A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900-1949 (Asia Pacific Modern)

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Lam, A Passion for Facts

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A Passion for Facts


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asia pacific modern Takashi Fujitani, Series Editor

1. Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, by Miriam Silverberg 2. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, by Shu-mei Shih 3. The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910–1945, by Theodore Jun Yoo 4. Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth Century, by John D. Blanco 5. Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame, by Robert Thomas Tierney 6. Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan, by Andrew D. Morris 7. Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II, by T. Fujitani 8. The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, by Gail Hershatter 9. A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900–1949, by Tong Lam


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A Passion for Facts Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900–1949

tong lam

University of California Press berkeley

los angeles

london


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University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2011 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lam, Tong. A passion for facts : social surveys and the construction of the Chinese nation state, 1900–1949 / Tong Lam. p. cm. — (Asia Pacific modern ; 9) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-26786-2 (cloth, alk. paper) 1. Social surveys—China—History—20th century. 2. China— Social conditions—1912–1949. 3. China—Social policy. I. Title. hn740.z9s6752 2011 300.72’051—dc22 2011010281

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In keeping with its commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.


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For my parents


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Contents

1.

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

introduction

1

the rise of the fact and the reimagining of china

19

2.

from divide and rule to combine and count

50

3.

foolish people versus soulstealers

75

4.

the nationalization of facts and the affective state

91

5.

time, space, and state effect

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6.

china as a social laboratory

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epilogue

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Notes

175

Glossary

223

Bibliography

227

Index

253


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Illustrations

table 1. The implementation of selected New Policies

64

figures 1. “His weight is thus known” (ca. 1920s)

31

2. Matching the medicine with the illness (1933)

37

3. Literacy as the foundation of the nation (1927)

46

4. Mandatory education and national progress (1927)

47

5. Designs of census verification form and doorplate (1909)

71

6. Bicycle training for social surveyors (ca. 1930s)

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7. Surveyors on parade (ca. 1930s)

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8. Vital statistics laboratory (ca. 1930s)

125

ix


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Acknowledgments

A first book is the occasion for acknowledging inspiration, help, and support over the years that led, often in circuitous ways, to this moment. My sincere thanks first go to the members of my original dissertation committee at the University of Chicago: Prasenjit Duara, Guy Alitto, Tetsuo Najita, and Jan Goldstein.Without their critical insights, patience, and constant support, this project would have never reached its present form. I also owe a particular debt of gratitude to my former teachers, Lionel Jensen, Susan Blum, Daniel Bays, and William Tsutsui, who have faith in me and offered me invaluable encouragement and guidance in different stages of my career. I must also gratefully thank Takashi Fujitani, who took an interest in this project and offered me perceptive and motivating advice for revisions. I first started writing this book in the University of Chicago’s Wilder House, which is only about two hundred meters from the headquarters of the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), one of the most prominent social research organizations in the United States, at a time when the nation’s public opinion was becoming increasingly vulnerable and when “facts,” contradicted by actual events, were being shaped by emotions. Although this book is not a direct response to this troubled moment of American and global history, recent events have heightened my sense of urgency to interrogate why the proliferation of information, numerical data, and professional knowledge do not always lead to public reason and greater understanding. Throughout my academic training and work I have been privileged to be supported by various institutional and personal commitments to interdisciplinary and critical historical scholarship. At the University of Toronto, the Markets and Modernities Project at the Asian Institute, the Critical China Studies Working Group, and the Department of History offered me opportunities to discuss some of my ideas. I am also grateful to the support xi


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and encouragement I received from colleagues at the University of Richmond, where I taught previously. As well, I owe a special thanks to my Chicago peer group, which helped to nurture this project in its early stages. I have also had the advantage of sharing and discussing different aspects of this project with colleagues and interlocutors in a variety of disciplines during lectures, conferences, and informal conversations in North America, Asia, and Europe. It is impossible to list all of those who provided me with useful comments, but I would especially like to extend my gratitude to Nadia Abu El-Haj, Tani Barlow, Li Chen, Mark Elliot, Joshua Fogel, James Hevia, Joan Judge, Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Li Hsiao-t’i, Meng Yue, Rebecca Nedostup, Mary Poovey, Gyan Prakash, William Sewell, Michael Tsin, and Wang Fan-sen for their helpful interventions at different stages. I also want to thank the participants in the Modern Chinese History Seminar Series and the Deviance and Social Control in Early Twentieth-Century China Workshop at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, the Genealogies of Modernity Workshop at the University of Amsterdam, the Medicine, Technology, and Society Workshop at the Institute of Modern History, and the Cultural and Intellectual History Workshop at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, as well as the Empires and Colonies Workshop and China’s Long Twentieth Century Workshop at the University of Chicago. Prasenjit Duara,Thomas Mullaney, Kathryn Ragsdale, and two additional anonymous reviewers have read the entire book manuscript. I sincerely thank them for their perceptive and generous criticisms. I am, of course, responsible for all the remaining shortcomings. Numerous friends and colleagues on different continents also played a significant role during the research and writing of this book, reacting to my ideas or generally bolstering my spirits over coffee, wine, and food in various contexts. They include Thomas Allen, Joshua Baker, Daniel Bender, Andreas Bendlin, Ritu Birla, Robert Blecher, Alana Boland, Monica Turk Burden, Richard Burden,Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, Linda Rui Feng, Evie Gu, Mareile Haase, Katsuya Hirano, Patrick Ho, Kajri Jain, Ken Kawashima, Sho Konishi, Fung Kwan, Thomas Lahusen, Ken Lam, Wai-pui Lam, Su-chuan Lee,Tania Li,Victor Li, Daniel Monterescu, Michelle Murphy, Olenka Pevny, Janet Poole, Richard Reitan, Scott Relyea, Ilka Saal, Andre Schmid, Jayeeta Sharma, Jesook Song, Carol Summers, Kunihiko Tanaka, Mohamad TavakoliTarghi, Yiching Wu, and Theodore Jun Yoo. Special thanks are also due to senior editor Reed Malcolm for his extraordinary stewardship; to Cindy Fulton and Sharron Wood for their metic-


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Acknowledgments

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ulous copyediting; and to my graduate assistant Meaghan Marian for her careful indexing. In a book on facts, social survey research, and the production of social scientific knowledge in general, acknowledgments are certainly more than just a performance, but also a confirmation that knowledge is inseparable from and enabled by networks and institutional resources. My graduate training was supported by a University of Chicago Century Fellowship and a Macau Foundation Graduate Scholarship. My dissertation research and writing was made possible by financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Center for Chinese Studies at the National Central Library in Taiwan. In addition, research and travel grants from the University of Toronto, the University of Richmond, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the American Historical Association have allowed me to carry out additional research and substantial revisions. I am also deeply thankful for the support and assistance this project has received from staff members of many archives and libraries on both sides of the Pacific. They include the Institute of History and Philology Archives at the Academia Sinica, the Kuomintang Archives, Academia Historica, the First and Second Historical Archives of China, the Special Collections of the Peking University Library and Nankai University Library, the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Harvard-Yenching Library, and the Library of Congress. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my parents for their love, support, and patience. This book is dedicated to them.


