{"product_id":"9780691179476","title":"Making It Count","description":"Author: Arunabh Ghosh\u003cbr\u003eISBN: 9780691179476\u003cbr\u003ePublisher: Princeton University Press\u003cbr\u003eYear first published: 09 Jun 2020\u003cbr\u003ePages: 360\u003cbr\u003eFormat: Hardback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 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. \u003ci\u003eMaking It Count\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGhosh 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 (195861), 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnchored in debates about statistics and its relationship to state building, \u003ci\u003eMaking It Count\u003c\/i\u003e offers fresh perspectives on China's transition to socialism.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u0026amp;#x27;Arunabh Ghosh could not have imagined how timely his book would be when he set out more than a decade ago on his research project. But \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eMaking It Count,\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e an academic work published by Princeton University Press examining the history of statistics in China, lands at a time when the world is wondering: How does Beijing collect data, and what did it know about COVID-19 and when?\u0026amp;#x27;   Melissa Chan, \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eForeign Policy\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u0026amp;#x27;[Ghosh] deftly explores deeper questions about how state-making unfolded during the early years of the PRC, how ideology came to permeate every facet of the governing apparatus, and how strategies of enumeration are invariably bound, in complex ways, to the expression of political power. As such, \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eMaking It Count\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e is an essential addition to any reading list on PRC history, as well to research methods in the social sciences and the humanities.\u0026amp;#x27; Patricia M. Thornton, \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eChina Quarterly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u0026amp;#x27;A remarkably well-researched and well-written book.\u0026amp;#x27;  Kristin Shi-Kupfer, \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eMERICS China Briefing\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ships in 10 to 15 days","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46798841282718,"sku":"ADS-9780691179476","price":79.78,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0400\/9043\/5742\/files\/9780691179476.jpg?v=1778120792","url":"https:\/\/classicbargains.com.au\/products\/9780691179476","provider":"Classic Bargains Australia","version":"1.0","type":"link"}