Abstract
Today, more than 40 years since the beginning of reform and opening up, China’s official statistics still remain a sort of terra incognita to the majority of external observers in the West. This mysterious land is depicted by its most radical critics as secretive and opaque where party goals and objectives trump economic reality, and where the quality of data is questionable. Meanwhile, there is little knowledge among the general public about the exact functioning of the statistical system in China, which causes even more mistrust of any statistical figures coming from China. Although the debate about Chinese official statistics is focused quite naturally on the most recent data, it is worth mentioning that the history of statistics is nonetheless important. As Arunabh Ghosh puts it in his book Making It Count, initial steps taken by Chinese statisticians back in the 1950s generated path dependence that affected types of methods used, data collected, and analyses performed. Knowing the history of the Chinese official statistics thus reduces at least some degree of bias and misunderstanding.
Making It Count starts by highlighting the fact that although the national statistical system was officially set up only in 1952 (three years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949), first steps to organize statistical work in the PRC were actually implemented in northeastern China, which became the first region to set up a statistical bureau in 1950, and the first to publish a specialized statistics journal and annual statistical report. The Northeast Statistics Bureau also became the first sub-national statistical agency in the PRC to fully incorporate Soviet/socialist approaches to statistics.
Adoption of Soviet socialistic statistics in China in the 1950s was quite comprehensive and actually had a long-lasting effect on the national statistical system. Ghosh’s book provides a thorough account of the Chinese engagement with Soviet aid and expertise in the 1950s, when full-scale introduction of statistical activity in the PRC was implemented. The main idea was to emulate the success of the Soviet Union in establishing the planned economy, and for this purpose exhaustive enumeration through a system of periodic reporting was adopted as the primary method of data collection. On the theoretical side, the primary focus on exhaustive enumeration helped to distinguish socialistic statistics from what came to be labelled ‘bourgeois’ statistics – which was criticized for its excessive focus on chance and uncertainty and mathematical abstractions whereas socialistic statistics were supposed to investigate ‘the quantitative expression of the laws of social development in the specific conditions of place and time’. Thus, the main duties of statisticians were supposed to consist of data collection and supply for planning purposes while theoretical issues were largely left to mathematicians. The book provides an interesting example of this shift by comparing pre-1949 textbooks on statistics with new volumes published under the guidance of the National Bureau of Statistics – with the latter overwhelmingly focused on collection, grouping, and aggregation of data while omitting entire chapters on topics of ‘mathematical statistics’, such as variance and probability.
Establishing a unified national statistical system from scratch in a country as vast and complex as China obviously was not an easy task. Chinese statisticians had to deal with such challenges as rising complexity of the economy, political trends toward greater decentralization (and, consequently, a larger degree of autonomy of regional statistical offices), and lack of skilled personnel. The system also created incentives geared at an overproduction of reports and lacked adequate means to check the accuracy of the numbers. One particular sphere in which such problems were especially pronounced was agriculture, where exhaustive enumeration proved to be especially ineffective. Frustration with the poor state of agricultural statistics was one of the main drivers which stimulated the interest of Chinese statisticians in alternative solutions as well as their eventual turn to India to adopt the emerging technology of large-scale random sampling. Unfortunately, exchanges between Chinese and Indian statisticians came to an abrupt end because of political tensions and havoc which plagued the Chinese statistical system due to the Great Leap Forward.
All in all, the book represents a thorough and interesting account of the establishment of the national statistical system in the early years of the PRC. On the basis of archival sources, official statistical publications, media articles, and interviews with statisticians, the author delivers the history of the establishment of Chinese statistics from the perspective of Chinese statisticians, who had to face multiple challenges (ideological, social, and economic) during that historic period of time.