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

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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

Reviews

"Arunabh Ghosh could not have imagined how timely his book would be when he set out more than a decade ago on his research project. But Making It Count, an academic work published by Princeton University Press examining the history of statistics in China, lands at a time when the world is wondering: How does Beijing collect data, and what did it know about COVID-19 and when"---Melissa Chan, Foreign Policy
"[Ghosh] deftly explores deeper questions about how state-making unfolded during the early years of the PRC, how ideology came to permeate every facet of the governing apparatus, and how strategies of enumeration are invariably bound, in complex ways, to the expression of political power. As such, Making It Count is an essential addition to any reading list on PRC history, as well to research methods in the social sciences and the humanities."---Patricia M. Thornton, China Quarterly
"A remarkably well-researched and well-written book."---Kristin Shi-Kupfer, MERICS China Briefing
"By mining rich archival materials in China, India, and the United States, and by balancing detailed descriptions of statistical work in the early PRC with lucid historiographical discussions on statistics, data science, and modern China, Ghosh has given us an exemplary case study of the social and political construction of sciencesnatural or socialin the transnational context of the early Cold War."---Zuoyue Wang, Isis
"The book presents an erudite history of Chinas 1950s statistics system and the discussions about the role of statistics in the PRC. It delves into the writings of the actors at the time, explores the context of their writings and actions, and extracts a narrative that makes sense of historical developments. . . . Much of the book is readily accessible to a wider audience and highly informative thanks to its richness of details. It is a must read for academics interested in the PRCs statistical system."---Carsten Holz, The China Journal
"In this fascinating account of states and statistics in the early Peoples Republic of China (PRC), Arunabh Ghosh explores the statistical agencies of a state with revolutionary aspirations but limited capacity to enumerate the society that it sought to transform. Making It Count stands out among the growing field of research conducted by historians on the society and politics of China in the 1950s."---Mark Frazier, Journal of Chinese Political Science
"Essential reading for any historian of the PRC in the twentieth century, and it likewise provides a model for an increasingly globalized history of statistics that (rightly) decenters Europe and the United States."---Thomas A. Stapleford, History of Political Economy

Author Bio

Arunabh Ghosh is associate professor of history at Harvard University.