Jeremy Wallace's new book Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology, and Authoritarianism in China is a tour de force of scholarship on the political development of the People's Republic of China (PRC), particularly in the post-Mao era. Wallace examines the political regime's strategic deployment (and subsequent abandonment) of quantification as a rhetorical device that can foster a system of “limited, quantified vision” (p. 3) in order to “frame regime maintenance” (p. 20). From the book's title, the reader may assume it to be a highly specific study of information politics that assumes extensive prior knowledge of the subject. On the contrary, the book is very enjoyable to read and remains accessible without compromising on theoretical depth or empirical richness.
The book begins with the keen observation that the quantitative metrics of performance that dominated China's political discourse in the reform era are now under “explicit attack” (p. 2). Wallace poses an intriguing central question in the opening chapter: “How did a revolutionary Communist Party come to justify itself through a limited number of statistics, and why is it currently shifting away from doing so?” (p. 3). The second chapter offers a theoretical framework for understanding that as a political tool, quantification is particularly powerful because it “imparts an aura of objective truth, transparency, and scientific authority to decisions” (p. 32). Properly utilized, quantification can be a highly effective tool for political regimes to forge an information environment to their own advantage.
Chapters three to five explore the political history of the PRC from Mao to the reform era, showing how the Chinese Communist Party's “ideological choice” of “justification based on performance” (p. 53) unfolded and was manifested through the gradual adoption and utilization of quantification as the primary tool for managing the careers of nomenklatura state officials, incentivizing local governments to creatively realize development goals, and convincing society of the party-state's right to rule. The machinery of quantified governance in this period had a “core cog” (p. 120): the cadre evaluation system, in which “performance on statistical indicators [is] associated with promotion for local cadres” (p. 111). This system, according to Wallace, “underlies much of [China's] successful economic development” (p. 120) in the reform era.
Chapter six discusses the “long harms and hidden things” (p. 137) behind this model of quantified governance, including multiple tensions within the regime's information environment, the high social costs of the one-child policy, pollution, local protectionism, state overinvestment and overspending, the explosive rise of local government debt, rampant corruption and the possible falsification of statistical data. The author argues that the “framework and worldviews” embedded in the quantified governance model were replicated throughout Chinese society in the post-Mao era, such that citizens became savvy enough to “game” the system to serve their own interests, turning the rhetoric of quantification against officials (p. 161). The sixth chapter also explains why the quantified governance model encountered “increasing failures” from the early 2010s, necessitating its systemic overhaul.
Chapters seven and eight scrutinize the Chinese state's current move away from the quantified governance model toward a system characterized by more centralized political authority, higher standards of behaviour for local officials, inspection units with expanded institutional capacity, and other new political norms. The author terms this move a “neopolitical turn” (p. 162) Focusing on this crucial political shift, the seventh and eighth chapters provide an insightful discussion of important recent developments in the PRC, which include – to name but a few – the debate and intrigue leading to the downfall of Bo Xilai, the nationwide anti-corruption campaign, the new labour movement, the new policy goal of “common prosperity,” changes to the social credit system and the government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wallace's book showcases his rich knowledge of China's political evolution in the reform era. It also presents an innovative theoretical perspective that draws together seemingly disparate political events into a historical whole with an underlying logic that will be clear to interested observers both within and outside the system.
However, while Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts provides an excellent overview and analysis of political development in post-Mao China (the Xi Jinping era in particular) from the perspective of quantified governance, a single monograph is naturally limited in scope, and many of the exciting and compelling new ideas that Wallace raises are not developed as fully as one might hope. For example, his theory that the “who-how-why” framework can be used to explore authoritarian governance and regime identity warrants another monograph-length work to further unravel.
Regarding the central concept of quantified governance, a few questions are left for future studies to answer. The most important of these concerns the origin of quantified governance. The Chinese state's use of quantification as a tool to govern society and manage political elites does not seem to be unique to the reform era. Indeed, “ruling by numbers” was quintessentially Maoist – consider, for example, the state's assignment of percentage-based quotas for alleged “Rightists” during the Anti-Rightist Movement, its “launching high-yield satellites” (which refers to reporting unrealistically high grain yields) campaigns during the Great Leap Forward, among others.
In addition, in the past decade, political controversy in China has consistently surrounded questions about official numbers and their dissemination, too. For example, how should the number of COVID-19 cases be defined and reported? What numerical target is appropriate for the country's annual GDP growth? How can carbon emissions be accurately measured in numbers at different locales? The use of numbers as a salient and crucial governance tool in the new era of Chinese politics is well evidenced and it is certainly far from becoming obsolete.
Finally, quantified governance may not be “Chinese,” “communist,” or endogenous at all. Indeed, Arunabh Ghosh's recent book on statistics and statecraft in the early years of the PRC reveals that China's deployment of statistical tools for governance at that time was part of a post-war global trend of quantification, with states worldwide seeking to make sense of society through numbers. No discussion of China's quantified governance model in the post-Mao era can be complete without taking a global perspective – placing China's story in the context of the wider process by which states are becoming ever better equipped not only to discern facts about society but also to take advantage of those facts to strengthen their rule and control of society. What Wallace's brilliant new book depicts may be part of a larger story of the evolution of the modern state and the ways in which it makes sense of, interacts with, and holds sway over public life.