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Introduction

We take it for granted that the gathering of social facts is indispensable to everyday life, and even more so when it comes to governance. From United Nations yearbooks to U.S. Gallup polls, governments and institutions constantly occupy themselves with facts, so much so that some have referred to the contemporary world as a fact-based society. In recent years the Chinese government, too, has begun to deploy public opinion polls to popularize its policies and legitimize its rule. Individuals, for their part, govern themselves by religiously checking nutrition facts, stock indexes, and an infinite pool of numerical data, believing that a mastery of these numbers will lead to a good life. However, as common and universal as empirical facts appear to be in our everyday lives, this “culture of fact” came into being rather recently.1 In this book, I will study one aspect of this global history by analyzing the rationale, politics, and passions behind the production of facts, especially what Chinese intellectual elites regarded as social facts (shehui de shishi), in early twentieth-century China. In particular, I will examine how and why the production of social facts was a crucial activity for constituting the new Chinese nation. Central to this operation of gathering facts was what anthropologist Bernard Cohn called the rise of “investigative modalities” as political technologies of the modern state.2 These investigative modalities, whether they are censuses, ethnographic studies, sociological surveys, or similar modes of knowledge production, involve not only the collection of empirical facts by trained experts but also the ordering, classification, calculation, preservation, and circulation of facts for governing purposes. In turn, the very production of such facts fundamentally transformed the nature of governance by making the complex human world appear to be knowable and manipulable in ways that were not possible before. In the same fashion, empirical 1


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facts enabled individuals and groups to reimagine their social and political existence and turn themselves into a new form of political subject. The present study focuses particularly on what could broadly be called social surveys (shehui diaocha) and examines how these surveys were deployed to produce legible and calculable empirical facts that were associated with the representation, imagining, and governing of the Chinese nation. By “social surveys” I refer not only to the mostly survey-based sociological research that appeared in quantity during the 1920s and 1930s, even though they are very much part of the story. During the first half of the twentieth century, social surveys, not unlike the ideas of “society” (shehui), “social science” (shehui kexue), and “social problems” (shehui wenti), were still very novel to Chinese practitioners of this new mode of knowledge production. As a result, it was not unusual for amateur as well as professionally trained social scientists to cross their own disciplinary boundaries and conduct surveys related to other academic fields. In addition to surveys that were sociological in nature, practitioners of social surveys also carried out ethnological, economic, philological, historical, and even archaeological surveys that relied heavily on field research and direct observation to collect empirical evidence in order to investigate the newly conceived social world.3 Rather than imposing our contemporary understanding of the social survey onto the past, therefore, I define as social surveys those organized empirical studies that sought to make sense of the nation in a variety of contexts and to analyze the emerging social field, which involved particularly the well-being of the aggregate social body. The social survey as a mode of knowledge production is best understood not as a narrowly defined academic endeavor or research activity but rather as a cultural and political practice. For this reason, this book approaches the rise of the social survey as part of the larger epistemological upheaval in which Chinese intellectuals increasingly used the claims of science and reason to construct new organizing principles for cultural production and political life. Culturally, this shift was inseparable from the breakdown and abandonment of the old Confucian moral universe and statecraft techniques of the turn of the twentieth century. Nowhere was this more conspicuous than in the iconoclastic New Culture Movement (ca. 1915–21) and the May Fourth Movement (1919), as Chinese intellectuals openly championed “Mr. Science” (sai xiansheng) and “Mr. Democracy” (de xiansheng) as the foundation of the new nation. In fact, it was during this time that concepts of social science and social surveys began to circulate widely in Chinese public discourse. Politically, the emergence of social surveys as new technologies of governance was related to China’s transformation from a dynastic empire


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to a nation-state in which the people—not tradition, classics, or Heaven— became the new source of political authority and legitimacy. As part of the transformation, a national census, along with surveys of customs and other similar programs of fact collection, was implemented in the last decade of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). The 1920s and 1930s saw the peak of a social survey movement (shehui diaocha yundong) that would have a lasting impact on Chinese culture and politics in the rest of the twentieth century and beyond. During this entire period, late Qing and Republican practitioners of surveys frequently used the slogan “seeking truth from facts” (shishi qiushi)— an expression first used by Neo-Confucian scholars who practiced evidential research in the seventeenth century—to describe their endeavors.4 But in spite of such a continuous preoccupation with the ideas of truth and facts, the meanings of these terms had departed significantly from their previous definitions. Specifically, for early modern scholars of evidential research (kaozheng), to seek truth through facts was to use philological methods to determine which sections of the classics were verifiable and therefore authentic and true.5 However, when late Qing and Republican scholars and officials invoked the idea of “seeking truth from facts” to characterize their survey activities, they were neither interested in using philological evidence to authenticate the meanings of classical texts nor in retrieving the moral truth of the ancient sages. Instead, they focused mostly on the gathering of population statistics, sociological and ethnographic facts, economic data, cultural artifacts, archaeological evidence, and similar empirical information about the Chinese nation. Likewise, by seeking truth they were looking for the patterns and logics of social mechanisms, cultural formations, and national history that were thought to be manifestations of the universal truth. To put it bluntly, these survey practitioners were interested in collecting empirical facts to affirm a set of emerging claims about society, nation, culture, and history, not the moral principles of high antiquity. It goes without saying that this new truth that they were searching for was inseparable from the particular conception of time and space vital to the operations of the nation-state and industrial capitalism. Throughout this book, I refer to Chinese activities involving the collection of social facts as the Chinese “social survey movement,” and not only because the practitioners of survey-based social science used the phrase themselves.6 Even if they had not used this term, the Chinese quest for facts in the first half of the twentieth century can be regarded as a movement in at least two respects. First, since the mid-nineteenth century European and American observers had complained about the inability of the Chinese to


