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Jeremy Friedman, Arunabh Ghosh. Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China., The American Historical Review, Volume 127, Issue 4, December 2022, Pages 1966–1967, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhac423
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In the third decade of the twenty-first century, the world has become acutely aware of the importance of the reliability of statistical information provided by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Though written before COVID case counts and deaths were held up as measures of national success by the CCP, Arunabh Ghosh’s fascinating examination of the early efforts at statistical data collection by the PRC provide an important window into the epistemological, ideological, and institutional controversies that accompanied the effort by the newly established socialist regime to understand the country and people it governed. Given the increasing historiographical attention to the ways in which modern states have used statistics to classify populations and make policy with reference to mathematical understandings of invented entities such as national “economies,” Ghosh’s Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China stands out for its focus on the ways in which this process was different in socialist states. By the time the Chinese people had “stood up,” in Mao’s famous phrase of September 1949, their new socialist government was explicit about its desire to “see” its state in a way that avoided the supposed ideological distortions of bourgeois statistics.
