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2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

1. Taking Chinese IR Scholars Seriously

Authors : Huiyun Feng, Kai He, Xiaojun Li

Published in: How China Sees the World

Publisher: Springer Singapore

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Abstract

In this chapter, we first discuss the existing research on China’s public opinion and foreign policy and suggest that the general, public-targeted survey research faces three analytical weaknesses. We then introduce our unique “opinion survey and textual analysis” approach, which integrates survey research techniques and traditional textual analyses of Chinese international relations (IR) scholars’ writings. We argue that our book makes two contributions to the study of China’s international relations. On one hand, we fill an intellectual gap in the study of Chinese IR scholars’ perceptions of international relations in the 2010s through a unique analytical approach integrating opinion surveys and textual analysis. On the other hand, through the eyes of Chinese IR scholars, we make sense of what Chinese policy makers may think about the world.

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next chapter On China’s Power and the International Order: Is China a Challenger?

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This section is based on the following two publications: Huiyun Feng and Kai He, “America in the Eyes of America Watchers: Survey Research in Beijing in 2012,” The Journal of Contemporary China 24, no. 91 (2015): 83–100; Huiyun Feng and Kai He, “How Chinese Scholars Think about Chinese Foreign Policy,” Australian Journal of Political Science 51, no. 4 (2016): 694–710.

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See The Pew Global Attitudes Project Website, available at: http://pewglobal.org. For a China-related study using the Pew Global Attitudes project data, see Tao Xie and Benjamin I. Page, “What Affects China’s National Image? A Cross-National Study of Public Opinion,’ Journal of Contemporary China 22, no. 83 (2013): 850–867.

It is difficult to follow a random sampling strategy in China since the samples are normally drawn disproportionately from urban areas.

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China’s “America watchers” refers to Chinese academic scholars and policy analysts who study US–China relations in government-funded universities and research institutions.

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Carsten Holz, “Have China Scholars All Been Bought?” Far Eastern Economic Review, 4 July 2007, p. 36. A recent study shows that overseas China scholars also face this “self-censorship” dilemma. See Sheena Chestnut Greitens and Rory Truex, “Repressive Experiences among China Scholars: New Evidence from Survey Data,” 1 August 2018, available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3243059 or https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3243059.

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Following a similar methodology, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) also conducted an opinion survey on “strategic elites” in 11 Asia Pacific economies in early 2014, which aimed to explore regional perceptual trend lines on power and order in Asia. However, the sample size of Chinese experts in this CSIS survey is only 35.

Despite our best efforts, we were unable to field our survey at the 11th CCPSIS annual meeting in 2018.

We include students in all of our analyses as most of them are in the MA and PhD programs of international relations and will soon become the next batch of Chinese IR scholars. Analytically, because nearly half of the respondents are students, dropping them would substantially reduce the statistical power and the significance of the temporal comparisons.

Title: Taking Chinese IR Scholars Seriously
Authors: Huiyun Feng
Kai He
Xiaojun Li
Publisher: Springer Singapore
Book: How China Sees the World
Print ISBN: 978-981-15-0481-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-981-15-0482-2

Copyright Year: 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0482-2_1