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appreciate the importance of exactitude and facts, even for such simple matters as a person’s height or the size of a population, and they regarded this absence of facts as a sign of China’s weakness and backwardness. For Chinese intellectual elites, the accusation that China was a place without facts and that the Chinese people had no factual knowledge of their own society was like a stab to the national psyche. Traumatized by this perceived national humiliation, these intellectuals became determined to overcome the alleged deficiencies by producing empirical facts about China themselves. These loosely coordinated yet interconnected efforts essentially constituted an intellectual and cultural movement with a clear sense of urgency and purpose. Second, one of the hallmarks of modern governance, as Michel Foucault noted in various contexts, is that modern power operates in a diffused manner rather than in a hierarchical and top-down fashion. Put differently, if power is to be able to function and circulate, it is only because individuals reactivate and reaffirm such power by governing themselves faithfully and uninterruptedly.7 In a similar fashion, Chinese social scientists explicitly argued that one of their objectives was to communicate social facts to the masses as a way to awaken, reform, and civilize them. This attempt to use social facts to convert the masses into national citizens and new political subjects capable of governing themselves was itself a form of social and political mobilization. Indeed, Chinese social scientists were hardly alone in using social surveys to produce the collective national subject. In the period between the two World Wars, American intellectual elites also repeatedly expressed their distrust of the masses and their belief that liberal democracy required the herding of public opinion through the use of survey techniques. At the time, the Chicago sociologist Robert Park referred to social surveys as a “social movement” to educate the masses about their social surroundings.8 For these reasons, the Chinese effort to survey the nation was nothing short of a movement, one that aimed at mobilizing the elites as well as the masses for the purposes of nation building and social transformation. The intensity of this movement is clearly revealed in a statistic from the period in question, which showed that there were more than nine thousand surveys carried out in China between 1927 and 1935 alone. By contrast, according to another study, there were more than three thousand surveys conducted in the United States in what historians have come to call the American social survey movement of the first few decades of the twentieth century.9 This book draws on recent conversations in a broad range of disciplines and subfields. The followings are five interweaving conceptual starting points


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and lines of inquiry that are particularly central to my analysis of the rise of social surveys in early twentieth-century China.

the social fact as a new source of truth My interest in examining how the ideas and rhetoric of science and reason were deployed to conceptualize and govern the social field, and how social survey research as novel political technologies in particular contributed to the formation of the Chinese nation, is in many ways indebted to the vast body of interdisciplinary literature on similar developments that took place in other geographical contexts. Mary Poovey and Barbara Shapiro have shown how the ascendancy of the fact as an epistemological medium to make sense of the world in early modern Europe had a lasting impact on the development of science, law, news reportage, literature, historiography, and a broad range of cultural practices. Likewise, Ian Hacking and Theodore Porter have illustrated in great detail how statistical reasoning continue to reshape the modern West, from processes of governance to everyday life. Drawing upon the larger literature in critical postcolonial studies, scholars such as Timothy Mitchell, Nicholas Dirks, and Ann Laura Stoler, among others, have further investigated these issues in various colonial contexts and raised new empirical and methodological questions with influence far beyond their own fields.10 Most recently, scholars working on Japanese colonialism have also begun to examine similar developments in colonial Taiwan and colonial Korea. American historians, too, have started to work on the edges of these issues, analyzing how statistical and social surveys have fundamentally changed American culture and politics.11 In spite of the insights generated by these works and their tremendous influence beyond their fields, there has been surprisingly little attention given to the parallel processes that occurred in China. Meanwhile, there have been some studies on the development of the social sciences published sporadically in the past few decades. Almost of all these works, however, have limited themselves to the history of specific academic disciplines, especially sociology and anthropology.12 One study with a broader scope is Yung-chen Chiang’s examination of how American foundations contributed to the formation of sociological and economic research in various Chinese institutions.13 The institutional and intellectual processes of academic social sciences, however, represent only one aspect of the larger cultural and political developments that commenced decades earlier. Another noticeable contri-


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bution is Xin Liu’s study of the rebirth of statistics in the post-Mao era. Liu’s book, however, does not address the long and complex history of statistical reasoning and facticity in modern China.14 Most recently, Thomas Mullaney has used a science studies approach to uncover the incipient moment of the ethnic classification project in the 1950s.15 In showing how the linguistic approach to social taxonomies employed by the ethnologists from the Communist era had previously been adopted by Chinese ethnologists in the Republican period, Mullaney’s work further points to the importance of interrogating the rise of social scientific statecraft and technoscientific reasoning in the first half of the twentieth century. In this book I will trace the emergence of survey-based information gathering for governing purposes to the early 1900s, or the last decade of the Qing dynasty, when the imperial court made a concerted effort to refashion the dynastic state into a modern nation. I argue that state transformation, social engineering, and the constitution of new subjectivity in China’s postimperial transition entailed a new conception of the fact, facticity, and admissible evidence. Instead of focusing on the ideas and writings of major social scientists or the building of social science disciplines, this book analyzes how the “fact” became the medium for discerning the truth about the human world, and how surveys were conceived, implemented, and received. Indeed, the surveys under consideration were conducted not only by professional social scientists; instead, more often than not they were carried out by specially trained fieldworkers, census takers, police officers, student trainees, health officials, and even bureaucrats. This book is therefore an attempt to unravel the relationships between investigative social science, facticity, and modern governance by examining a diverse range of surveys carried out by established social scientists as well as little-known fieldworkers.

the sentiments of science A close examination of the actual practice of social surveys is to follow the social science laboratory process. In doing so, this book will open the Pandora’s box of social scientific knowledge production and reveal crucial extrascientific and nonrational factors that are hidden from the stated intentions and written rules presented by leading thinkers and official guidelines.16 My second line of inquiry particularly highlights the role of sensibility and sentiment in the production of social scientific knowledge. In China studies, recent works by Haiyan Lee and Eugenia Lean show the importance of sentiment in the cultural and political life of the Republican period. But


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nowhere is the juxtaposition between sentiment and reason more stunning than in recent works in science studies. Research by Steven Shapin, Ann Laura Stoler, and others have shown that science and reason alone were never sufficient to produce scientific knowledge.These scholars argue that cultural sentiments such as trust, loyalty, commitment, emotion, and passion were no less important in the production of facts and truth.17 In this study I, too, will highlight at least two areas in which we can see the importance of sentiment as a major force behind the Chinese intellectual elites’ embrace of empirical facts and claims of scientific truth. The first was the desire to overcome the factual deficiency alleged by the colonial powers. Specifically, the epistemic violence inflicted by the industrial powers, which charged that China was a place without rational thought and factual knowledge, was able to shatter the old Chinese cultural and moral universe. This narrative of China’s deficiencies and failure particularly gained momentum in the mid-nineteenth century, when the industrial West needed to forge a new kind of relationship with China. As China increasingly offered economic, political, diplomatic, and military opportunities to the West, the older Euro-American cultural imaginary of China as an incomprehensible, exotic, and distant land became inadequate. What the industrial powers demanded, moreover, was not just up-to-date information, but also knowledge of the Chinese society that was compatible with their framework of analysis. They strove to create, as Marx succinctly put it, “a world after its own image.”18 In light of this rising desire to make China commensurable, European and American observers who failed to acquire even the most basic facts about China often turned their frustrations into criticisms of the Chinese people for their inability to be exact and to make themselves intelligible to their interlocutors. Although Chinese intellectuals did not necessary concur with the Euro-American assessment of their society and culture, they were nonetheless deeply hurt and insulted by the apparent inability of the Chinese people to describe themselves and their society in a conceptual language that was characterized as modern, civilized, and universal. Humiliated and traumatized, Chinese intellectuals began to scramble for facts in order to remap China’s territory and population. Finally, the centrality of sentiment was revealed in the specific ways in which empirical facts were generated in the field. In particular, although scientific training, equipment, institutional infrastructure, and political support were certainly needed for this new mode of knowledge production, they alone were never sufficient. During their training and fieldwork, surveyors were repeatedly told about the importance of being able to endure physical


