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.
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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.”
Research Portfolio Post #1: Exploring or Dissecting our Motivations and Assumptions
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.
Research Portfolio Post #10: Mentor Meeting
My most recent meeting with Dr. Yang Zhang took place on Wednesday, December 13 from 3:30 to about 4:05, so about 35 minutes. Having discussed methodology extensively (and having already settled on a time-series cross-sectional case study analysis based on my own reasoning, Dr. Zhang’s advice, and the work of Gerring) in previous meetings, we mainly focused on my preliminary findings and goals moving forward to SISU-306.(1) The most interesting finding that I encountered in some of my political research is that the People’s Daily, a state-run mainland Chinese newspaper, seemed to lend tentative support to anti-South Korean protests in Spring of 2017 and gave South Korea a significant amount of critical coverage.(2) However, as the diplomatic crisis was unfolding, the same newspaper gave the bilateral US-China relationship positive coverage during American state visits to East Asia, even though it was the American military that was installing the THAAD system in South Korea, initiating the crisis.(3)
I suggested that it was a manifestation of Chinese priorities: China focused diplomatic pressure on South Korea because it was not willing to sacrifice its relationship with America. Dr. Zhang then posited that it might have also been because the Trump administration was so young at that point and relatively isolated in terms of international relationships, creating an opening for cooperation that Xi Jinping perhaps found very valuable. His comment reminded me of Weiss’s study of the 1999 and 2001 anti-American demonstrations — the 1999 demonstrations took place in the final part of the Clinton administration (when it was clear the administration would change) and were given tacit support from the Chinese government, while the 2001 demonstrations took place in the first few months of the George W. Bush administration and were suppressed.(4) I mentioned this as a possible explanation for why the anti-South Korea protests conspicuously avoided anti-Americanism in the initial days of the Trump administration (and even more interestingly, all this anti-South Korean sentiment took place during the waning days of the Park Geun-hye administration). Dr. Zhang suggested that this was an explanation that would be worth studying moving forward, but that I should remember to look at the issue from multiple angles.
As far as laying the groundwork for my future research, Dr. Zhang suggested that I read and compile a large number of news stories from Chinese news sources about the event (focusing on three — the People’s Daily, the Global Times, and the South China Morning Post). These will probably serve as the beginning of my pool of evidence for the most important of my three cases: the 2017 anti-South Korea protests. He also suggested that I do more methodological reading and assigned a book by Mahoney and Rueschemeyer on comparative historical analysis.(5)
(1) Jonathan Gerring. “What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good For?” The American Political Science Review 98, no. 2 (May 2004): 341–54.
(2) “Lotte Outlets Closed for Violating Fire Codes.” People’s Daily, March 7, 2017. http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/0307/c90000-9186594.html; “Part of THAAD Battery Arrives in S.Korea, Deployment Process Begins.” People’s Daily, March 7, 2017. http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/0307/c90000-9186798.html.
(3) “Tillerson’s First China Visit to Build on Positive Momentum in China-U.S. Ties.” People’s Daily, March 16, 2017. http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/0316/c90000-9191192.html.
(4) Jessica Chen Weiss. “Authoritarian Signaling, Mass Audiences, and Nationalist Protest in China.” International Organization 67, no. 1 (January 2013): 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818312000380.
