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.