I have realized that as I learn more and more commands in SPSS, I forget those I have previously learned. I know that this will only get worse as the semester goes on, and I suspect that at some point new commands will be introduced that build on those already taught. Therefore, I have begun keeping a notebook listing the steps for each command, its purpose, and any additional pertinent information. I think that it would have been better had I begun this sooner, but fortunately the material covered so far hasn’t been overwhelming and can be filled in easily.

In writing the first draft of my group’s literature review, we found that dividing the work among group members lightened the load but made it more difficult to coordinate and encouraged procrastination. Since the nature of the project demands that we divide the burden of researching and writing, we will have to schedule better in future, allowing time to compile and edit our individual material into a coherent whole.

After delving more deeply into the literature surrounding our topic, we are in a much better position to define our variables. We found that our dependent variable, Chinese political gains in Africa, was summed up by RAND in four categories: “access to natural resources, particularly oil and gas; markets for Chinese exports; political legitimacy; and sufficient security and stability to continue its commercial activities.” Our independent variable, Chinese FDI in Africa, was defined by Blackwill and Harris as investment by state-owned enterprises (SOE’s), sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) and state-owned banks.

Moving forward, we are thinking about focusing on support in the UN and derecognition of Taiwan as two components of our dependent variable (political gains for China). It looks like the most challenging part will be fine-tuning the exact mechanism by which Chinese FDI leads to political gains. For instance, is a particular threshold of FDI needed to get a particular benefit? Do countries intentionally try to milk China for all they can before they give up a concession? Additionally, what non-financial things might China be doing in tandem with its economic efforts? All of this will hopefully become clearer as we continue to research and start gathering data.

Over the past week, my group has been working on narrowing down our area of focus and choosing a research question. This process ended in us making a tentative decision last Friday. Picking a research question was not as easy as I had thought it would be, due to the need to sort through existing literature and find an area that had a body of research from which to draw our data. Also, picking a question specific enough to be manageable, but broad enough to be meaningful, was also a challenge.

We started off knowing that we were generally interested in China’s use of economic tools for political ends, especially in the One Belt, One Road initiative. We struggled to narrow down which region we wanted to focus on, what types of political concessions to look at, and how to quantify political gains. Figuring out how to quantify our question has probably been our most difficult problem thus far. Right now, we are considering coding concessions on a scale of 0-4, with “0” being “none” and “4” being “significant concessions.”

We eventually chose to focus on Africa to make our task more manageable, and are asking: “is there a relationship between increased levels of Chinese FDI in Africa and strategic concessions?” We postulate that increased Chinese FDI gives China the leverage needed to acquire access to natural resources, preferential treatment for Chinese companies, and infrastructure usage. We certainly plan to modify our hypothesis and make it more specific as we do more research. I think the main challenge we will face going forward is how to accurately quantify our variables.