writing for a newspaper and under very different constraints from Gorski and Comte), but he would probably agree with Gorski’s proposition.(3) They both denounce the fact-value divide as arbitrary and consider the good that could come from the crossover from the fact side to that of values.(4) Comte, though, does not envision a neat reconciliation between the two, rather he think that his positive philosophy with its confidence in human rationalism (and its conviction that laws govern the natural and even the social worlds) can and should take over the entirety of study, overrunning theology and philosophy if they do not voluntarily accommodate it.(5) My research on nationalist protest in China is probably not geared towards directly investigating values or answering a normative question. Perhaps in my conclusion, I could consider policy recommendations for the United States to glean information from the signaling of the Chinese government. But (if we envision study as a progression from the specific focus of the hard sciences up to the social sciences, and then up to the broad focus of philosophical speculation) I do not think that I could progress any further up the ladder.
(1) Philip S. Gorski. “Beyond the Fact/Value Distinction: Ethical Naturalism in the Social Sciences,” October 16, 2013.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Justin P. McBrayer. “Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts.” The New York Times, March 2, 2015. //opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/02/why-our-children-dont-think-there-are-moral-facts/.
(4) Ibid.
(5) August Comte. Course of Positive Philosophy. Gertrud Lanzer. New York: Harper, 1830.
Mentor Meeting #1
My meeting with Dr. Zhang took place on January 24, 2018, from 3:30 to about 4:05 (so about 35 minutes in length). Our discussion focused on the methodological dilemmas of my research and the problem of finding suitable data that could answer my research question. Fortunately, I have already solved most of the large methodological dilemmas of my research project (though as I discuss later in this post, some dilemmas have returned with a vengeance), but we revisited the qualitative research vs. quantitative research dynamic because Dr. Zhang suggested that I did not adequately address it in my final narrative paper. He felt that I implicitly assumed that quantitative research was superior to qualitative research since my justification for small-n case study analysis and my methodology was that there were too few cases of widespread nationalist protest (that were adequately recorded) to do a large-n statistical analysis. Dr. Zhang responded that even if large-n was possible, small-n research still has significant advantages for my proposed research: it allows me to disentangle often complicated causal relationships and focus on China since it is such an outlier in terms of regime strength and resilience.(1)
On the problem of finding researchable data, Dr. Zhang had recommendations on two fronts. First, he suggested that I tweak me research question so that I did not claim to research decision making (which I cannot get to directly since I have no access to Politburo records). He also suggested that I begin looking more broadly for data (I am in the process of compiling news stories from the state-run media outlet The People’s Daily as a way to analyze the government line on the issues). I envision accommodating this advice by first removing “decision-making” from my paper and then replacing it with a research question about the government reaction to the protests and how it utilized them to extract diplomatic concessions, but I expect that this could be a problem that I will reckon with for some time. If I did change my research plan in this way, it might allow me to analyze the line of the South Korean government on the protests. Being a more transparent government, research in this area might yield some interesting results. That said, I think that a structural shift in this way pulls me closer to interpretivist methods of discourse analysis since I would then be analyzing government narratives. That brings its own problems because I do not have the language capabilities to analyze either Chinese language or Korean language sources — I only have access to exposure to one subset of the discourses. In considering these problems, I will probably do more methodological reading and consultation with Dr. Zhang and Dr. Field, but both trajectories of research seem to carry with them significantly (though not insurmountable) problems.
(1) Peter Hays Gries. “Chinese Nationalism: Challenging the State?” Current History; Philadelphia 104, no. 683 (September 2005): 251–56.
Research Portfolio Post #2: Culture, Politics, and Science
Johnson and Plato make very similar arguments — it seems to me that Johnson’s could even be an extension of the democratic flaws that Plato points out. Plato argues that the freedom of democracies means that leaders are unable to shape (or as later social scientists might suggest, socialize) the opinions of the people or control their actions.(1) He points out that this creates a society incoherent in both action and opinion, with the people refusing to hold any value as superior to any others.(2) Johnson echoes these negative ramifications, lamenting that we “live in a culture in which bad faith tolerance-for-others is ubiquitous and rewarded, while productive intellectual sparring is shunned.”(3) Thus, the two authors agree that the pluralism of democracies stifles discourse and the emergence of true consensus on values. Tocqueville, however, argues that the equality of democracies leads to each person putting immense faith in their own reason and abilities (since none of his countrymen are his superior) and in public opinion.(4) As a result, the opinions of the people will converge (not diverge as Plato suggests and Johnson seems to assume), yet the people themselves will be reluctant to engage in discourse since they are all equals.(5)
I think they are right to the extent that people in democracies do not often take up the normative questions of to what ends we should devote ourselves. This is restrictive of debate, but I think that our society does accept moral truths, even if people do not defend them as such and instead revert to “lazy relativism.” For example, the equality and liberty of liberal societies like America (even if some think that they ultimately stifle debate) are held as moral truths themselves — indeed, Western countries have seized many opportunities to export these values abroad. That said, ending the embargo on normative claims might have some benefits — it could strengthen the sets of values that we currently hold (or, if we cannot defend our values, as Johnson says, “we ought to let them go”).(6)
Tocqueville, though, articulates the best argument in favor of the status quo: if every person took up philosophical speculation, we would never get anything done. Even if we had no walls between the social sciences and more philosophical practices, I would venture to say that social scientists might find it troublesome to always question the ends of their work — in other words, there are limits to the practicality of interdisciplinary interaction. There are some interesting examples of fields that straddle the divide (such as behavioral economics bridging the hard science-social science chasm with economics and psychology), revealing that our categorization is somewhat arbitrary. Nevertheless, the divides have their utility (in dividing labor) — they are arbitrary in their locations, not in their existence.
(1) Plato. Republic: 557a-558c, 560e-562a.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Leigh Johnson. “Lazy Relativism.” ReadMoreWriteMoreThinkMoreBeMore, November 7, 2009. http://www.readmorewritemorethinkmorebemore.com/2009/11/lazy-relativism.html.
(4) Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America. Vol. 2. 2000: 409.
(5) Ibid: 409, 410.
(6) Johnson. “Lazy Relativism.”