Category: Mentorship

This meeting took place on April 17, 2018 from 3:30 to about 4:05. It was the first since I found out I had been accepted to the Undergraduate Research Symposium, so we mainly discussed the feedback that I had received on my presentation last Friday. I explained that Professor Jackson had suggested that I be more explicit in my conceptualization of my theory as a model, rather than three separate hypotheses (since they really are not separate at all). He said that my analysis section looked much improved (since I had reorganized it to give a chronological explanation of each protest even before my variable analysis), but that I could be even more concise in both my analysis section and on my poster. He said that generally speaking I was in good shape for the symposium and to submit my paper for comments from and reading by the symposium panel this Friday.

My meeting with Dr. Zhang took place on April 11, 2018 from 3:30 to about 4:10 (so about 40 minutes). We mainly discussed my poster for the poster conference in April. He explained that I had to deal with the dual problem of presenting enough information for people to understand my project and making my presentation simple enough to draw people in. He also reminded me that my audience was slightly different from that of the Research Symposium — at the poster conference, I might be presenting to people with no experience researching international relations, making prioritizing simplicity and clarity even more imperative. He also said that I could add one or two more visual aids to make my poster more pleasing to the eye and sent me an example from one of his former students.

My fifth meeting with Dr. Zhang took place on April 4, 2017 from 3:30 to about 4:00 (so about 30 minutes). We continued our discussion of my analysis. He said that I needed to prioritize clarity more in my writing. His issue, as he put it, was that he, someone who knows my research and had been following me and guiding me in the research process, was confused in some places. He said that reorganizing my paper so that I gave the sequence of events before moving onto my structured, focused comparison of variables would help to this end, but also that I needed to make my wiring itself more dynamic and not worry about writing every piece of data I have collected. He also told me to start working on my poster so that I could bring it in next time for comments since I will be presenting at the SIS Poster Conference.

My latest meeting with Dr. Zhang took place on March 28, 2018 from 3:30 to 4:08 (so 38 minutes). We discussed problems with my analysis section, as well as deadlines that were coming up. I sill do not know whether I will be accepted to the Undergraduate Research Symposium, and so if I am, Dr. Zhang suggested that we meet very often over the next month (possibly every week). He showed me a paper that he was working on as a demonstration of a way to organize a small-n structured, focused analysis. Essentially, he started out his analysis section with a historical background so that readers know the order of events before the variables involved were distilled into degrees of presence and absence. He said that simply diving into variable analysis and also giving contextual information on the way was a confusing and somewhat cumbersome. As something to work on moving forward, I said that I would work on writing a more dynamic analysis.

Dr. Zhang and I met on March 21, 2018, from 3:30 to about 4:00 (so about 30 minutes). We mainly discussed my methods for data collection as I was finishing up and preparing to finalize my analysis. His original suggestions (from a previous meetings) were to focus on coverage of THAAD deployment from the South China Morning Post (a somewhat neutral source and it is neither from a foreign country nor from the mainland), the Global Times (as a populist perspective), and the People’s Daily (as the official line). He suggested that I keep track of my searches either to report in my paper or so that I could retrace my steps in the future and that not worry about recording every fact of the event (in fact, he said that I would almost certainly end up with an excess of data than a shortage). We also talked about my methodology, the additions that I had made to it, and Dr. Field’s comments. Dr. Zhang felt that I had incorporated the language of structured, focused comparison well, but that I could better incorporate some of his other suggested methodological readings.

My second meeting with Dr. Zhang took place on February 19, 2018 from 12:15 to about 12:45 (so about 20 min in length). Our conversation mostly addressed my anxieties about the current form of my research question, and so the internal (and also external) validity of drawing any conclusions to answer it. I explained to Dr. Zhang that I had come to a sort of crossroads — a dilemma about the trajectory of my research — and was considering moving antiforeign protest from the dependent variable of my research project to the independent variable of my project. Instead of testing for causes of protests, I would be testing for the cause of the diplomatic concessions made after (and hypothetically in response to) the nationalist protests.

I also explained that after Professor Mislan’s workshop, I was feeling slightly more confident about the state of my project and possibly saw a way forward in structured, focused comparison. His explanation of structured, focused comparison acted as a nice counterweight to the emphasis that others (especially in our readings from last semester) had given to process tracing. The “structured” and “focused” nature of this methodology is very useful to me as it entails testing for the presence (or degree of presence) of variables at different stages of the given process rather than placing as much emphasis on directly approaching or observing the causal mechanisms at play (though these two sides of case study research are not completely mutually exclusive — indeed, process tracing is probably the most powerful form of within-case analysis).

He replied that I certainly still could change my research question at this point, but shifting nationalist demonstrations from the dependent variable to the independent variable would be a complete break from my work up to this point — my literature review would probably consist of social movements research, rather than research on protest and crisis bargaining. He also expressed that my research was doable in its current form. I do not have the resources, time, or experience that Weiss had when she did her research on Chinese nationalist protest, but I can still test for external effects of government decision-making and do meaningful research — even if I cannot necessarily directly observe the decision-making process. Since then, I have decided not to change my research project and instead to dedicate myself to work on structured, focused comparison.

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.

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.

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.