EVENTS

Abstract

When the PRC was established in 1949, industrial modernity achieved via planning was the only modernity worth envisioning for the CCP elite. At the heart of any planning enterprise lie the collection, analysis, and deployment of data. As early as 1949, economists and statisticians began debating the nature and methods for collecting data. Existing statistical norms and practices were identified as products of the excesses and errors of Western bourgeois influence and summarily rejected. The Soviet Union, the only country to have successfully industrialized under communist auspices, provided an alternate blueprint for China’s own future. Valorizing the Soviet Union’s ‘advanced experience,’ domestic debates within China during 1951 and 1952 came to reformulate statistics as a social science in contradistinction to a natural or universal science. Its function lay in helping build a socialist society. As a result, the new statistics stood bifurcated — rhetorically and substantively — from what was labeled the tainted, bourgeois, and socially unproductive pursuit of mathematical statistics. Statistical work, first most notably in the northeast and then progressively elsewhere, followed suit. This talk investigates the establishment of this new statistics. Drawing upon the writings of Chinese and Soviet statisticians, textbooks and primers, archival documents at the local and national level, contemporary journal articles, and oral interviews, it traces the emergence, justification, and adoption of this new definition of statistics and considers its concomitant influence on the practices of statistical work and economic planning during the first decade of the PRC.

About the Speaker

Arunabh Ghosh is a Ph.D candidate in modern Chinese history at Columbia University. He received undergraduate degrees in History and Economics (with a Minor in Math) from Haverford College in Pennsylvania. Between 2003 and 2005 he worked as a research assistant at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. He spent 2006-07 at the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He received an MA in 2009 and an MPhil in 2010 (both in History) from Columbia. He is currently writing a dissertation on statistics and state society relations during the first decade of the PRC, which he plans to defend in May of 2014. Arunabh’s research and writing is supported by grants from Columbia University, the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.