Making it count : statistics and statecraft in the early People's Republic of China / Arunabh Ghosh.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ghosh, Arunabh, Author.

Series:

Histories of economic life.

Histories of Economic Life ; 23

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Statistics--Political aspects--China--History--20th century.

Statistics.

Statistical services.

China--Statistical services--History--20th century.

China.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

A history of how Chinese officials used statistics to define a new society in the early years of the People's Republic of China In 1949, at the end of a long period of wars, one of the biggest challenges facing leaders of the new People's Republic of China was how much they did not know. The government of one of the world's largest nations was committed to fundamentally reengineering its society and economy via socialist planning while having almost no reliable statistical data about their own country. Making It Count is the history of efforts to resolve this "crisis in counting." Drawing on a wealth of sources culled from China, India, and the United States, Arunabh Ghosh explores the choices made by political leaders, statisticians, academics, statistical workers, and even literary figures in attempts to know the nation through numbers.Ghosh shows that early reliance on Soviet-inspired methods of exhaustive enumeration became increasingly untenable in China by the mid-1950s. Unprecedented and unexpected exchanges with Indian statisticians followed, as the Chinese sought to learn about the then-exciting new technology of random sampling. These developments were overtaken by the tumult of the Great Leap Forward (1958-61), when probabilistic and exhaustive methods were rejected and statistics was refashioned into an ethnographic enterprise. By acknowledging Soviet and Indian influences, Ghosh not only revises existing models of Cold War science but also globalizes wider developments in the history of statistics and data.Anchored in debates about statistics and its relationship to state building, Making It Count offers fresh perspectives on China's transition to socialism.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations and Tables

Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction

2. A New Type of Standardized Statistical Work

3. Ascertaining Social Fact

4. No "Mean" Solution: Reformulating Statistics, Disciplining Scientists

5. The Nature of Statistical Work

6. To "Ardently Love Our Statistical Work": State (In)Capacity, Professionalization, and their Discontents

7. Seeking Common Ground Amidst Differences: The Turn to India

8. A "Great Leap" in Statistics

9. Conclusion

Chinese Character Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Revision of author's thesis (doctoral)--Columbia University, 2014, titled Making it count : statistics and state-society relations in the early People's Republic of China, 1949-1959.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 06. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780691199214

0691199213

OCLC:

1121419466