Interview procedure

A pilot study enabled me to test the interview structure and questions, to reveal ambiguous, meaningless or embarrassing questions, to discover whether new issues were raised during the pilot test and whether new questions needed to be developed. It also enabled me to rehearse the actual survey, to alert myself to difficulties that were unforeseen, to give myself an opportunity to discover how the respondents would react to the survey and thus to estimate the level of non-responses (Burnham et al, 2004: 39). The pilot research was conducted as follows:

a. Categories of interviewees: Chinese overseas students and visiting scholars, Chinese immigrant workers, Chinese religious activists;

b. Sample size: 3-5 people from each category;

c. Interview methods: face-to-face interview, telephone interview, email interview, group discussion;

d. Date: 22/5/06 - 12/6/06;

e. Venue: Newcastle upon Tyne and Durham, UK;

During this trial research, the interview questions and procedures were evaluated and finalised after making modifications or corrections, taking into account new topics revealed by the trial, and providing solutions to any practical problems. The length of the interview was the biggest methodological defect. The longest time to answer all the questions with some comments on open topics from the interviews was about two hours. Limited by the length of the interview, there is a need to prioritise the topics to be covered. More attention should be made to the question order, when to skip particular questions and when to emphasise particular words or questions. According to the classification of interview questions (Steward, 1997: 155), the essential questions are about interviewees‘ basic information, the contentious activities they take and the state responses they know, which are two core themes of the research. The necessary questions that are important to the research and should be covered as much as possible are those on perception of the problems during modernisation, organisational and networking resources and attitudes towards different contentions. Finally the desirable questions, which are those on interviewees‘ value systems, life experience, comments on particular issues especially the sensitive ones, can be inserted if time permits and if the interviewees are willing to share. Attention was also paid to ethical problems and the codes of conduct due to the fact that I touched upon controversial themes in the interviews.

The formal interview research was entitled ‗Assessment of China’s Realities, Problems, Contentious Activities and Party-State Responses‘ with an introduction letter issued by the department of politics at Durham University (see appendices). This fieldwork was carried out in the summer of 2006 (26/6-11/8) in the cities of Beijing and Wuhan. At the end of the primary data collection, there were 43 labourers, 42 intellectuals and 15 religious people as identified by themselves or by the researcher. As stated in the sampling strategy, non-random

sample designs were used to select interviewees from certain sub-categories. For labourers, 15 laid-off workers were chosen from bankrupted or privatised SOEs (state-owned enterprises), while 11 white-collar workers came from foreign or joint enterprises, and 17 migrant workers were sampled from their most common occupations such as construction, restaurant, hairdressing and port workers.

Domestic intellectuals here were composed of university/institute students and scholars, journalists and lawyers. The samples of students and scholars mostly came from the most famous universities and institutes in Beijing and Wuhan, because these are recognised academies and share the incomparable social, cultural, historical, prestige and policy resources, assemble and attract the most talented elites and the most cutting-edge thoughts, they always closely interact with the government (either central or local) and greatly influence mass media, policy making and evaluation, and public opinion as a whole. As for the domestic religious groups, there were 11 Christians, five of whom were ministers and one Catholic nun; the rest were students, entrepreneurs and retirees, who had stronger religious identification to be categorised into this group. There were also four Buddhist monks from the temples.

I made some slight changes to the sample groups during the fieldwork and added five entrepreneurs and five cadres. Entrepreneurs were mostly private business owners, one of the newly emerged categories and emerging as a powerful interest group (Thakur, 2005). I also encountered a few young local Cadres, identified by Thakur (2005) as an upwardly mobile group, with a lower mean age, more education and higher technical skills. They could be grouped into the urban middle class who have a certain degree of prestige and power, enjoy a well-off family and a comfortable life, possess a confident recognition of their own identities, cautious attitudes and behaviours and have the least potential to be challengers. There had also been a tendency towards alliance between local cadres and entrepreneurs from the early stage of reforms and their interdependence with each other either for political protection or for economic prosperity. Growth of private wealth in both groups determined that they were the most supportive of the political status quo. Therefore, it is interesting to include their attitudes and opinions towards China‘s problems, contentions and official responses.

The email interviews with dissidents and Falun Gong practitioners overseas were conducted in September 2006. Five self-conscious dissidents, who resided in the USA and UK, were tracked through their online publications and blogs. Five Falun Gong practitioners who

resided in Canada and France were tracked via contacts from their news network ‗the Epoch Times‘ and interviewed using emails. A particular finding was a special group of Chinese intellectuals with religious adherence and the mobilisation of overseas Chinese communities;

the chapter on contentions of religious groups will detail the overseas Chinese intellectual-religious movement in the Christianity and Falun Gong related cases.

