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.
For a discussion of some of the book's major themes, check out this essay in Aeon: "Counting China".
Reviews:
Jeremy Friedman. 2022. Book Review: Arunabh Ghosh. Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China. American Historical Review, Volume 127, Issue 4 (December 2022): 1966-1967. [Link]
Plekhanov, Dmitriy. 2021. Book review: Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China. China Information 35(2):248-249. [Link]
Thornton, Patricia. 2020. Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China. The China Quarterly, 244, 1168-1169. [Link]
Wu Jiarui. 2022. Book review: Arunabh Ghosh, Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China. China Report. 58(3), July 2022. [Link]
Bemmann, Martin. 2022. Arunabh Ghosh: Making it Count. Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China. Comparativ, 31(5-6), 679–682. [Link]
East Asian Science, Technology and Society:
Lin, Yi-Tang. 2021. “Data and Databases: Emerging Objects of Research.” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, 15:3, 395-401. [Link]
East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine:
Bréard, Andrea. 2022. Arunabh Ghosh, Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China, East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (published online ahead of print 2022). [Link]
Chan, Melissa. 2020. “When the Numbers Don’t Add Up in China.” Foreign Policy, 20 July 2020. [Link]
Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht
Daniel Leese. 2023. “China.” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 74, H 9/10 (October): 574-589 (see p. 583).
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences:
Bian, He. 2022. “Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China: A Review of Recent Works.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 1 April 2022; 52 (2): 265–275. [Link]
Stapleford, Thomas A. 2022. Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China. History of Political Economy 1 October 2022; 54 (5): 1002–1005. [Link]
Isis:
Wang, Zuoyue. 2021. Arunabh Ghosh. Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China. Isis 112, 2: 428-429. [Link ]
Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs:
Kumar, Vikas. 2021. Book review: Arunabh Ghosh, Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China. Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs, 2021, 8(1):130-133. [Link]
Veg, Sebastian. 2021. Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China. The Journal of Asian Studies, 80(4), 1060-1062. [Link]
Journal of Chinese Political Science:
Frazier, Mark. 2020. Arunabh Ghosh, Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China. Journal of Chinese Political Science, Issue 1, 2021: 257 – 259. [Link]
Journal of Development Studies:
Wallace, Jeremy L. 2022. Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China. The Journal of Development Studies. Published online: 08 Jun 2022. [Link]
Korean Journal of the History of Science:
Bae Sanghee 배상희† . “The State, Statistics, and the Methodology of Non-Western Socialist States.” Korean Journal of the History of Science Vol. 44, No. 3 (2022): 763-772.
John Lanchester. “Get a Rabbit.” London Review of Books. Vol. 45 No. 18 · 21 September 2023
Shi-Kupfer, Kristin. 2020. Review: Making it Count. Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China by Arunabh Ghosh. The Merics Briefs, 27 August 2020. [Link]
Newsletter for Research in Chinese Studies
Zhuoying Lu. 2023. Review: Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China. Newsletter for Research in Chinese Studies [Link] [in Chinese]
Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines:
Wu, Shellen X. 2022. “Arunabh Ghosh, Making It Count. Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China.” Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines, 40: 277-281. [Link]
Holz, Carsten. 2021. Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China, by Arunabh Ghosh. The China Journal No. 85: 226 – 228. [Link]
The PRC History Review:
Liu, Jessie. 2023. Forthcoming
Karl, Rebecca E. 2022. "Subject to the State: Language and Data in Twentieth-Century China." Twentieth-Century China 47, no. 1 (2022): 81-87. [Link]
Twenty-First Century 《二十一世纪》:
Wang Yi-wang 王宜揚. 2023. “「數字中國」與國家能力建設——評Arunabh Ghosh, Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China.” 《二十一世纪》No. 197 (June 2023): 140-149
Online Reviews (Substack, Medium, etc.)
Global Inequality and More 3.0
Branko Milanovic. 2023. “Statistics as a philosophy and art: The use and misuse of statistics in the early years of the People's Republic.” Global Inequality and More 3.0 [Link]
Intersectional Spaces: Amogh Arakali's Newsletter
Amogh Arakali. 2023. “Numbers and Plans.” Intersectional Spaces: Amogh Arakali's Newsletter [Link]
David Dayton. 2021. “Statistics, lies, and damn lies.” Silk Road International China Book Reviews [Link]
Alec Ash. 2020. “Making Sense of the Multipolar World.” The Wire China [Link]
Media Mentions
- "Economics and Marginalia" Blog Post by Ranil Dissanayake, Center for Global Development, February 10, 2023 [Link]
- "Does the Chinese Communist Party ever learn from history?" Alex Lo in the South China Morning Post, April 7, 2021. [Link]
- "The Most Romantic Sentences Ever About Government Statistics?" in Conversable Economist by Timothy Taylor, August 9, 2020 [Link]
- "Why the world counts on honest stats in a pandemic." Editorial in Christian Science Monitor, July 23, 2020. [Link]
Interviews, Podcasts, Essays, etc.
- Featured in Dan Bouk, Kevin Ackermann, and danah boyd. "A Primer on Powerful Numbers: Selected Readings in the Social Study of Public Data and Official Numbers." Data and Society, March 23, 2022 [Link]
- New Books Network, Interview about “Making it Count,” July 7, 2021 [Link]
- Studying Maoist China YouTube Channel, "“Statistics and Statecraft in Maoist China: An Interview with Arunabh Ghosh,” with Felix Wemheuer (Univ. of Cologne), April 10, 2021 [Link]
- Pekingology Podcast with Jude Blanchette, “Statistics and State-Building in Mao's China,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, January 7, 2021 [Link]
- “Crises of Counting,” Essay on Invisible Histories Website, Center for History and Economics, October, 2020 [Link]
- “Counting China,” Aeon, July 23, 2020 [Link]
- "The Stories Behind The Numbers." States of Anarchy Podcast with Hamsini Hariharan, June 23, 2020. [Link]
- “Knowing through numbers,” on the Visualizing Climate and Loss Blog of the Center for History and Economics, May 2020 [Link]
- Written interview about Making it Count, with Mark Frazier, India China Institute, New School, April 14, 2020 [Link]
Related publications (for pdfs or links, look under publications tab)
- Ghosh, Arunabh. 2022. “The Mean-ness of Statistics.” Harvard Data Science Review 4 (4).
- Ghosh, Arunabh. 2019. “Forecasting.” In Critical Terms in Future Studies, edited by Heike Paul, 127-130. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Ghosh, Arunabh. 2018. “Lies, Damned Lies, and (Bourgeois) Statistics: Ascertaining Social Fact in Mid-century China and the Soviet Union.” Osiris 33 (1): 149-168.
- Ghosh, Arunabh. 2016. “Accepting difference, seeking common ground: Sino-Indian statistical exchanges 1951–1959.” BJHS Themes 1: 61-82.