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and emotional suffering as a precondition for the successful production of social scientific knowledge. Trainees were even required to document their hardships and commitments during their fieldwork as a way to establish their credibility as capable collectors of facts and witnesses to the truth of the nation. By emphasizing the importance of emotion and sentiment in the production of facts and in modern governance, this book joins similar studies in questioning the myth that modernity is purely rational and that the triumph of science and reason is a self-evident, natural, and unproblematic process, a myth that Chinese cultural and political elites have shared since the beginning of twentieth century even though their own practices have constantly suggested otherwise.

the social question versus social history Another important starting point of this study is the inherent connection between the emergence of “society” (shehui) as a site of political discourse and the rise of social surveys. After all, the idea of a social survey presupposes the existence of an aggregate social world with empirical contents that are observable and understandable. In 1872, when the American missionary Justus Doolittle translated the word “society” into Chinese in a vocabulary book, he equated it to the Chinese character hui, meaning “gathering,” “assemblage,” or “association.”19 A decade later Huang Zunxian, the Qing’s first envoy to Japan, was among the first who took notice of the Japanese expression shakai and introduced this semantic compound into Chinese as shehui. Interestingly, he designated shehui along with Buddhism and Shintoism as Japanese “rituals and customs.”20 Huang, in other words, was apparently unaware of the sociological implications of this compound, even though shakai and shakaigaku had already become the standard translations of the English words “society” and “sociology” in the 1870s.21 It was only in the final decade of the century that the social scientific connotations of the term society found their way into China. Among the most substantial intellectual engagements with this concept was that of Qing scholar Yan Fu (1854–1921), who, as a naval official, witnessed the defeat of the Qing navy in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95). Shortly after the war, Yan Fu began to introduce Western treatises into China.22 Yet, in his translations of and commentaries on these texts, he mostly used qun and qunxue, which literally mean “grouping” and “the science of group strength,” to translate “society” and “sociology.”23 Following Yan Fu, other leading thinkers of the late Qing such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao all


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echoed this social Darwinist understanding of society and sociology in terms of “grouping” and “the science of group strength” in their discussions of communal coherence and national strength.24 However, as more officials and students studied in Japan as part of the initiatives of the New Policies, shehui gradually replaced qun as the standard translation of “society” by the end of the 1900s. This shift was hardly just a stylistic matter since the neologism shehui allowed Chinese intellectuals and reformers to tap into the discursive framework that involved other novel concepts that had already become prevalent in Meiji Japan such as science, nationhood, popular sovereignty, and constitutionalism. More importantly, it triggered a debate on the Chinese “social question” (shehui wenti), namely, how to make sense of China using this novel concept, and how to improve the Chinese social world. Notwithstanding this shift of terminology, the earlier interpretation of society as an organic grouping persisted. In the first decade of the 1900s, many Chinese writers contended in books as well as in emerging print media such as newspapers and journals that China did not have a real society, and they lamented that this was a national shame. They lashed out against the Chinese people, referring to them as unenlightened and parochial foolish people (yumin) who were neither patriotic nor capable of participating in politics. Such disquiet about the absence of a functioning society was perhaps best captured by the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen’s characterization of China as “a heap of loose sand” (yipan sansha) made up of four hundred million individuals. Nation building, for Sun, was to glue the incomplete and fragmentary social world into a cohesive “national social body” (minzu tuanti) as solid as a rock.25 When the new republic Sun and his associates helped to establish in 1912 disintegrated, the need to create enlightened citizens for a new society became even more pressing. During the height of the iconoclastic cultural movement of the 1910s and early 1920s, leading social scientists such as Fu Sinian and Tao Menghe echoed the same sentiment about the need to create an organic society made of real political citizens.26 Indeed, the numerous social engineering projects and political campaigns of twentieth-century China, such as national reconstruction, the New Life Movement, rural reconstruction, and land reform, to name just a few, could all be seen as attempt by the Nationalists, the liberals, and the Communists, respectively, to create their corresponding ideal society or “new society” (xin shehui). In this respect, the Chinese social survey movement operated on two fronts. On the one hand, the idea of social science and social survey research presumed an external social reality with internal mechanisms waiting to be discovered and dissected. On the other hand, Chinese social thinkers themselves also vehemently argued that


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China did not have a real organic and functioning society and that their goal was to create one.27 These two arguments, however paradoxical they seem, were not really contradictory, as the social scientific diagnosis of the Chinese social world was ultimately aimed at the curing of the sick social body, making it strong and healthy. In a sense, for Chinese cultural and political elites, the gap between the existing social world described by social surveys and the desired social order prescribed by them was the impetus for their action.28 In many ways, in fact, this gap precisely produced the condition and justification for the emergence of the modernizing state of twentieth-century China. Despite the fact that a great deal has been written on the emergence of the population as an aggregate social body in the new politics of the nationstate, as well as the rise of the social field as an object of knowledge in the critical historiography of Europe and European colonialism, these issues have remained largely unexplored in Chinese historical scholarship.29 In fact, historians writing about the social history of the late Qing and Republican periods often are not very attentive to the fact that empirical facts and conceptions of the social world are themselves products of social science that came into being in the same period that they are studying. Instead, they simply accept “society” as a natural category of historical inquiry and the social fact as the essential medium to understand the world. A case in point is the ongoing interest in the history of civil society and the public sphere in modern China. Instead of asking why Chinese elites were increasingly preoccupied with the social question, as well as why issues such as civil society and the public sphere became particularly important in the post–Cold War period, these historians ask about the form and existence of civil society and the public sphere in the late imperial and Republican periods.30 There is no doubt that social historians of China, aided by modern social scientific categories, have produced many insightful works. Some of these works have even delved into the vast body of empirical data produced by social surveys during the Republican period to understand different dimensions of the social life of that era. However, as many anthropologists and historians, including some social historians, in other fields have noted, just like the nation, categories such as “society” or “the social fact” all have their own genealogies.31 Similarly, as Sarah Igo argues in the context of the United States, the American self-conception as a modern society was very much a product of social surveys.32 Therefore, rather than approaching the survey findings merely as factual information that allows us to understand early twentieth-century Chinese society, this book offers a story of how the social world came into being as a field of knowledge and practice through an


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analysis of the ways in which social facts were constructed and mobilized to produce truth claims about the human world.

