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Making It Count : Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China / Arunabh Ghosh.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: Histories of Economic Life ; 10Publisher: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2020]Copyright date: ©2020Description: 1 online resource (360 p.) : 11 b/w illus. 17 tablesContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780691179476
  • 9780691199214
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 001.4/22095109045 23
LOC classification:
  • HA37.C752
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations and Tables -- Abbreviations -- Acknowledgements -- 1. Introduction -- Part I. A Statistical Revolution -- 2. A New Type of Standardized Statistical Work -- 3. Ascertaining Social Fact -- 4. No "Mean" Solution: Reformulating Statistics, Disciplining Scientists -- Part II. Seeing Like a Socialist State -- 5. The Nature of Statistical Work -- 6. To "Ardently Love Our Statistical Work": State (In)Capacity, Professionalization, and their Discontents -- Part III. Alternatives -- 7. Seeking Common Ground Amidst Differences: The Turn to India -- 8. A "Great Leap" in Statistics -- 9. Conclusion -- Chinese Character Glossary -- Bibliography -- Index
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.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780691199214

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations and Tables -- Abbreviations -- Acknowledgements -- 1. Introduction -- Part I. A Statistical Revolution -- 2. A New Type of Standardized Statistical Work -- 3. Ascertaining Social Fact -- 4. No "Mean" Solution: Reformulating Statistics, Disciplining Scientists -- Part II. Seeing Like a Socialist State -- 5. The Nature of Statistical Work -- 6. To "Ardently Love Our Statistical Work": State (In)Capacity, Professionalization, and their Discontents -- Part III. Alternatives -- 7. Seeking Common Ground Amidst Differences: The Turn to India -- 8. A "Great Leap" in Statistics -- 9. Conclusion -- Chinese Character Glossary -- Bibliography -- Index

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

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.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 26. Mai 2021)