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A history of how Chinese officials used statistics to define a new society in the early years of the People's Republic of China 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

Andrew B. Liu, Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), pp. 360, $50.00, 25 b/w illus, Hardcover. ISBN: 9780300243734.

AbstractThis paper uses the decade-long collaboration between the Indian paleobotanist Birbal Sahni (1891–1949) and his Chinese doctoral student Hsü Jen (Xu Ren 徐仁, 1910–1992) to offer a connected history of mid-twentieth century scientific activity in China and India. Possibly the first Chinese scientist to earn a PhD from an Indian university (Lucknow, 1946), Hsü was certainly the first to be appointed to a faculty position in India. Sahni and Hsü's attempts to build Asian networks of scientific activity, characterized by the circulation of experts, scientific knowledge, and specimens, provide the grounds for considering a practice of Pan-Asianism. Such a formulation adds to existing work on the Pan-Asianist articulations of intellectual and political figures and urges for an expansion of how we understand scientific activity across China and India from the 1930s to the 1960s. In so doing, the paper makes two historiographical interventions. In the first instance, the collaboration presents an opportunity to move beyond the two dominant frames through which histories of science in China and India are studied: the nation state and Non-West/West binaries. Second, a focus on science widens the scope of China–India history, a field dominated by research on cultural, intellectual, and diplomatic topics.

This essay offers commentary on the previous three articles regarding PRC-era science by Sarah Mellors, Chuan Xu, and Sigrid Schmalzer. It notes that by moving beyond older concerns that were centered on issues of state control or techno-nationalism, these articles exemplify new directions in the study of PRC-era science. Their focus on lived experience, local stories, and materiality provides rich and diverse perspectives on histories of science in the PRC by exposing the often contradictory ways in which the power and influence of science operated across society. The commentary concludes by identifying three pathways for future research.