Making It Count by Arunabh Ghosh

Making It Count by Arunabh Ghosh

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 projectBut 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

Arunabh Ghosh is associate professor of history at Harvard University.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780691179476
ISBN 10	0691179476
Title	Making It Count
Author	Arunabh Ghosh
Series	Histories Of Economic Life
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Princeton University Press
Year published	2020-03-31
Number of pages	360
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.