My research concerns Chinese graduates' subjective perspectives and experience from UK universities in applying their knowledge in the Chinese context. Since the late 1990s, researchers have suggested that conducting participatory research in China has its unique challenges. Key issues that have been previously discussed include those arising from accessing samples, establishing mutual trust with respondents, collecting sufficient and expansive responses, and correctly interpreting responses that are complicated by the differing language of the researchers and participants and the implicit social norm differences (Manion, 1994; Alon, 2006; Gamble, 2003; Roy et al., 2001; Peng and Nunes, 2008). Furthermore, when conducting research relating to professions, as I was, one needs to consider the rapid but diversified economic development across these professions and industries and the variation of this in different regions of China. Therefore, like others before me, I found that qualitative research needs professionals as participants as they need to have profession-specific or industry-specific knowledge, skills, and experience (Stening and Zhang, 2007; Zhou and Nunes, 2012). In addition, as I was exploring the complexity of knowledge learned and the process involved in using that knowledge in work-based settings, individuals experiences were complex, and clarification and further discussion were needed to gain greater clarity and accuracy from them. Consequently, conducting qualitative research in China that involves a particular industry or profession requires a contextualised methodology that is culturally sensitive, industrial/professional-sensitive and era-sensitive (Hsiung, 2015; Zhou and Nunes, n.d.; Zhang et al.). 

With more and more "eastern" scholars joining the global academia, various "Asian-friendly" qualitative research methodologies have been proposed and adopted. Some scholars argue that Chinese and Japanese people are unwilling to self-express and prefer indirect, "softly-worded" questions and answers due to their political and socio-cultural context. To provide different perspectives, some researchers found filmed ethnography or "asking informally" instead of formal interviewing changed the dynamics between interviewers and interviewees from counterparts as perceived by interviewees to people on the same side (Dales et al., 2021; Coates, 2015; Mclelland, 2020; Jackson and Ho, 2018; Gagné, 2019). Alternatively, some researchers suggest that though Asian interviewees were very restrained with self-expression, they were very willing to comment and expand on other interviewees' answers, to some extent forming indirect discussions between two or more interviewees. Called distance focus group or cross-sample data analysis, these methods are believed to generate a better understanding of structural and cultural problems and enhance the richness of data (Jackson and Ho, 2018; Ho et al., 2018; Takeyama, 2021; Huang and Fang, 2019).

This research aims to explore the process and feelings graduates went through during the acquisition, understanding and application of professional knowledge, namely professional knowledge in law and IT in this research, in the Chinese context. Apart from 22 UK university Chinese graduates, data were collected from 21 Chinese university graduates for comparative purposes. Like Yoshida's research on unwed mothers using life history interviews (Yoshida, 2020), my research requires retrospective data; however, my focus was on educational history and experience. Considering that I am a Chinese researcher educated in the west, the life gird method is more suitable. An individually tailored design helped me ensure education as the main narrative in storytelling (Abbas et al., 2013). As first stage interviews took place from the start of the pandemic, even though in-person interviews were not viable, the life grid allowed me to understand and get to know each interviewee more comprehensively and establish close personal connections. Since this research involves professional knowledge in law and IT, significant proportions of jargon, industry phenomenon and events were mentioned in the life grid. As my second stage of data collection, I used a series of short informal interviews like the ones adopted by Brumann and Ho et al. (Ho, Jackson and Lam, 2018; Ho, Jackson and Kong, 2018; Brumann, 2012). These interviews generated indirect discussions between interviewees by presenting anonymised quotes that contained jargon, phenomenon and events to and from interviewees through a series of short interviews. For example, interviewee A said local law firms are getting more specialised in particular fields such as finance or environmental law. This quote was shown to interviewee B with A's consent, and B commented by confirming this trend, but it is limited in a few cities. C predicted that this trend would stop soon, and D argued that it would spread to the whole country. In this paper, I will further illustrate how more comprehensive arguments were made with interviewees' in-depth participation and how the relationships between interviewees and me changed throughout 18 months of data collection and analysis.

Within the domain of qualitative research, more and more scholars start to question the authenticity of the participation that is usually claimed to have taken place in qualitative research. This paper illustrates an effort to ensure that participants more fully engage with the research, particularly the interpretation and analysis of data. The method was important as the participants were the experts. I explain the methodology, which involved a continuous dialogue between myself as a researcher and the forty participants over a period of approximately eighteen months, wherein I tried to engage them with one anthers' opinion and with the problem of answering my research questions.

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