In his study of the “social survey movement,” Tong Lam has taken a seemingly prosaic topic and successfully developed it into an engaging study of the “circulation, mutual implication and convergence” (p. 11) of scientific knowledge production, colonial modernity and epistemological practices in late Qing and early Republican China. In the author's own words, “the battle of social surveys was […] a battle over China” (p. 143). Though never as complete, representative or indeed successful as envisaged by those who designed them, censuses and surveys were crucial components of the nation-building project, both in the years before the collapse of the Qing and during the 1920s and 1930s. As the author convincingly argues, the history to be told is not merely one of the success or failure of surveys; indeed, this is perhaps the least intriguing aspect. Rather, this is a history of epistemological trauma, experienced by those who were forced to engage with foreign concepts of facticity, time and progress, and a history of the search for a scientific approach suited to a modernizing China.

The history of surveys, statistics and social sciences is also the history of the everyday and how this everyday was configured. In China, surveys and censuses were based on new categories, which eventually included nation, society, race, age and gender. On their trips away from the urban areas, survey researchers presented these categories as ontological realities to the people they sought to gather information from. “Society” and “state” were two concepts scholars of modern history continuously engaged, developed and proliferated as part of these surveys. As the book illustrates, the “social survey movement” not only brought the state into people's homes and impressed a new vocabulary of governance, it also helped create state and society as common frames of reference through the very practices of state-funded societal surveys. In this process, novel distinctions within and between state and society were created and expressed in adjectives such as “scientific” and “unscientific,” “superstitious” and “rational,” “legitimate” and “illegitimate.” The “peasantry” was forged as a central category used by social scientists, intellectuals and politicians alike while rural China was increasingly associated with “backwardness.” Although they were intended to render people “legible” and bring them closer to the state, these surveys and the distinctions they imposed conversely served to remove the state from society; the state increasingly stood “apart from the social world” (p. 141).

Chapter one opens the study with a discussion of “the rise of the fact” as an epistemological unit and the development of a “culture of facts.” “Seeking truth from facts,” an expression developed by neo-Confucian scholars of the school of evidentiary research became a catchphrase of early 20th-century social investigation and is central to the author's analysis. Chapters two and three give a fascinating account of the 1909 census, conducted as part of the late Qing's new policy reforms. Though these reforms failed to sustain imperial rule, their legacy and the legacy of this census proved invaluable in the transition to a Chinese Republic. Violent anti-census riots, however, accompanied some of the imperial attempts to conduct surveys as local people were terrified that researchers might be stealing souls. These riots and the state's failure to frame the riots as more than mere superstitious responses to fact-finding illustrate the inability of the modern state to understand “crucial aspects of human life that were not accessible through scientific rationality alone” (p. 73). Chapters four through six examine the census of 1928 as well as more general social surveys conducted during the 1920s and 1930s. The chapters engage with important social scientists and research institutions, such as the Institute of History and Philology and the Research Institute of Land Economics. These spread the foreign-influenced yet staunchly Chinese idea of making accountable to state and nation by way of social surveys those people belonging to the Chinese nation, including rural populations and “frontier nationalities.” Influenced by the US survey movement and aided by foreign support such as the Rockefeller Foundation, science was promoted as a “universal language” (p. 148).

Although a slim volume, it is impossible to represent adequately the rich detail provided in this book. Despite being written with great erudition, I was missing some further engagement with the catchphrase of the social survey movement: “seeking truth from facts” (shishi quishi). The author alludes to it multiple times throughout the book, yet it would have been helpful to say a bit more about how shishi came to be translated as “fact” and engage further with the etymology of the term as pertinent to social scientists in the early 20th century. Moreover, the term “fact” is used synonymously with “social fact.” This is of course perfectly acceptable, but I do wonder about the interplay of social facts with other kinds of facts. Were legal facts, for instance, relevant to the passion for facts that developed in China? Were social facts established and contested in the courtroom and enshrined as legal facts? If so, what does the epistemological history of these kinds of facts tell us about a larger history of facts in the transition to modern China?

These are, however, minor quibbles and do not lessen the importance of the fascinating research presented in this book. The author has covered an impressive set of primary sources, ranging from surveys, letter exchanges and magazine articles to a wide array of archival sources from Chinese and foreign collections. A particular strength of the book is its emphasis on seeing the Chinese social survey movement as part of larger transnational and colonial processes that took place in the 19th and early 20th century. Global connections are key to understanding modern Chinese history and the author has succeeded in complicating our picture of the “colonial framework” as evidenced by the growth of social sciences in China. The book will speak to students and scholars in Chinese studies as well as to historians of transnational history and those interested in the historical social sciences. It is a major contribution to our understanding of the multifarious processes of nation-building, the trajectories of epistemological shifts, the everyday contestations of “facts,” and the history of surveys and social sciences in China.