Dr. Arunabh Ghosh (Harvard University), Dr. Madhavi Thampi (Institute of Chinese Studies)

In 1949, one of the biggest challenges facing PRC leaders was how much they did not know. 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 US, Arunabh Ghosh explores the choices made by Chinese leaders, statisticians & academics in their attempts to know the nation through numbers.
As Soviet-inspired methods of exhaustive enumeration became untenable by the mid-1950s, the Chinese sought to learn about Random Sampling from Indian statisticians. These developments were overtaken by the tumult of the Great Leap Forward, 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 histories of statistics and data. Making It Count offers fresh perspectives on China's transition to socialism.