4. Interview Analysis
4.6 Summary of the Findings
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4.6 Summary of the Findings
As has been discussed in the sections above, the interviews give us evidence for some of the assumptions of this thesis. At first, all of the vendors have observed a large increase in mainland Chinese tourism over the last years. This is important because it is a precondition for my assumption that there has been an increase of economic incentives of those tourists as well. The fact that this upturn has been noted and seems to be very obvious helps to verify the data given on the growth by the night market and confirms that there has been a huge change in the customer composition.
Next, the vendors of the night market have been grouped according to their own assessments of economic transactions with Chinese tourists. Three groups with low, medium and large economic benefit have been identified. The correlation of this categorization with other outside factors like the kind of business and the location is also notable and shows that this categorization is applicable. If a vendor owns a stall or a large restaurant and the kind of business, in which he operates, can explain the categorization of many of the vendors, if not all of them.
The future prospects for economic benefits generated by Chinese tourists also give further confirmation to this classification. Most of the interviewed vendors seemed to expect about the same share of tourists as in the present and only very few expect customer behavior to change significantly. While the researcher primarily expected positive effects of an
increase of Chinese tourists on the night market, the vendors themselves did not only issue positive expectations. Some actually expected a negative impact of the Chinese tourists on their business, because the increase of tourists would harm their local customer base. The bad image of Chinese tourists would, in their views, affect the locals, who would not go to the night market and visit other places instead. Since the main share of customers for almost all of the vendors is still made up by those local Taiwanese people, the economic benefits that the Chinese tourists bring with them would maybe rather do harm than good and affect the overall business of some of the vendors negatively.
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Using this categorization by economic transactions of the vendors, we then turned to the attitudes and opinions. The first of the questions on the dependent variables clearly shows that the image of Chinese tourists among the Taiwanese night market vendors is not very favorable. There were almost no positive responses about the Chinese tourists and a widespread animosity toward the tourists seemed to be very common. Taking our
independent variable of the level of business transactions into account, we then find that all of the positive or more moderate responses were issued by vendors belonging to either the large or the medium benefit group. This suggests that the view of the tourists and economic transactions are correlated in some kind of way. Looking further into the answers, we then also find that negative accounts could be found in all of the three benefit groups, while all the more moderate and positive accounts were present in the large and medium benefit groups with the respective economic incentives and contact. Therefore, this result suggests, as we would have expected, that economic transactions show some kind of correlation with the attitude about Chinese tourists. The reasoning behind moderate responses often was pragmatic, while the negative responses often contained some kind of affective of habitual arguments, which suggests a large role for economic incentives on this issue.
When looking at the change in those attitudes, we find even stronger arguments for this: More people changed their attitudes toward mainland Chinese tourists positively in the large benefit group. These positive changes were also underscored by pragmatic arguments.
In contrast, the low benefit group used mostly habitual reasoning and also had a stronger tendency to not change their attitudes or to change it negatively. These results show clearly that the attitudes about Chinese tourists differ for vendors within different economic benefit groups. Positive attitudes and attitude changes have been described mainly pragmatic and, therefore, it might be suggested that those are also motivated by economic reasoning. For other vendors things were quite differently. The lack of economic incentives seems to leave vendors with a more negative view of Chinese customers. We also see a slight increase in habitual arguments in those vendors’ answers.
For the other China related issues we cannot observe a tendency, which is as clear as for the attitudes on the tourists. On the issue of cross-Strait economic integration, there
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seemed to be general tendency toward a positive evaluation of ECFA and the related policies.
Negative and positive responses did not show any distinct correlation to the economic benefits. Somewhat in contrast to the mainly negative responses about tourists, the vendors saw cross-Strait economic integration very positive. All of the arguments given by the vendors on this question were pragmatic and used better economic conditions as a main argument for their positive views.
The results for the alienation from Mainland China also weren’t as clear as for the attitudes toward tourists. But in contrast to the question on cross-Strait economic integration, there is also a clear tendency to observe when looking at the results compared with the economic benefit groups. This tendency matches the one we would have expected and more positive views can be found among the high benefit group and more negative views among the low benefit group. In this issue we also see both pragmatic and habitual reasons given by the respondents. However, there exists a notable difference in the answers between the benefit groups. While the large benefit group did not feel like they had to explain their standpoint on this question, the groups with lower economic benefits more frequently justified themselves.
The motivation and arguments of the vendors and the evaluation of their pragmatist and habitual arguments then suggests that the positive responses and positive changes in this study have been dominated by pragmatist arguments. For the attitudes about tourists, the opinion on cross-Strait economic integration and the effect of economic incentives on the attitudes and opinion toward China, the results show that pragmatist arguments can account for all the positive answers with one exception given by the vendors. The negative responses, in turn, are more often motivated by habitual reasons. Interestingly, some vendors also give pragmatist reasons for their negative views, which might be caused by the fact that
Taiwanese people sometimes are driven away from the night market by the presence of the Chinese tourists.
At last, the question on the effect of Chinese tourists on attitudes and opinions gives us the self-assessment of vendors and own their opinion on the correlation of attitudes, opinions and economic benefit. Most vendors simply did not think that there had been any
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changes in their attitudes and opinion toward China. This is interesting because this neglecting of influence when asked directly does not correspond to our findings especially when considering the results of the changes in attitude about the Chinese tourists. While many people admitted they had their changed their opinion about Chinese tourists and many even argued pragmatically during the questions on the attitudes, they did not see this as being motivated by the presence of the tourists on the night market. Also, all of the few vendors, who actually admitted to having changed in the context of increased business with tourists positively, actually did give very pragmatic reasons for their change in attitude, while the only negative change was expressed in an habitual argument. This somehow suggests that changes occur positively by economic incentives and sometimes negatively by contact, even if not everyone readily admits that he himself is being influenced by both forces.