Arunabh Ghosh is a historian of modern China, with research and teaching interests in\u00a0social and economic history, history of science and statecraft, transnational history, and China-India history.<\/p>\n
In his book\u00a0Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the early People’s Republic of China<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0(Princeton University Press, 2020), he investigates how Chinese officials used statistics to define a new society in the early years of the People\u2019s Republic of China.<\/p>\n In 1949, at the end of a long period of wars, one of the biggest challenges facing leaders of the new People\u2019s Republic of China was how much they did not know. The government of one of the world\u2019s 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.\u00a0Making It Count\u00a0is the history of efforts to resolve this \u201ccrisis in counting.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Anchored in debates about statistics and its relationship to state building,\u00a0Making It Count<\/em>\u00a0offers fresh perspectives on China\u2019s transition to\u00a0socialism.<\/p>\n The event is part of the Asian Futures Seminar Series convened by Ravinder Kaur and J\u00f8rgen Delman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Arunabh Ghosh is a historian of modern China, with research and teaching interests in\u00a0social and economic history, history of science and statecraft, transnational history, and China-India history. In his book\u00a0Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the early People’s Republic of China\u00a0(Princeton University Press, 2020), he investigates how Chinese officials used statistics to define a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":118606,"template":"","class_list":["post-118605","event","type-event","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","event_category-seminar-en"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n