china in a global colonial context Like many recent works on modern Chinese history, this book situates China in a global colonial context. Until recently, the historiography of modern China has been structured around a framework developed through the 1980s known as the China-centered approach, which represents a rejection of an earlier sinological framework that characterized the history of modern China primarily as a reaction to European colonialism. Mindful of the older characterization of Chinese history and civilization as stagnant and timeless, practitioners of the China-oriented approach look to explain China’s modern transformations by examining the long-term but domestic economic, demographic, social, and even cultural tendencies that began much earlier. In doing so, these historians set aside the colonialism question and argue that the conditions of modern China existed long before the arrival of the industrial West.33 While this insistence on understanding modern Chinese history on its own terms is meant to be culturally sensitive, giving agency to Chinese historical actors, it runs the risk of affirming the East-West binary in which Chinese history is seen as an independent development unconnected to the rest of the world. Similarly, the epistemological underpinning of this argument, however unintentionally, is akin to that of colonial discourse and modernization theory from the past two centuries. That is, by suggesting that China had already acquired many of the conditions and qualities of being modern, this argument often ends up reinforcing the unspoken but problematic assumption that there exists a checklist or master narrative that defines the criteria for being modern.34 Nonetheless, many historians have moved beyond this China-oriented approach in recent years. Works by Kenneth Pomeranz and Lionel Jensen, among others, have broken down those binary constructs considerably and emphasized that it was circulation, mutual implication, and convergence— in trade as well as ideas—since the early modern period that made our modern world possible.35 However, when this question of circulation is put in the nineteenth-century context of colonial violence, the issue becomes considerably more complicated and controversial. Some scholars such as Shumei Shih and Bryna Goodman, while acknowledging that we cannot simply sidestep the colonial question, insist that we need to take China’s semicolonial status seriously as China was never completely occupied by the industrial


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powers and native elites still had plenty of freedom and confidence to devise their own ideas and policies. Others, such as James Hevia, on the contrary, argue that even though the industrial powers never governed the entire Qing empire directly, they were able to impose a hegemonic legal and cultural order on the Qing.36 Unlike the older “impact and response” approach, this emphasis on the effect of colonial violence is not a denial of Chinese historical agency. In a study that could be seen as a follow-up to this line of reasoning, Lydia Liu argues that although the Qing dynasty was compelled to change its legal system, the way it did so was not entirely dictated by the colonial powers. Liu also challenges the conventional assumption that international law was established solely for the purpose of dealing with exchanges among the European states. She argues that international law also was updated constantly in order to exclude non-Western societies such as China from becoming part of the self-proclaimed civilized world. Hevia, too, shows that British military and cultural violence in China was not intended only as a lesson for the Qing empire and its people, but also as a lesson for the British domestic audience in constructing a sense of Victorian justice and sensibility visà-vis the alleged barbarity of Qing China.This later point about mutual constitution and circulation made by Liu and Hevia is crucial, for it points to the fact that European core values and self-conceptions from the idea of civilization to the practice of law were at least partially constituted through colonial contacts. In her discussion of the coloniality of China, Tani Barlow concludes that the constant circulation of all these ideas and practices indicates that modernity is inherently colonial for one cannot possibly exist without another. As such, semicolonialism as a halfway concept is not productive, and the Chinese historical experience should be understood in terms of the larger category of “colonial modernity.”37 The rise of the social survey as a cultural and political practice in China certainly fits well into the global story of circulation. On the one hand, the Euro-American assertion about Chinese factual deficiencies was an act of epistemic violence that dismantled the older Chinese order of knowledge and traumatized the national psyche imagined by the Chinese elites. On the other hand, scholars have begun to suggest that social science techniques and social experiments developed in Republican China ultimately become a source of inspiration for the idea of development preached by the United States in the postwar period.38 But acknowledging that Chinese intellectual elites were not passive recipients of methods of social survey research was itself not sufficient. My intention is to further complicate the notion of colonial modernity by showing the multiplicity of colonial experience using the Chinese case.


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After all, as Frederick Cooper argues, the danger of subsuming a range of complex colonial histories into the category of colonial modernity is that we could easily end up overlooking the vast differences between colonial systems and experiences, as well as the actual contents of these historical processes.39 The importance of examining the specificities of colonial experience has recently been illustrated by Ruth Rogaski’s study of the arrival of modern hygiene in Tianjin, a colonial treaty port that was divided up by multiple colonial powers. Rogaski has demonstrated that the specific situation in Tianjin not only encouraged competing colonial powers to showcase their own visions of hygienic modernity, but it also compelled the Chinese elites to embrace the idea of modernity with little reservation. She argues therefore that the city’s status as a “semicolony” could also be described as a “hypercolony” because its drive to modernity was often uncontested and more intense in comparison to the formal colonies.40 Indeed, Rogaski’s observation of the race toward modernity driven by native elites in Tianjin seems to resonate with the unrelenting faith in the ideas of scientific reason and progress shared by other Republican cultural and political elites of the period. The Chinese social survey movement, too, can be said to operate in this broader hypercolonial context.41 Specifically, though the idea of social science was by definition colonial, the Chinese social survey projects under study here were chiefly devised and carried out by competing intellectual elites and political factions in China. The absence of an active and intrusive foreign regime responsible for the development and implementation of these survey programs subsequently made the race to conduct surveys even more urgent and intense, leading to a range of incredibly diverse and innovative practices vigorously pursued by native elites. In the formal colonies, as much as colonial authorities had to make science “go native” in order to acquire credibility, the logic of industrial capitalism and colonial rule often required colonial administrations under the same colonial power to standardize their practices within and among colonies in a way that was conducive to the movement of labor and capital, commodity transactions, the calculation of risks, the management of social taxonomies, and so on in a global scale.42 This aggressive imposition of science on the native population, as Gyan Prakash observes, tended to set off resentment and resistance among the native elites, who, instead of simply accepting this Western-imposed science and reason, often sought to establish an alternative reason for their nationalist struggles.43 Such was not the case in early twentieth-century China, however, due to its political disunity as well as its still rudimentary and highly uneven capitalist development. The absence of an intrusive colonial regime directly responsible for the implementation of surveys and for the structure of gov-


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ernment often meant that Chinese elites did not have to actively search for alternative reasons for the purpose of cultural resistance. Rather, they were intensely addicted to the idea of science because science promised to offer a new kind of epistemological certainty to replace the crumbling cosmological order. They believed as well that the power of science could give rise to a modern state capable of resisting the intruding industrial powers in the great game of the survival of the fittest. Finally, science allowed Chinese intellectual elites to establish their credibility and authority so that they could rail against and silence their political opponents in the race to define and control China. In short, even though Chinese elites did not internalize the colonial gaze passively but refracted, reconfigured, and redirected colonial technologies for their own purposes, their social scientific views of the human world still shared many of the same ideological and epistemological assumptions of colonial social science.44 They produced sociological and ethnographic categories such as peasants, ethnic minorities, and superstition as the Other of modernity and as the targets of the civilizing and modernizing initiatives of the modern state. They used surveys to produce the difference between themselves and those who were being investigated, making themselves the agents of modernity and progress and foreclosing the voices of those whom they sought to study, represent, and govern.45 In this respect, there is no reason that these survey materials should not also be read against the grain in the same way we would approach the colonial archive. No less important, although this study is built upon the insights generated by similar studies in other geographical areas such as Europe and South Asia, it is not my goal to apply those frameworks to China. Just as the colonial experiences of South Asia and elsewhere have “provincialized” Europe, China’s historical experience can be used to relativize the experiences of those formal colonies. By putting the rise of social surveys in China in a global context, it is my hope to bring Chinese history into a much-needed conversation with the existing literature on this topic from other geographical areas and subfields.

