Arunabh Ghosh is associate professor of history at Harvard University.
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. "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 sciences-natural or social-in the transnational context of the early Cold War."---Zuoyue Wang, Isis "The book presents an erudite history of China's 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 PRC's statistical system."---Carsten Holz, The China Journal "In this fascinating account of states and statistics in the early People's Republic of China (PRC), Arunabh Ghosh explores the statistical agencies of a state with revolutionary aspirations but limited capacity to enumerate t
