4. Interview Analysis
4.4 Pragmatism and Habituation
Table 5 – Alienation from Mainland China Positive
The overall tendency suggests that there exist a similar case as with the attitudes toward the Chinese tourists. The low benefit group has the least favorable opinion on this issue, and the large benefit group has the most moderate, if not positive. Surprising, however, is that the opinions on this political issue give us more reason to believe that there is a
correlation between the alienation and the amount of economic transactions than between those transactions and cross-Strait economic integration.
4.4 Pragmatism and Habituation
Like briefly mentioned during the respective sections, some of the answers about the different levels of attitudes were justified mainly by pragmatic arguments and other arguments included habitual motivation, which suggested that vendors have gotten accustomed with vendors. To further address the issues of the independent variable of business transactions with Chinese tourists and to try to differentiate the impact of economic incentives and contact on this variable, it is useful to look at these motivations more
thoroughly and find out if those attitudes are in fact influenced by rational incentives or if the contact with Chinese people also has to be added as an important variable. The categorization of the answers according to those two kinds of arguments, therefore, can help us to answer the question which factor really affects the results reported here and which one does not.
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When looking for pragmatic or economic reasoning in the attitudes about the Chinese tourists, we find a clear tendency. While the large benefit group mainly justifies their
attitudes of the mainlanders by pragmatic arguments, the low benefit group does not rely on this kind of reasoning. Many vendors of the high benefit group rely on arguments like “many buy only one piece and share it with a group of people” (H5) or “the Chinese bargain too much” (H3) to underscore their more moderate views, but other also use those economic viewpoints to justify their bad opinions: “[they are] only old people without much money.
The people, who really spend money, go elsewhere. They also don’t spend enough time here.” (H1). Therefore we have reasons to assume that these vendors are very much influenced by the economic side of the arguments. Although we find a couple of vendors with bad attitudes, this does not seem to be particularly influenced by contacts because pragmatic arguments prevail. This becomes even more evident, when we look at the change of attitudes. Vendors, which argue that their opinion has changes positively, argue that they have gotten used to the Chinese. This at first can be seen as an influence of contact, in which the vendors get accustomed to the mainlanders. But, when looking at the reasons many give for this development, we see arguments like “I want to earn money off them, [therefore] it is worth ignoring the bad habits” (H2) or “my attitude got a little better, [because] the [Chinese]
customers now buy more” (H5) which, again, hint at a pragmatist influence even in the context of those habitual arguments.
On the question of cross-Strait economic integration, we have seen that the arguments given are a bit different and, instead, appear to be motivated by pragmatism only and we cannot find any affective or habitual arguments in those responses. The analysis also suggests that the vendors do not really make the connection between their business situation and the issue of cross-Strait economic integration. Neither contact nor economic incentives appear to largely influence this attitude.
For the alienation of Taiwanese people from China we, in turn, can see an overall trend, when taking the economic transaction categories into our considerations and
corresponding to this, we find both pragmatic and habitual arguments in the answers of the vendors. Therefore, it is interesting to note that we find neither affective nor pragmatic
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answers given by the large benefit group. It is only among the medium and low benefit groups that we can observe justifications of any kind for the responses given. Of those, who did give reasons, however, there was a tendency to see their attitudes on the PRC to have changed positively during the last years. And the arguments given for this development were almost all very pragmatic: “The political side is not good, but the economic side is [now]
very good.” (M5), “Now it is better than earlier, but not on the political side. (M4), “There’s good and there’s bad. The economy belongs to the good.” (L6).
The answers for the attitudes about Chinese tourists and the alienation from the PRC give us reasons to believe that many of the more moderate or positive attitudes are influenced by pragmatic motivation and, therefore, by economic incentives. We can find many
pragmatist arguments in the positive accounts and even some in the negative attitudes. When we look at the changes in attitudes, this is even clearer as most of the positive changes are caused by economic reasons. But we also find one memorable exception with a negative change in attitude, which might be interesting for us. While positive changes in this case are apparently caused by economic reasons, the vendor with the negative account argues: “I now think that they [the Chinese] are even worse. Earlier, I thought they were ok, [but] now I know they are really terrible and extreme” (L6). This account clearly suggests an habitual background and that the reasons for this might be the contact with Chinese tourists, which actually had a negative effect for the vendor.
When classifying all of the opinions given by the different vendors on the attitudes in terms of pragmatist and habitual arguments and comparing them to the economic benefit groups, we find that there is a great overlap (See table 2). This is especially visible for the large benefit group. All of the vendors in this group have used several pragmatic arguments in their responses and are significantly more pragmatic than the other two groups. There are comparatively only very few habitual reasons given by this group. This suggests that the large benefit group is thinking significantly more pragmatic than the low benefit group, which offers a lot more habitual arguments and fewer pragmatic considerations.
This tendency for the high benefit group cannot prove that there is no influence of contact on the vendor’s attitudes. In reality, we see quite some habitual arguments in the
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large benefit group, which do suggest a subtle positive influence of contact on the attitudes.
But, the increased usage of pragmatic arguments in describing their attitudes does give us a hint that economic incentives are very important. If we see this development of the influence on the positive attitudes or attitude changes, that, however, does not mean that there are no cases with negative influence. As has been shown above, we can find one vendor issuing a negative change in attitude toward Chinese tourists. This attitude is underscored by a very habitual argument, which gives us reasons to think that it is influenced by contact although the vendors comes from the low benefit group. Apparently, for this vendor, the contact with Chinese people has strengthened his aversion against the mainland tourists and while we suppose his identity has not changed, the influence of contact in this is possible.
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Table 6 – Pragmatist and Habitual Arguments Used by the Vendors3 ID No Economic Benefit Group Pragmatic
arguments
3 Vendors have been classified as having a tendency toward either direction, if they have issued at least two more arguments of the either pragmatic or habitual kind. All others have been classified as having “no clear tendency”.