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5. Conclusion
The aim of this thesis is to assess the influence of Chinese tourists on the attitudes of night market vendors in Taipei. By analysis of qualitative interviews of 22 vendors of Ningxia Night Market, this study tried to understand and gain insights into the workings of rational incentives and contact on the vendor’s views. The questions whether business transaction with Chinese have a positive influence on the night market vendors attitudes toward China (Hypothesis 1) and whether these attitudes are expressed in pragmatic terms and show economic reasoning (Hypothesis 2) have been addressed.
The literature review showed that usually two main variables (affective identity and rational incentives) influence the public opinion on China related issues in Taiwan. An evaluation of the current state of affairs in other scholars research highlighted this relationship between affective identity and rational incentives and has shown that those aspects differ in specific ways. Both affective identity and rational incentives play an
important role in for the present study. Affective identity has a strong influence on the public opinion, but it is mainly formed through socialization and before adulthood. Although it is not unchangeable, it usually takes time for a person to alter his identity in a significant way.
For the study on the night market, this variable has been designed to be as constant as possible.
To assess the other factor (rational incentives), this study has looked at the business transactions of Taiwanese night market vendors with Chinese tourists as the main
independent variable. This independent variable includes the rational incentives, but in the present case, cannot completely be divided from another important factor: contact. This is caused by the fact, that business transactions include both incentives and contact, which empirically are hard to measure separately in the situation on the night market, but might affect the attitudes of the vendors differently. While an increase in business with tourists surely affects the incentives of vendors, it also creates contact situations for the vendors with those tourists during the business transactions on the night market. Therefore, the contact itself also might cause the attitudes to change.
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As a contrast to the affective identity, the business transactions are more short-term oriented and therefore should affect the more issue based attitudes of the vendors as analyzed in this study. The study of Ningxia Night Market offered the possibility to study the material incentives of vendors and their contact with tourists in a specific environment. For the period of two to three years, the large increase of Chinese tourists has changed the business situation in a strong way. While this study assumes that the identity of vendors have not changed to a large degree, it has shown that incentives from and the contact with mainland tourists have changed very significantly. An increase of tourist number of about 300% in three years up to 2013 lead to a restructuring of the customer base from a situation, in which mainly local Taiwanese people enjoyed the market, to the present state, in which about 30% of the customers are Chinese tourists. This has not only been proved by data provided by Ningxia Night Market, but also by the perception of vendors themselves.
To study the influence of this development, different attitudes of vendors have been measured and analyzed. The main emphasis regarding these attitudes has been put on
contentious issues with a short-term oriented background. Three areas have been investigated:
Attitudes toward the Chinese tourists, cross-Strait economic integration, and the alienation from the PRC. According to a self-assessment and validated by objective factors like kind of business and location, vendors have been classified into three different groups with low, medium and large benefit from the Chinese tourists. The categorization of the vendors into groups has served the purpose to compare the different benefit group’s attitudes and understand how these vendors explain their choice of attitudes.
While the thesis has shown that most of the vendors in this sample do not think that the Chinese tourists influence their attitudes, an analysis of the interviews has shown different results. We have reasons to believe that vendors with different levels of economic transactions with Chinese have different attitudes toward those tourists and are less alienated from the PRC. In both of these two sets of attitudes, vendors with larger benefit tend to have more positive views than vendors with medium or low benefits. This tendency is stronger for the attitudes toward Chinese tourists than for the alienation and becomes especially evident,
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when looking at the change of the attitudes toward Chinese tourists in the last two to three years. While looking at the influence of the tourists, many scholars have suggested a mainly positive effect of incentives for the vendors. While the business transactions with tourists brings economic incentives with it, it also facilities the short-term contact with those same tourists. In part, this can have a positive effect, but as this study has shown, can also have a negative effect on the vendor’s attitudes.
While the study found positive effects of business transactions on the attitudes toward tourists and alienation issues, no such effect could be shown for attitudes toward cross-Strait economic integration. The general tendency among the vendors shows a favorable attitude toward the issue, but neither negative nor positive responses really were affected by
economic incentives.
To further clarify the influence of business transactions, the answers of vendors have been analyzed qualitatively to assess both the influence of rational incentives and contact. It has been claimed that the reasons given by the night market vendors on most the positive attitude changes have been heavily influenced by pragmatic arguments. This would suggest a large effect of economic incentives. The few arguments, which suggest of a role for contact theory, have been found to have a positive and a negative effect on attitudes. Therefore, it is suggested that negative effects on China related attitudes might have been caused by identity, contact or even the incentives, while there is some evidence that, in the present framework, positive changes are largely influenced by incentives. Consequently, the thesis can give support to the prevailing view among other scholars, who suggest that rational incentives influence the view of the public on cross-Strait economic exchange and China positively, while “affective” reasons or a Taiwanese identity accounts for a more negative view of these issues, like suggested in Keng, Chen and Huang (2006). In the present framework, however, the vendors also raised the possibility of a small negative effect of incentives, which might be worth to consider in certain situations as well.
These findings come with all the limitations of a qualitative research design and the small sample size. While a correlation between business transactions and two of the attitude sets is suggested by our findings, further research is needed to confirm these results
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and to clarify their robustness and validity. It might also be possible that the correlation between attitudes toward tourists or the alienation and the incentives in fact is not caused by the business transactions, but that, in turn, the vendors with the more positive attitudes are able to attract more customers. Although “common sense” and the arguments of our vendors suggest otherwise, this possibility still exists. The present study also cannot completely answer the question whether the influence of the business transactions is caused by rational incentives or by the contact with tourist. Although the pragmatic arguments of vendors suggest a larger role for incentives, the contact cannot be measured separately in the present framework and therefore the shown influence of business transactions might be affected by both of the forces. To summarize, it would be premature to claim the results of the present study as being very strong. What this thesis can do, however, is to point out some of the interesting connections between the variables and to raise questions for further research on this topic. We can also attempt to provide an outlook and, given the assumption that the research findings are correct, point out areas or issues of potential conflict.
If we do this, we can, first and foremost, assume that the very different economic incentives and contact with Chinese tourists for different night market vendors can lead to a division of vendors into two or more groups. The interests and needs of vendors with large economic benefits and low economic benefit from Chinese tourists are very different. For the large benefit group, any increase in tourists is supposed to be a favorable scenario because this also means an increase in customers. This is different for the low benefit group, which in some cases might even see a decrease in customers and contact with those. At least this is true, if we believe the opinion of the vendors, who believe less Taiwanese are coming to the market as a result of this increase. This may cause serious problems for the structure of the market and can lead to opposing views on the administration. If the attitudes of vendors change as well, there might even be a more serious development of this problem. If the beneficiaries of the business with Chinese tourists take a more favorable or moderate view and the low and/ or medium groups do not in the same way, this causes a further division in the political arena. If only the people, who benefit from the business with China, change their attitudes then the cleavage along the issue of national identity might be joined by an
economic cleavage along very similar conflict lines and further facilitate contrasting and
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maybe even extreme political views. A similar development has already been suggested by Kevin Tse Wai Wong (2010) for the Taiwanese society as a whole and might be facilitated with further steps toward cross-Strait economic integration.
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