Appendix III: An interview invitation letter

Appendix V: The researcher as an instrument

The researcher was born in a small village in 1978, the year when the reform and opening up began in China. The village was in Chongqing, in the southwest of China and it contained about fifteen households. It was about an hour’s walk for an adult to go to the nearest town. It took a much longer time to go by bus since it sat in mountains. The researcher’s childhood before she was seven years old was mainly spent there. She spent about a year with her grandmother (her mother’s mother) in another smaller and remoter village during the period her mother gave birth to her younger brother. 1978 was also the year the one-child policy began. Her mother had to leave her village to hide from the family-planning office of the village in order to give birth to her second child. The researcher’s childhood in the countryside was happy and carefree. As far as the researcher can recall, she had no sense of worry or sadness.

Her parents had always wanted to leave the countryside for the town, for a better life. Her father joined the army. At that time, servicemen were assigned jobs in towns or cities when they retired from the army. Her mother was diligent. Her mother worked in a small brick factory as an accountant in the daytime and farmed the land of five people in the night. In 1985 when her father retired from the army and was assigned a job, the researcher moved to Yudong Town and started her primary school life with her father. Her younger brother and grandmother (her father’s mother) still stayed with her mother in the countryside because the unit her father worked for only provided accommodation for one person. A year later, her family reunited in Yudong Town with accommodation provided by the unit.

She was still happy, but she began to have worries with her life in town. She began to notice that most families in town were richer than hers. Their apartments were better furnished, clean and tidy. Their children were better attended and served with better-cooked food. Her parents were too busy making money to feed the family to take care of her brother and her. Her teacher told her mother that she did not do well in her studies because she had not had any education before the primary school. Her family was not well-connected with her father’s family. Her mother’s younger sister and three younger brothers all lived in the countryside, in poorer and remoter villages than her home village. Her family began to help her mother’s brothers and sister since her family moved to town.

After her graduation from Sichuan International Studies University in 2001, she became an English teacher in The Third Military Medical University in Chongqing. She was married in 2002 and her husband also came from countryside. She spent lots of her summer vacations and winter vacations with her husband’s family in the countryside.

She had never realised that her living conditions in her home village were poor until one time in about 2004 when she was viewing photos taken in her village on her computer. She came across a news report about the life of children in poor areas and calling people to help them through donation. The news report showed photos of their houses, their bare feet, and their dirty but smiling faces. The family house of the researcher in the countryside was even shabbier. She could not recall if her face had been dirty, but she was sure that she had been as happy as the owners of the smiling faces were. She had been happy and had never realised that her family needed any economic help. To the researcher, her home village was everything, a beautiful place with mountain views and fresh air, a home, and a reservoir of happy and carefree memories, but a poor village that needed economical help.

Her experience in the countryside and family background has a profound influence upon the researcher. On the one hand, the researcher always wants to be better-off economically through her own efforts and wants to help those in poor economic conditions. On the other hand, the researcher has doubt about whether it is the countryside people who need the economic aid or whether it is we who are economically better-off who want to help others to feel spiritually better-off. Maybe what the countryside people need is understanding and respect of their life. To help people live a better life, more importantly, a happy life is one of the motives that drive the researcher to study and do research.

Another important factor that shapes the design of the research and the interpretation of the results is the researcher’s study of communication. In 2004, the researcher decided to take an MA course as a way to improve herself and also as a life-changing opportunity. She was determined to go to Peking University. She was not so sure about what to study. She tried English literature first since this was what she studied for her BA. Unfortunately or fortunately, she found that she was neither interested in nor good at English literature. There were two choices left for her, education or communication considering lots of factors like interest, possibility of passing the entrance examination, and future development. In the summer vacation of 2005, the researcher went to Peking University and tried to find somebody for advice. And she was lucky. She met the first two important persons on her way to communication study, two new graduates from Beijing Normal University. One of them had taken the last entrance examination for MA in international communication of Peking University and received high scores. She told the researcher all her experience of preparing for the examination.

The researcher began to study and prepare for the coming examination right after coming back to Chongqing from Beijing. The researcher was fascinated by the power of communication and fell in love with communication studies. She failed in the coming examination, but she had the confidence to try for the second time since her total score was above the admission line. Only the score of one subject was a little lower than that required and she had started to learn a new course for only six months. Therefore, she prepared for another year during which she took the summer course of communication studies co-lectured by the College of Journalism and Communication at Peking University and Annenberg School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania. The experience started or re-enforced her determination to go abroad for further study and research.

In 2007, the researcher passed the entrance examination, but failed in the interview. She accepted the offer from Chongqing University and started her MA in communication in the College of Literature and Journalism, with a special interest in political communication. Her MA dissertation studied the influence of the university campus Bulletin Board System on deliberation of university affairs. Her study found that BBS worked to reflect and amplify the power relations in reality instead of shifting the power from one group to another.

During her writing of her MA dissertation, the researcher had been preparing for PhD study abroad, taking English language examinations and applying. In 2009, she received an unconditional offer from the University of Sheffield. But she postponed her registration for one year both because her newly-born son was only four months old and because she lacked the funding. In 2010, the researcher, with the support of her family, decided to accept the offer and start her PhD study. It was a very hard decision. The funding from her employer could only cover half of her total expenses and her family had to borrow about 30,000 GBP to cover the difference. She had to separate from her husband and her son because her husband needed his job to support the whole family.

Her three year study in the University of Sheffield, however, proves that it was a wise decision. The experience is precious and life-changing. It is through the three years study that she found many of her previous views about research and democracy had been superficial. She learned and gained the knowledge, skills, and confidence to conduct real scientific and valid research both qualitatively and quantitatively. Through systematic study of democracy guided by her supervisor and talks with research students from different polities or countries with different degrees of democracy about their understanding of democracy and their government forms, her view that democracy solves all problems has been overturned and she learned about the preconditions for democracy and closely related concepts like ‘conflict’, ‘tolerance’, ‘negotiation’, ‘compromise’, ‘interest group’ and so on, which she had not any idea about their relationship with democracy.

The researcher’s view of who benefits from democracy and who are the driving forces of democratisation has also been changed. She used to think that democratisation was a zero-sum game in which the lower class win while the upper class, especially the ruling class, loose. Therefore, it is the conflict between the lower class and the upper class that drives democratisation. Now she realises that democratisation is actually a win-win game in which all classes win. It is the conflict between the lower class and the upper class, more importantly the conflict within the ruling class in the case of China that drives democratisation.