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3. Research Framework
The basic idea of this study is to explain how mainland Chinese tourists in Taiwan influence the images and attitudes on cross-Strait related issues among night market vendors in Taipei.
As expressed earlier, this study wants to look especially at the economic incentives and the contacts of the Taiwanese vendors and observe their effects by comparing the opinions of vendors with a different exposure to Chinese tourists. In the following section, I will introduce my framework for the in-depth interviews.
There are many reasons why I decided to look at night markets for the empirical part.
Although this choice might not immediatly come to mind for some, it can serve as a very good case study, when doing research on economic incentives and attittudes in Taiwan. This is because many of the background conditions are very favorable for the researcher. First, all the study objects are located in a somewhat confined area and have very similar business conditions. Logically, all of the businesses on a night market mainly open for the same hours, offer very similar goods, and – most of the time – try to address a similar customer base. On top of that, one can expect that vendors themselves also tend to have a largely similar
background. Most of the people working in a restaurant or food both of the night market probably do not have any college education and have similar career options, fall generally in a similar age group and also seem to roughly have similar ethnic backgrounds. All these factors allow for a very good comparability and allow us to focus on the main variables while minimizing the outside factors.
The second very big advantage that night markets in Taiwan offer for this research is the good environment to study the influence of Chinese tourists. While many night markets have been around for some decades, there have been very recent changes and some of the markets have seen a sharp increase of mainland Chinese tourists. Because this increase of tourists in Taiwan is very well documented and night markets are among the prime destinations for many of the tourists, this offers a very good chance to study the change in incentives and related attitudes among those vendors. In addition, business transactions with the Chinese tourists also affect different night markets and different businesses in a
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uniform way. While some night markets register a large increase in tourists, others still mainly serve to local customers. Although some businesses are very popular among tourists, others are not and mostly frequented by the locals. This variation in benefit situations among a comparatively unitary group of vendors, allows for a prime environment to study the effect of Chinese tourists on the attitudes of vendors on China related issues.
For my case study, I am going to look at Ningxia Night Market in Zhongshan District of Taipei. Ningxia Night Market offers the researcher all of the above described advantages of night markets and further adds some specific ones, which make it an even better object to conduct research. Located in an area close to the city center, but not in direct contact to any of the major tourism sites, Ningxia Night Market has established itself during the 1940s and ever since attracted customers. The main business always has been food and this is the case until today with few exceptions of other businesses around (Zhang, Pan 2013). While the night market always attracted some tourists, it never really has been one of the top
destinations for them and cannot be compared to night markets like the famous Shihlin Night Market. This continues to be the case until today, although the number of mainland Chinese tourists increased by a huge share and now makes up an estimated 30% of the customers on the night market (Lin Dingguo, personal interview, June 7th 2013). While other night markets, like the one in Shilin, always attracted very large number of foreign tourists, the scale of the development and increase of tourists on the Ningxia Night Market is very new for the vendors. For the research, this is a very good situation. These changes allow us to assess the changes and problems of the vendors with this development and to study these changes and its effect on attitudes over a period of time.
Another interesting feature of Ningxia Night Market is the fact that it has been established for a long time and presently also has a very low turnover rate (only about 10%
of the businesses change per year; Lin Dingguo, personal interview, June 7th 2013). This means that most of the vendors are working on the night market for several years and gives business owners a good idea of the general business situation and future prospects. It is also important, because almost all of them were around to see the inrease in tourists by
themselves and they are able to compare the situation today with the business of former years.
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Apart from increase in tourists and the turnover rate, the location of Ningxia Night Market also offers benefits for the empirical research itself. The night market is located almost entirely on Ningxia Road and stretches out in a fairly uniform way. In contrast to many other night markets with a large number of small alleys and sometimes confusing structure, the location of the booths in Ningxia Night Market should be less important than on other comparable night markets. The composition of vendors and businesses also seems to be very consistent and offers a good environment to conduct interviews and assess our main variable of economic incentives.
The empirical research for this paper has been conducted by using qualitative interviews of the vendors and business owners on Ningxia Night Market. Each of the interviewees has answered a set of questions and was asked to elaborate on the topic whenever possible. Interviews lasted about ten to fifteen minutes and concentrated on the following issues.
3.1 Dependent Variable: Attitude Toward Mainland China
Different questions on the attitudes toward mainland Chinese tourists and cross-Strait
economic integration, and level of alienation of Taiwanese people from the PRC shall help us to get a picture of respondents’ political views and attitudes. A special attention has been directed toward the changes of attitudes over time in all three cases. By comparing the results of these questions with the respondents economic benefits from the Chinese, we then can analyze those two variables and by evaluation of respondents’ answers also get insights into the nature of this relationship. To further examine this relationship, questions about this relationship itself has also been asked and can shed additional light on this issue.
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3.2 Independent variable: Affective Identity
The identity of vendors on different levels is used as a measure of their affective identity. As we have seen, the term affective identity revolves around “stable affective preferences” and is a rather long-term development, which is being conditioned during pre-adult years.
Therefore, the measurement of identity used in many works on cross-Strait relations seems to be useful (Chen, Keng, Tu, Huang 2009; Keng, Liu, Chen 2009). In these articles, the
identity of subjects is divided into three different levels: group identity, personal identity, and political identity. All of those can be seen in the context of symbolic politics and help us to understand the affective identity of the night market vendors. Questions on the ethnic background will account for the personal level, questions about the identification as Taiwanese, Chinese or both will give us information on the group identity and, finally, questions on the party identification will be used for information on the political level of identity.
3.3 Independent Variable: Business Transactions with Chinese Tourists
The second independent variable in this study will be the business transactions of the vendors at Taiwanese night markets with mainlanders. The measurement of this variable will be based on a self-assessment of the vendors of the night markets. Questions regarding the business activities with Chinese tourists have been asked to clarify the amount of business transactions and to evaluate the level of economic benefits each particular vendor enjoys. To further clarify the matter, vendors also have been asked to estimate the share of Chinese customers in their business and been evaluated according to this. A last question asked if in a hypothetical scenario (suddenly no customers from mainland China would come to Taiwan) the business of vendors would suffer. These assessments help us to group vendors
accordingly and establish different “benefit groups” divided by their respective amount of business with the tourists.
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Another way to assess the economic transactions is to look at the different kinds of businesses. One can expect certain kind of vendors to gain more from the Chinese tourists than others. Especially vendors, which are selling fruit or Taiwanese delicacies, profit from the mainland visitors. Businesses with larger food portions, which take more time to
consume, or businesses, which offer textiles or other non-food items, are also expected to benefit less from the tourists, while food stalls with fast delivery and smaller portions or souvenir shops will benefit more.
As has been outlined in the theoretical section, the issue of business transactions with Chinese people can itself be conceptually divided into two factors. A similar influence as from economic incentives on the attitudes among vendors could come from the contact with the customers during the business transactions. While the influence of economic incentives is supposed to be largely positive, the influence of contact is believed to be negative, if it is present at all. To clarify this issue and assess the actual role of incentives and contact, the answers of respondents will be analyzed for the motivation of their arguments and the reasons they give us for their choices. By looking into these answers we, then, can
distinguish between a more rational, economic reasoning or other arguments, which suggest a role of habituation an which one could expect to observe, if the contact would influence the attitudes.