All the domestic (110) and overseas (10) samples participated in the interviews. The outline and basic statistics of the 120 samples including districts, occupations, and demographic factors are listed in the Table 1 and Table 2:

Table1: Outline of Samples

7 Beijing University

8 Qinghua University

9 Renmin University of China

10 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

11 Wuhan University Location (N=120)

Labourers (N=43)

Intellectuals (N=47)

Religious (N=20)

Others (N=10)

Beijing (N=61) Laid-off workers (8), Migrant workers (9), White-collar workers (6)

Beida⁷ (4), Qinghua⁸ (4), Renda⁹ (4), CASS¹⁰ (3), Other universities (3), Lawyers (2), Journalists (2)

Christian/Catholic (7), Buddhist (3) Entrepreneur (3), Cadre (3)

Wuhan (N=49) Laid-off workers (7), Migrant workers (8), White-collar workers (5)

Wuda¹¹ (4), Wuhan University of Science and Technology (4), Huazhong Normal University (4), Other universities (4), Journalists (2), Lawyers (2)

Christian/Catholic (4), Buddhist (1) Entrepreneur (2), Cadre (2)

Overseas (N=10) Dissidents: North America (3), Europe (2) Falun Gong: North America (3), Europe (2)

Table 2: Basic Statistics of Samples

Sex (%) Age (%) Place of birth (%) Current residence (%)

Male: 64 (53.3) 20-30: 45 (37.5) Beijing: 27 (22.5) Beijing: 61 (50.8)

Female: 56 (46.7) 31-40: 44 (36.7) Wuhan: 30 (25.0) Wuhan: 49 (40.8)

41-50: 21 (17.5) Other cities in Hubei: 17 (14.2) North America: 6 (5.0) 51-60: 10 (8.3) Other provinces: 46 (38.3) Europe: 4 (3.3)

Education (%) Occupation (%) Political affiliation (%) Religious affiliation (%) Primary school: 3 (2.5) Laid-off worker: 15 (12.5) CPC member: 23 (19.2) Catholic/Christian: 30 (25.0) Junior high school: 10 (8.3) Construction worker: 8 (6.7) Youth League member: 20 (16.7) Buddhist: 24 (20.0)

Senior high school: 14 (11.7) Waiter/waitress: 5 (4.2) Member of other parties: 3 (2.5) Falun Gong: 6 (5.0) Vocational school: 9 (7.5) Hairdressing apprentice: 2 (1.6) None: 74 (61.6) None/Atheistic: 60 (50.0) Diploma: 14 (11.7) Porter: 2 (1.6)

Bachelor: 46 (38.3) White-collar workers: 11 (9.2) Master: 18 (15.0) Scholar: 11 (9.2)

PhD: 6 (5.0) Student: 29 (24.1)

Journalist: 7 (5.8) Lawyer: 6 (5.0) Ministry: 5 (4.2) Monk/nun: 5 (4.2) Cadre: 5 (4.2) Entrepreneur: 7 (5.8) Retiree: 2 (1.6)

Stimulating new ideas and in-depth sharing with the interviewees was an important intention of the semi-structured interviews. How the interviews were then practically conducted was decisive to achieve the goal. In order to establish an atmosphere of mutual trust and understanding from the beginning, I first showed the interviewees an introduction letter with the purposes of the research explained. I then tried to create a relaxed but purposeful environment in which interviewees were willing to discuss issues in greater depth and length and enjoy sharing their ideas and perceptions. Different types of probes, for continuation, clarification, completion and redirection (Rubin and Rubin, 1995: 150), were used throughout the interviews, especially for some of the open questions or the interesting points that were stimulated. Examples of the probing questions are ‗so what happened next?‘, ‗could you say a little more about that?‘, ‗you said earlier that…‘. Rambling, or going off at a tangent, was encouraged (Bryman, 2001: 312) in the qualitative interviews, while I was also aware of the importance of redirecting the discussion from irrelevant dialogue. A digital recorder was used during the interviews, and back-up notes were taken at the same time. All of the 18 interviewees did not give permission or showed reluctance to using the recorder.

The sensitivity of this research topic was of great concern to some interviewees, as if an inquiry into unrest was in itself rebellious. So one of the biggest problems I encountered whist conducting the interviews was resistance, non-response or vague responses to some of the questions rather than precise and meaningful answers. There were some sensitive topics, such as Falun Gong movements. When interviewees were asked about their comments and attitudes towards these contentions, the rate of non-response was high. However, for some interviewees, as the rapport developed as the interview progressed, I found we could move toward more difficult and sensitive questions. I also noticed that the recorder inhibited interviewees from being as frank as they would be in its absence. In the end, only about half of the interviewees were able engage in a fruitful dialogue with the interviewer. On the other hand, I was continually discouraged from writing about the ‗black spots‘ in China, Chinese people, CPC or the government and foreign academia. Such discourses, indicative of nationalism, will be further explored in the following chapter.

Another practical problem was that the interviews were full of multiple choice questions. It was strategic for me to clearly present the interviewees with a list of choices in cards to choose, but the hints on cards also deprived them of desires to explore their own choices.

Some terms were unfamiliar, abstract or too general for them, and as a result some of the

interviewees only provided generalities or platitudes as answers. The categorisation of groups was found to be somewhat problematic in one aspect: the white-collar workers were in closer alliance with intellectuals than with labourers in regards of their means of contentions such as the use of internet. Therefore in the following chapter on internet contentions my analysis will be based on a combination of intellectuals and white-collar workers as the main online forces for contentions.