Documentation and Analysis of Internet Data

The collection and analysis of secondary data is a very cost-effective way of discovering what research has already been done on the topic and what evidence is available, which elucidates areas where new research needs to be performed (Burnham et al, 2004: 33-4).

Secondary sources, including internet data, are most effectively employed in combination with analysis of primary data from interviews. For this research, in order to build a theoretical framework and a general picture of China‘s modernisation as well as generate new knowledge on the topic of contention and democratisation, documentation is still the main method complementary to interviewing. The procedure of documentation research is composed of searching for related literature from sources including books, journals, magazines, newspapers, websites, internet forums, TV programmes and videos by using search tools such as categories, search engines or tracing references. I accumulated the necessary materials by taking notes, analysing and sorting out useful and important information using a combination of extensive and intensive examination of selected materials with critical and comparative perspectives, summarising and evaluating the literature on the research topic by integrating different arguments systematically, and developing new ideas about the theories and realities in a creative and practical way.

Among the documents and literature what was worth noting is the Chinese governmental discourse, such as pervasive slogans and ideological speeches, which contain rich meanings, messages, implications and contradictions. This kind of data can typically be found in the largest national news network Xinhua or in the newspaper the People’s Daily. There are also valuable government documents and publications including policies, regulations, laws and statistics from governmental departments and organisations as well as the official statistics bureau. Another useful source is the documentaries made and circulated through non-official channels by popular intellectuals, dissidents or independent organisations.

As for the contentious event analysis, mass media offers a unique approach to the study of past events inasmuch as they are time-specific and datable (Wilkinson, 1994: 50). The Internet provided an innovative cost-effective way of undertaking this documentation.

Increasingly, much documentary material is available ‗online‘. The electronic version of paper-based media resources and academic resources, online government and civil organisation documents, quantitative data such as online polling surveys and qualitative data such as online elite interviewing can all be reached through search engines and the

‗snowballing‘ strategy. It can be noted that the internet is transforming political research and politics itself, especially for analysis of online activism and contentions. The internet can be a main and immediate source and provide a synthesis of stories from different news portals (such as China.com, People.com, Xinhua net, Sina.com.cn, QQ news, Times online, BBC, New York Times, The Epoch Times) as well as perspectives from popular forums and web blogs (such as Tianya, China Digital Times, Global Voice, EastSouthWestNorth).

Since the Chinese government and the Communist Party rigidly control the mainstream and mass media inside China including the internet, the availability and authenticity of the materials about Chinese political conditions is difficult to guarantee. It is noted that internet resources in both English and Chinese are more accessible outside China because they escape domestic censorship. However, the resources‘ authenticity, systematisation, reliability, validity, impartiality and objectivity should be double-checked. For example, some of the internet resources, especially from overseas, might indicate some political bias and list the extremes of violent solutions.

For the sheer range and diversity of documentary sources from online newspapers to research reports, from governmental records to documentary materials, from websites to blogs, I adopted mainly a qualitative method of content analysis, whereby I made subjective judgments about the selection of resources and assessments on the value of content (Berelson, 1952: 18). The first criterion I used was to choose material that was public, with no problems of access or informed consent. I then decided that the material should be appropriate for the research themes and able to provide concrete evidence to the background arguments. Texts and transcripts of the material were treated as narratives to be understood and interpreted for meaning; meanwhile words were also used as data based on the links between specified words in known political texts and their subsequent political implications and positions (Laver, Benoit and Garry, 2003). This qualitative analysis of internet content is primarily based on the methodological philosophies of hermeneutics and constructionism.

3.5.1 Collection and coding of internet data for internet contentions.

Networking and debating in cyberspace has formed a significant online public sphere contributing to the mobilisation of civil society contentions. In this thesis I provide a specific chapter on the growing number of recorded online contentious activities that were mainly

conducted by intellectuals and white-collar workers. The selection and coding of internet resources is based on results from the fieldwork interviews. I first found out what topics people are most contentious about and what the most popular trends are. For the former, it is the problems during reforms and modernisation, mainly about the dissatisfaction with the governance and the overall moral decay of society. For the latter, it is obviously nationalism.

Then I employed these findings to categorise and construct equivalent online case studies, in order to examine how people react to the problems through cyberspace and how they express nationalism online. In particular, I examined how contents and discourses are shaped in the lead up to the social mobilising process and how groups use the weapon of language to impose their assumptions and values on others in order to promote their own interests.

After grouping online cases into administrative and legal cases, moral cases and nationalist cases, I targeted governance issues, social moral issues and nationalism issues, respectively. I also added the recent Wenchuan Earthquake case as an inclusive case that can integrate different interesting elements. I then conducted an internet search based on the key words found in the most typical cases in each category. I also collected different online content from the news, forum discussions and blogs for one of the cases. Meanwhile I combined them with accounts from mainstream media reports to form a whole picture. In the chapter on internet contentions, I will also provide detailed sourcing of the text for both internet and media report data.

3.6 Summary

This chapter has discussed how the research was conducted and how the required knowledge for the research themes was obtained. Firstly, a research paradigm was set up as the fundamental disciplinary and epistemological pattern in order to lead the methodological choices and research design. An integration of new institutionalism and rational choice combined both methodological collectivism and individualism for a better comprehension of interaction between the institutions and the challengers within China‘s contentious politics.

Based on the epistemological paradigms the methodological principles of positivism and hermeneutics/constructionism were applied to deliver both inductive and content-specific reasoning, to build up both an objective empirical foundation and a subjective interpretative tower. Such methodological pluralism led to a practical research design containing both

quantitative approaches, such as statistics and structured interviews, and qualitative approaches, such as unstructured interviews and internet content/discourse analysis. The main instruments adopted for data collection were interviewing, documentation and internet content analysis. Attention has also been paid to semi-structured interviewing with regard to the design of sampling methods and interview questions and on the actual procedures of sampling and interviewing as well as the problems encountered. The following chapters will seek an application of the methods and a full analysis and discussion of the data collected.