(5) James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer. Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Final Research Design Presentation
Also find it here: https://youtu.be/IxWcRrW7I6c
RPP #9: Qualitative Data Sources for Interpretivist Research
A divide certainly exists in the analysis of Chinese nationalist movements in Western media sources. One of the discourses that exists on this subject is composed of foreign observers that assume all nationalist protest in China to be manufactured by the government.(1) Gries briefly observes that this “idea that the Chinese people are largely impotent before the vast coercive apparatus of the Oriental state has a long history in the Western study of Chinese politics, and it continues to impede Western studies of state legitimation in China today.”(2) In analyzing the coverage of Chinese nationalist movements by Western news sources, the Economist is a good example (of one subset of Western sources) because it explicitly takes a Western liberal point of view.(3)
An article by The Economist covering the nationalist protests against South Korea in 2017 makes this assumption that the Chinese government can finely manipulate public sentiments in its title, “China is whipping up public anger against South Korea.”(4) Throughout its coverage, the article referred to nationalism as a “weapon in China’s diplomatic armoury” and only briefly does it recognize the threat that nationalist sentiment can pose to regime stability.(5) The way meaning is constructed by this particular discourse is a puzzle because, as Weiss notes, China has a long history of instability and revolution created by antiforeign unrest.(6) This history would seem to indicate that nationalist protests should be understood in the context of being a constraint on government decision making, but that is not the belief that this particular discourse advances. In one sense though, the article from The Economist is unhelpful because the names of the authors of all articles from The Economist are concealed. This means that we cannot know with certainty the identity of the author, but we can still assess it as a Western news source with a liberal point of view.
(1) See for example “China Is Whipping up Public Anger Against South Korea.” The Economist, May 17, 2017. https://www.economist.com/news/china/21718876-it-wary-going-too-far-china-whipping-up-public-anger-against-south-korea.
(2) Peter Hays Gries. “Chinese Nationalism: Challenging the State?” Current History; Philadelphia 104, no. 683 (September 2005): 252.
(3) “China Is Whipping up Public Anger Against South Korea.”
(4) Ibid.
(5) Ibid.
(6) Weiss, Jessica Chen. Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014: 7-11.
Research Portfolio Post #8: Qualitative Data Sources
The dependent variable of my research project is the foreign policy outcomes of an international crisis — specifically, the presence of concessions in the recipient of the signal. In this case, the signal is conveyed via the allowance of protest by the Chinese government (in the THAAD crisis of early 2017) the recipient is South Korea. This variable can be difficult to measure because both sides can have an incentive to distort reality by exaggerating concessions — the recipient may want to demonstrate compliance without making substantial concessions, and the conveyor may want to save face. Nevertheless, a signal of concession can be a concession itself and useful for analysis in its own right.
Essentially, for a valid operationalization of this variable, we should search for the presence of a response signal from the recipient government — specifically, the presence or absence of public speeches from leaders or heads of state that emphasize some new strategic restraint or retreat. In the case of South Korea, Paul McLeary notes in Foreign Policy that Moon Jae-in seems to have attempted to signal a desire for concession and cooperation.(1) Having publicly emphasized the importance of Sino-Korean relations multiple times, Moon publicly suspended the deployment of THAAD for review.(2) Thus, the article seems to indicate a strong presence of this aspect of the dependent variable.
Yet, in operationalizing the dependent variable, an analysis of rhetoric may be the most apparent facet, but it is not necessarily the most important. We also need to analyze the presence of actual strategic concessions (within which there are multiple factors to consider, including concrete retreats, shifting alliance dynamics, and changing overall strategic posture). Taylor notes that Moon did agree to suspend deployment, which could indicate a concrete strategic retreat; however, on further analysis, he notes that deployment was later quietly resumed.(3) This indicates, that South Korea’s overall strategic posture has probably not changed outside of that single temporal concession, but also that its alliance dynamic may have changed, demonstrating a more nuanced ability to balance US and Chinese interests.
(1) Paul McLeary. “In Nod to China, South Korea Halts Deployment of THAAD Missile Defense.” Foreign Policy, July 7, 2017. https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/07/in-nod-to-china-south-korea-halts-deployment-of-thaad-missile-defense/.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Taylor, Adam. “South Korea and China Move to Normalize Relations after THAAD Dispute.” Washington Post, October 31, 2017, sec. Asia & Pacific. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/south-korea-and-china-move-to-normalize-relations-after-thaad-conflict/2017/10/31/60f2bad8-bde0-11e7-af84-d3e2ee4b2af1_story.html.