early twentieth-century china as a social laboratory Last but not least, this book examines how, when unmitigated faith in science converged with the desire to produce a new social order under the hypercolonial environment, China was essentially turned into a social laboratory


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where the production of social facts was tied to experiments, debates, and rivalries about the nation’s future.The great political experiments to remake China into a modern nation in many ways started in a series of reforms known as the New Policies during the last decade of the Qing dynasty. Yet, as the nation quickly plunged into a state of warlordism and factional politics without a real national government in much of the 1910s and 1920s— instead of coalescing into a strong, healthy, and cohesive social body as the revolution had promised—the need to chart a new course of action based on the authority of scientific reason and objective truth rather than the ideology, politics, or tradition thought to be responsible for China’s political chaos was actually heightened. In his study of how Republican China developed into an independent sovereign state, John Fitzgerald characterizes the period as a time when China was at once “stateless” and “nationless” in the sense that although the nation-state concept certainly existed in the minds of the Chinese elites, the form of neither the state nor the nation had been determined.46 By analyzing and diagnosing China’s social problems, social surveys were therefore also the political technologies that helped to prescribe the form of the nation and state. In this regard, the production of social facts and the making of truth claims about what the nation was and how it should be governed and transformed was very much the core of the laboratory process. But instead of having the architects of empire use the colonies as “laboratories of modernity” for developing and refining governing techniques, the practitioners of the Chinese laboratory of modernity were mostly native intellectuals, social scientists, reformers, and revolutionaries, all of whom strove to determine the nature of Chinese society and its methods of intervention, as well as the appropriate form of the state apparatus and political disposition.47 During this period of fervid political and ideological struggle, Chinese social thinkers knew that in addition to gaining legitimacy and credibility, they also needed to make their truth claims about Chinese society and nationhood durable by placing the generative processes of these claims in a black box so that their claims could not easily be contested, distorted, or overturned. Precisely for this reason, if we seek to unmask how they produced these empirical facts and truth claims, we need to look into the laboratory process of these social surveys. As Bruno Latour’s study of the laboratory process has shown, the production of scientific knowledge involved endless mobilization of many layers of numbers, charts, and instruments, as well as extrascientific factors such as politics and social networks, in order to turn contingent outcomes, weak rhetoric, and controversial statements into scientific knowledge safely secured inside the black box.48


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Ironically, since practitioners of social surveys sought not only to describe and document the social world but also to prescribe and construct that social world according to their own visions, the truth claims they made were anything but transcendent, impartial, and universal. What these competing survey projects ended up producing was therefore not a shared and unified new vision of China but a Babel of facts, a cultural scene that was no less bewildering than the political and ideological atmosphere of the period. This scene of noise and confusion was nevertheless a testimony to the incredible diversity, creativity, and innovation that occurred on the social science scene of early twentieth-century China. Competing regimes and political factions all advocated their own social categories and conceptions of society, drawing on a variety of intellectual traditions, including concepts of imperial statecraft and Neo-Confucian scholarship that Chinese elites thought they had rejected. Much of this diversity, needless to say, was replaced by the far more hegemonic and monolithic vision of the social world eventually installed by the new Communist regime after 1949. By revisiting the history of the Chinese social survey movement, this book is an attempt to unlock the black box of the production of social scientific knowledge. As such, the book is less about the social taxonomies and ethnographic data that the laboratory process ultimately produced and more about the process itself. Indeed, during this period of social and political experiments, what arguably mattered most were not the findings of those surveys or the social facts themselves. Rather, it was how this process contributed to the training of cultural agents for the state’s civilizing and modernizing initiatives, the forging of those being surveyed and enumerated into the collective national subject, the legitimatization of social scientific investigative modalities, and, above all, the honing of the arts of governance of the emerging nation-state. The six chapters into which this book is divided are intended to examine different aspects of the profound epistemological shift associated with the Chinese social survey movement. Chapter 1 is an overview of the emergence of the fact as an epistemological unit or conceptual medium in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. It begins with a brief discussion of how the emergence of a “culture of fact” in Europe increasingly made China appear to be a place without factual information. I then analyze how this perceived factual deficiency traumatized Chinese cultural and political elites, compelling them to scramble to produce facts about Chinese society. As the Chinese elites used social facts to reconceptualize China, they


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also came to regard numeracy as political literacy. They therefore set out to educate the people, making them use social facts to reimagine their social and political existence in order to convert them into collective national subjects and patriotic citizens. The focus of chapter 2 is on the hitherto neglected national census that took place between 1909 and 1911, which, in many ways, marked the beginning of the movement to produce facts about the social world. In order to show the novelty of this census, this chapter first examines the old census system and analyzes how the Qing empire was capable of deploying multiple systems of census according to the ideological and political structure of the empire in order to keep track of its vast and diverse population. The national census, in contrast, emphasized systematic, direct, and exact enumeration. Equally important was that this new census deployed a single census template to enumerate the entire population as the political community of a nation-state founded on the principle of abstract equality among its citizens, not hierarchy between groups. Chapter 3 goes beyond the discussion of the rationale of the new national census and analyzes how the census was understood by those who were enumerated. In particular, I discuss how the census triggered widespread fear and riots among the rural population who believed that the state was trying to steal their souls as well as levy new taxes for modernizing projects. This chapter also shows how the non-Han population under the indirect rule of the Qing in the frontiers resisted the national census by refusing to cooperate with the central government. By looking at these different forms of resistance, I argue that, despite the declared ability of social science to render invisible social mechanisms visible and remake the social world in a logical and commonsensical order, the new census ultimately failed to make sense of many aspects of social and political life. Beginning in chapter 4, the focus shifts to the Republican period (1912– 49). In this chapter, I demonstrate how research institutes and their researchers constantly invoked the ideas of science and the nation in their search for a new epistemological foundation for political discourse and action. I examine especially how social scientists working for the Nationalist government were often more concerned with using science to establish their own credibility, as well as the authority of the state, than in searching for an alternative science and reason as a way to counter the colonial intrusion of the industrial powers. Drawing upon field notes and the diaries of researchers, this chapter also illustrates that, although social scientists and survey fieldworkers constantly styled their activities as scientific, extra-


