TY  - BOOK
AU  - Ghosh,Arunabh
TI  - Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China 
T2  - Histories of Economic Life
SN  - 9780691179476
AV  - HA37.C752 
U1  - 001.4/22095109045 23
PY  - 2020///]
CY  - Princeton, NJ : 
PB  - Princeton University Press, 
KW  - Statistics
KW  - Political aspects
KW  - China
KW  - History
KW  - 20th century
KW  - HISTORY / Asia / China
KW  - bisacsh
KW  - A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State
KW  - Anti-Rightist Campaign
KW  - Austin Jersild
KW  - Chinese population management
KW  - Chinese statistical reports
KW  - Chinese statistics
KW  - Choh-ming Li
KW  - Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao's China
KW  - Denise Ho
KW  - Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union
KW  - Felix Wemheuer
KW  - Great Leap Forward
KW  - How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind
KW  - Jennifer Altehenger
KW  - Jeremy Friedman
KW  - Legal Lessons: Popularizing Laws in the People's Republic of China
KW  - Lorenz Lüthi
KW  - Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China
KW  - Shadow Cold War
KW  - Sigrid Schmalzer
KW  - Sino-Indian, PRC studies
KW  - Ted Porter
KW  - The Rise of Statistical Thinking
KW  - The Sino-Soviet Alliance
KW  - The Sino-Soviet Split
KW  - The Statistical System of Communist China
KW  - Tong Lam
KW  - Trust in Numbers
KW  - comparative statecraft
KW  - economic governance
KW  - economic policymaking
KW  - ethnographic, exhaustive, stochastic approaches
KW  - government statisticians
KW  - historians of modern China
KW  - modern Chinese history
KW  - national statistical systems
KW  - quantitative positivism
KW  - quantitative techniques
KW  - science and technology
KW  - socialist statistics
KW  - standardized statistical work
KW  - statistical approaches
KW  - statistical science
KW  - statistical significance and random sampling
KW  - tongji
N1  - 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; Issued also in print
N2  - 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
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691199214?locatt=mode:legacy
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780691199214
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/cover/covers/9780691199214.jpg
ER  -