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.