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scientific factors such as patriotism and the ability to “eat bitterness” (chiku) and endure suffering were prerequisites for achieving credibility and producing scientific knowledge. Chapter 5 continues the inquiry into surveys conducted by the Nationalist government. Here I focus on how the 1928 census was designed to imagine the nation-state as a political community marching forward in the new context of National Reconstruction (1927–37). At the same time, this sense of simultaneity and sameness also enabled the state to construct anomalous social groups for further intervention.The chapter further analyzes how social surveys and ethnological studies were used to single out and then transform social groups that were allegedly superstitious and culturally backward. The conversion of these groups from one category to another did not take place only on paper. The individuals and groups targeted by these surveys and investigations were sometimes also compelled to internalize the civilizing and modernizing values of the state. Even more important, by constructing the categories of superstition and backwardness, cultural sameness and difference, these various kinds of surveys essentially helped to legitimize the bureaucratic state by elevating it as the vanguard of modernity and progress, as well as racial harmony and national unity. Given the political disunity of the Republican period, surveys conducted by the Nationalist government, however important, were only part of the story. The final chapter is an examination of other major players in the Chinese social survey scene, including American social scientists, who played a central and direct role in funding and training their Chinese counterparts. A major focus of this chapter is the self-conscious indigenizing turn during which Chinese social scientists increasingly switched their attention, previously on the urban environment, to the rural world and eventually took the peasantry as their pivotal political concern and object of social analysis. In doing so, they departed from their American colleagues and turned social survey research into an anticolonial instrument. I further argue that early twentieth-century China was in effect a social laboratory in which contending political interests sought to innovate and experiment with new research methods, conceptual categories, and social engineering programs in their attempts to gain control and govern China. Finally, the epilogue is a brief reflection on the lasting impacts of this earlier history of facticity and the social survey movement on contemporary China.


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The Rise of the Fact and the Reimagining of China To take such [a scientific] attitude is to seek truth from facts. “Facts” are all the things that exist objectively, “truth” means their internal relations, that is, the laws governing them, and “to seek” means to study. We should proceed from the actual conditions inside and outside the country, the province, county or district, and derive from them, as our guide to action, laws that are inherent in them and not imaginary, that is, we should find the internal relations of the events occurring around us. And in order to do that we must rely not on subjective imagination, not on momentary enthusiasm, not on lifeless books, but on facts that exist objectively. mao zedong

When Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, wrote about the importance of “seeking truth from facts” in guiding the Communist revolution in 1941, he was describing a brief that was already widely shared by Chinese intellectuals from a broad political spectrum. For them, political and military solutions were insufficient in themselves to address the social dislocation and political breakdown caused by the encroachment of colonial powers, the collapse of the longstanding dynastic order, the bitter power struggles among contending warlords and political parties, and now a total war with Japan. They believed that if China were to survive its chaos, its political leaders had to be guided by the right approach, an approach purportedly grounded in science and objective truth instead of in the ostensibly timeless tradition or false ideology that they blamed for the nation’s disintegration. Only by examining facts carefully, they insisted, could the truth about Chinese society and the proper way of remaking it become self-evident. But this conviction that empirical facts somehow held the key to social reform and nation building, however prevalent by this time, was actually remarkably novel on the Chinese intellectual and political scene, even though the expression of “seeking truth from facts” had long been used by Neo-Confucian scholars to describe their empirical inquiries into the human and natural worlds. Just a century earlier, when American missionary and 19


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linguist Samuel Wells Williams (1812–84) first published his monumental study of China, The Middle Kingdom (1848), one of his biggest complaints was that Chinese censuses were full of “discrepancies and inaccuracies.”1 Written at a time when statistics and social science were still geminating, Williams’s work was not so much a social scientific analysis of China but instead was in line with the tradition of political arithmetic that sought to use numbers to compare state strengths.2 Nonetheless, his comment, made at the onset of China’s violent encounter with the industrial West, was evidence of the growing frustration among Western observers who considered China incomprehensible due to the absence of reliable facts that were commensurable with their own conceptual framework. This idea of China as a place without facts not only frustrated Western social experts and practitioners; eventually it also compelled Chinese authorities and intellectuals to scramble for facts about their country, for they hoped that these facts could help to elucidate and transform the moral and material conditions of Chinese society. This chapter is an examination of the rise and transformative power of the fact as a conceptual medium in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to provide a context to make sense of the profound cultural shift and ramifications that will be discussed in later chapters. Although my focus here is on the moment of epistemological encounter and its political effects, my intention is not to approach this historical episode in terms of the essentializing binaries of East versus West or tradition versus modernity by suggesting that empiricism and quantitative precision were innate only to European civilization. It is important to emphasize that both Europe and China, in part because of mutual economic and cultural influences, had experienced rapid changes in the centuries leading up to their violent encounters in the nineteenth century.3 Moreover, just as early modern European thinkers had reversed their earlier skepticism about empirical evidence and called for quantitative precision in political thinking, their Chinese counterparts also increasingly came to affirm the role of empirical evidence in statecraft and scholarship. Meanwhile, the “culture of fact” that first emerged in Europe during the early modern era had also undergone drastic changes in the subsequent centuries.4 As a result of economic and political upheavals starting at the end of the eighteenth century, the older paradigm of “political arithmetic” that used numbers and measurements as the basis of political discourse was replaced by a new statistical science that was inseparable from the new realities of the emerging nation-based empires, colonialism, industrialization, and global capitalism. While economic development followed a rather different path in China, territorial expansion, economic pros-


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perity, and population growth during the early and mid-Qing dynasty (1644–1912) also led to innovations in statecraft theory and practice.5 My discussion of the rise of the fact as a conceptual medium to make sense of China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is situated precisely at this historical juncture where multiple changing cultural paradigms, economic systems, and political structures converged and collided. Particularly, I argue that the perceived Chinese factual deficiencies became an obsession not only for Chinese cultural and political elites; the desire to overcome this weakness also provided a new condition for the masses to make sense of their social and political existence afresh. Central to this process was the rise of a certain kind of conceptual thinking, what Talal Asad has called “strong languages,” exemplified by statistics and social science that could afford to ignore all local differences in order to produce a standardized and commensurable framework of knowledge that claimed to be universally applicable.6 Compelled by this strong language, the late Qing regime was the first in China to embark on new census and survey projects to reconceptualize and convert its diverse populations and territories into a unified social body and geobody. In the decades after the collapse of the Qing in 1912, the Nationalist and Communist regimes, as well as a broad spectrum of intellectuals who may or may not have been connected to any of the contending political parties, also urgently carried out their own surveys. In fact, it was during this time that discussions about the meanings of facticity as well as the importance of surveys found their full articulation. The passion for collecting facts about China eventually led to a social survey movement that peaked in the 1920s and 1930s, when competing political factions and intellectual parties used surveys to assemble the empirical contents of the social world that they were striving to construct and govern.

evidential practices in early modern china and europe For those who are familiar with imperial Chinese history, Euro-American assertions that the Chinese possessed little empirical knowledge about themselves and their empire certainly sound preposterous. With a long tradition of centralized bureaucracy, successive Chinese dynastic regimes had produced an enormous amount of empirical knowledge about different aspects of the empire. While such cultural and political stocktaking was often compiled in the form of local gazetteers and travel writings by scholar-officials who needed to demonstrate their scholarship and officialdom, the imperial authorities also


