[Book Talk] Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China

In 1949, at the end of  long periods 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 re-engineering its society and economy via socialist planning while having almost no reliable statistical data of the 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 US, 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 (1958–1961), 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 globalises 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.