Wu.china.summary - University of Delaware

Bonnie Wu Studies Perceptions of Police in China

Reflections from Bonnie:

The fun of research is maximized when the researcher can examine a topic that she/he has been dreaming of doing for a long time. Thanks to the summer research award granted by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Center for International Studies at the University of Delaware, I was able to travel to China in May of 2008 to study how Chinese citizens perceive and evaluate their police and police services. Very little is known about how Chinese view the police in their country. However, understanding how the public conceptualizes and evaluates the police is particularly vital as it tells us why the public respond to police in ways they do and how the police can obtain more support and cooperation from citizens. This information is especially important given the rising status that China has on today’s world stage and the rapid trend of globalization that merges the West and the East in a faster pace than ever. Thus, when the good news came in mid-March about the grant, I was quite excited. Under the supervision of Dr. Ivan Sun, I started to prepare my trip right away, designing the survey instrument, submitting the proposal to IRB for review, and setting up connections in China to facilitate survey distribution. Then, in early May, I took off! As planned, I collected survey data from college students in two universities, one in Beijing, a large, cosmopolitan city in North China, and the other in Fuqing, a small, more homogeneous city in Southeast China. The university in Beijing is a comprehensive, highly-ranked institution with over 20,000 students. There, I distributed surveys through visits to dormitory rooms, class meetings, and personal connections. The university in Fuqing is a four-year, public university with around 6,000 students. There, I reached potential respondents mainly through visits to classrooms and dorms. Although I could not employ random sampling techniques, I made efforts to obtain a student sample as diverse and representative as possible. In total, about 350 students completed the survey approximately half of whom were from Beijing and half from Fuqing. During my stay in China, I also conducted a variety of other research-related activities, such as visiting university and state libraries and exchanging research ideas with police and legal scholars in China. Overall, my six-week trip in China was busy, fruitful and fun. Findings from this research can definitely enrich my knowledge of the police-citizen relationship in China. It is also fascinating to see how variations in societal contexts can alter theoretical and policy implications in significant ways. Further, the process of this research, filled with both pleasures and challenges, has helped me to obtain a broader picture of the research

environment, social changes, and even contemporary culture and society as a whole in China. I learned two main things from this trip. First, interpersonal connections indeed play a significant role in data collection process in a Chinese setting, especially in the areas of crime, law, and criminal justice. Second, when conducting international research, following the Western rules of research is important, but the researcher must be flexible and take the host country’s own academic, cultural, and social customs and characteristics into consideration is also critical.