The nascent People's Republic of China (PRC) entertained a profoundly ambiguous relationship with the theory and practice of statistics over the period of the “seventeen years” from its founding to the Cultural Revolution. State leaders were to some extent “enamored of the positivistic promises of quantification” (p. 1), as Arunabh Ghosh puts it, and statistics were deemed indispensable to the establishment of a planning system in keeping with the scientific tenets of Marxism. However, the discipline was tainted by previous practice under the Republican government and by mathematical theories deemed “idealistic” and associated with bourgeois, capitalist regimes driven by profit and the desire to whitewash class conflict. This paradoxical situation impeded the development of a functional statistical apparatus in the PRC and eventually played a role in the unchecked political decisions that led to famine during the Great Leap Forward. In Making It Count, Ghosh reconstructs this story using mainly archives and publications of the State Statistics Bureau and its affiliated offices, as well as some oral history interviews and a set of original materials on the bureau's contacts with the Indian Statistical Institute in the mid-1950s.
The PRC was eager to build a new statistics bureaucracy that marked a break with capitalist statistics: “a new statistics for a new China” (p. 4). For this goal, it envisaged three main methodologies, which Ghosh terms ethnographic, exhaustive, and stochastic. The ethnographic model, rooted in Mao's 1927 Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, was based on the selection of a “typical” or “paradigmatic” sample by the researcher. The exhaustive approach, modeled on Soviet practice and based on periodical complete counts such as censuses, was defined by the rejection of mathematical statistics, justified by the assertion that statistics was a social rather than a natural science, and hence mathematical models did not apply. The stochastic method, based on probability theory, used large random-based sampling to achieve accurate data in a more expeditious way, and was notably used in India.
Part one of the book retraces how the new bureaucracy was set up, based on the pioneering model of the Northeast Statistics Bureau, established in early 1950 with the close support of Soviet advisors. It adopted the Soviet preference for exhaustive enumeration, justified by a theoretical position denying the universal applicability of mathematics to social reality. Mathematics were seen as tools of the ruling class; furthermore, the notion of chance and uncertainty in the social world contradicted the teleological view of history embedded in Marxism.
Under the State Statistics Bureau established in August 1952, a nationwide system was gradually set up, which by 1957 was staffed by 200,000 cadres. It carried out four types of activities: collection, collation, research, and supply of data. However, the system was perennially overloaded by bureaucratic demands and chronic delays, tensions between local and central offices, problems in the quality and consistency of data, as well as low morale among cadres.
Part three is devoted to events in the late 1950s that called into question the methodological and ideological foundations of the PRC statistics system. After Zhou Enlai visited the Indian Statistical Institute in December 1956, a collaboration was established, in the course of which the PRC toyed with adopting the “stochastic approach” based on random samples, favored by the institute's director, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis. However, the Anti-Rightist movement, followed by the establishment of the people's communes, dampened the enthusiasm for random samples, while the March 1958 uprising in Lhasa and the Dalai Lama's flight to India strained bilateral relations. In the end, PRC statistics took a turn in the opposite direction with the revival of “typical samples” inspired by Mao. During the Great Leap, statistics did not so much collapse as they were redefined as a political tool for mass mobilization.
Statistics, far from being a neutral tool, emerged as “a site for a fundamental theoretical battle about the nature of social reality” (p. 283) in the early PRC. The system set up under Soviet guidance was useful at producing data, but it was impeded by both practical and theoretical limitations, and ultimately proved unable to control its own numbers. As Ghosh writes, “The state was unable to see and measure society as anything other than a response to its own policies” (p. 285).
Making It Count makes a well-documented and sophisticated contribution to several intersecting fields. Linking intellectual history and science and technology studies, it shows how theoretical, institutional, and even diplomatic aspects were closely intertwined in defining a discipline like statistics, picking up where Tong Lam's study of the social survey movement and the state-building projects of the 1930s ends.Footnote 1 As part of a set of new studies of the early Mao era, Making It Count complicates our understanding of the political battles around science and statecraft, although perhaps it does not fundamentally change the notion that ideology was at the core of knowledge production in the PRC. However, it does interestingly point out that Marxist teleology was not always synonymous with scientistic approaches. Perhaps some further thought might also be devoted to the construction of the social categories used in statistical work, and their links with ideology and politics. In passing, Ghosh raises the provocative question whether the “exhaustive tradition” in statistics is currently undergoing a revival with the advent of big data. Finally, by documenting a previously unknown chapter in the history of India-China relations, it complexifies our understanding of the early Cold War while also connecting with a new field of research.Footnote 2
Making It Count is elegantly written and jargon-free (apart from a few mathematical formulas), making it suitable for undergraduates as well as graduate students. Engaging with at least three important fields in contemporary history, Ghosh's book is sure to meet with wide interest among historians of China, Asia, as well as intellectual historians and historians of science.
