The China Archive/China Survey Roundtable

It is the purpose of this roundtable to bring together American and Chinese scholars to discuss potential for and problems of collecting social science data B and particularly survey data B in China, and to begin to lay plans for taking advantage of the potential and surmounting the problems by instituting a biennial, nationwide, social science survey of China, to be called The China Survey. As currently envisioned by roundtable organizers, The China Survey would involve joint planning by American and Chinese social scientists; its survey instruments would include items chosen from submissions worldwide in addition to the standard GSS battery and would be carried out in collaboration with Chinese institutes; its products would be disseminated through The China Archive at Texas A&M University (chinaarchive.tamu.edu). Each of the biennial surveys would highlight particular subject matters of interdisciplinary interest; e.g., for the initial survey these may include political communications and a battery of items to support spatial analysis.

Being planned and funded jointly between China and the United States, The China Survey project would create a special collaborative relationship with unlimited potential for joint research initiatives involving Chinese and American scholars covering a broad range of interests in the social science community. In addition to supporting new collaborative research on China itself, the surveys would also

open new opportunities for including China in truly cross-national research on such important and basic topics as political agenda-setting and societal problem-solving.

The roundtable will begin on November 17 at 2:30 p.m., with introduction of The China Archive and of the potential relationship of The China Survey to the Archive. Then participants with survey experience in China (Mingming Shen/PKU, Tianjian Shi/Duke, Melanie Manion/Wisconsin, Pierre Landry/Yale, Ian Weber/Texas A&M, and others) will briefly describe those experiences. The first session will conclude with review of the status of ongoing or planned survey projects relevant to social science and to development of a new project like The China Survey.

The second session will begin on November 18 at 9:30 a.m., with assessment of Awhere the holes are@ in data on China that still need to be filled in order to better serve the social science community worldwide, with focus on both coverage of existing/ongoing/planned data collections and accessibility to their data. Discussion will next turn to options for filling the holes, including various forms that might be taken by The China Survey. The remainder of the time will be devoted to specifics of what the favored option(s) might look like, and to how the team(s) should be organized for moving the planning/project along.