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were directly involved in censuses and territorial surveys for purposes of statecraft. By the time of the Qing dynasty, the growing complexities of the empire further encouraged the imperial state to carry out mapmaking, ethnographic surveys, and other large-scale knowledge projects that were comparable to similar efforts undertaken by European states.7 In addition to these statecraft projects, there also were plenty of empirical inquiries into, as well as scholarly discussions of, legitimate and suspect forms of empirical knowledge. Charlotte Furth, for example, observed that empirical and specialist knowledge in imperial China was articulated in terms of “cases” (an), as opposed to facts, in legal and medical discourses. Benjamin Elman has shown the prevalence of empirical studies known as evidential research (kaozheng) since the late seventeenth century. This particular approach to empirical inquiry, known as shishi qiushi (commonly translated as “seeking truth from facts”), emphasized the search for authenticity, interpolations, and original meanings of the classical texts as the basis for reconstructing the truth established by the ancient sages. While the so-called “fact,” or shishi, in this approach was mostly textual evidence, such empirical inquiries also flourished in the fields of natural studies, mathematics, and medicine.8 In other words, while empiricism as a general philosophy and methodology could appear in many forms, what imperial China lacked was the particular mode of empirical knowledge production that the industrial powers insisted upon. Elman, for his part, argues that China’s indigenous intellectual development nonetheless prepared it for a rapid adoption of European science and technologies in the nineteenth century.The main concern of this book, however, is not a comparative study of different modes of evidentiary practices and their commensurabilities, even though these important questions have yet to be adequately examined by scholars. Instead of asking whether or not indigenous Chinese empirical thinking was compatible with its European counterpart, this study is more interested in how and why the indigenous mode of empirical inquiry, however prominent and useful it might have been, was suddenly rendered invalid and irrelevant by European scientific thinking around the turn of the twentieth century. Why, moreover, when elements of the indigenous knowledge system resurfaced in the new context, did they have to be refashioned as modern science in order to remain relevant? It is indeed hard to imagine today how we could possibly study human, social, or natural sciences without respecting facts by collecting, classifying, and analyzing them. Yet, as common as empirical facts appear to be in modern societies, recent works by cultural historians demonstrate that our pre-


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occupation with the fact as the conceptual medium for understanding the world has specific or even peculiar cultural and historical origins. Lorraine Daston, for example, has shown that fact and evidence were closely linked to prodigies and miracles in Christian theology prior to the seventeenth century. She explains that medieval and even early modern European thinkers routinely regarded facts as divine manifestations because these observed particulars defied comprehension based on conventional wisdom. It was through the development of natural philosophy in the seventeenth century, she argues, that facts were gradually naturalized and emptied of their marvelous connotations. As formerly bizarre anomalies with religious significance gradually evolved into mundane facts, they were also “the mercenary soldiers of argument” that were ready to be enlisted in accordance with their evidentiary fitness.9 Similarly, Mary Poovey has traced the history of the fact in a wide-ranging survey of cultural practices from the first manual on double-entry bookkeeping to economic writings and statistical discourses in early modern England. She also illustrates how the fact as an “epistemological unit” acquired the prestigious qualities of being universal and value neutral over time and became what she has referred to as “the modern fact.” This modern fact, which also became increasingly interchangeable with numerical fact, has been the conceptual medium through which our lives are now understood and governed.10 The development of the category of the fact from its specific medieval and early modern meanings into an instrument for a broad range of cultural practices such as news reportage, travel writing, history, ethnography, science, and even fiction in the eighteenth century marked the beginning of a fact-based culture. In the area of human affairs, this “culture of fact” was manifested especially in the seventeenth-century ascendancy of political arithmetic.11 Leading political arithmeticians such as John Graunt (1620–74) and William Petty (1623–89), among others, argued that governance should be based strictly on numbers and measurements instead of theories and rhetoric. As a device to study the relationship among population, disease, and wealth, political arithmetic was critical to thinkers and practitioners of political economy in their bids to strengthen the power of the state. The question of state strength remained central even when political arithmetic was losing ground to the emerging branch of knowledge known as statistics in the early nineteenth century. After all, it was no coincidence that the term statistics was derived from the German Statistik, which referred to the use of science in politics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.12 Indeed, in much of the nineteenth century, when the term statistician was yet to be invented, British statisticians were called “statists.”


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Their work, accordingly, was to describe the conditions of a particular country within a particular timeframe. For example, immediately after the Statistical Society of London was established in 1834, it began to promote statistical science as an objective and noble undertaking because of its critical role in examining and managing the well-being of nations and empires. In the inaugural introduction to the Journal of the Statistical Society of London, published in 1838, the society stated that statistical science was by no means “inferior in usefulness to any other science” precisely because it produced facts that helped to “determine and explain the civilization, riches, power, and happiness of our own and of other nations.” To further illustrate its point, the same inaugural issue also included reports and tabulations such as “Statistics of the British Empire” and “Statistics of Nations” as well as “Progress of the Nation” as exemplars of fine statistical studies that illustrated the strength of the British empire in relation to its rivals.13 In this respect, in the early days of the institutionalization of statistics at least, the need to tabulate and compare the strengths of states was actually used by the builders of the discipline of statistics to justify the existence of their methods. At any rate, the fact as a conceptual medium had come a long way from its humble and provincial origins to arrive at its modern association with facticity related to science and governance in a broad range of contexts.

statistics in the age of revolution and empire In spite of the continuous interest in the question of state strength among British statisticians in the early nineteenth century, the imperatives of industrialization and urbanization had increasingly compelled European thinkers to move away from the old paradigm of political arithmetic. Instead of trying to augment the wealth and power of the state by governing population growth through the manipulation of demographic processes, they now acknowledged that population, however susceptible to state intervention, was itself an independent social realm subjugated by its own laws and mechanisms.These hidden trends, which could become legible only through the collection and analysis of social facts, must therefore be respected. Under this new conceptual premise, governing entailed the calculation and management of the inevitable risks and contingencies that would arise from the social field. Probability discourse, not surprisingly, became an important element demarcating statistics from political arithmetic.14 During the first half of the nineteenth century, the simultaneous rise of statistical thinking and of the social question was particularly heightened


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by the frequent unrest and revolutions that were raging across Europe. In contrast to members of the radical left, who approached the social question as an opportunity for radical action, liberals and conservatives regarded the social field as a challenge to their desire for gradual change or even preserving the status quo.15 By the second half of the century, when the earlier waves of revolution had subsided, there was a strong consensus among liberals and conservatives that a new science of society was needed to comprehend and manage the disruption of the social field brought about by industrial capitalism. In a statement made during his inauguration as the president of the Statistical Society of London in 1872, the British medical statistician William Farr (1807–83) laid out precisely such sentiments: “Politics is no longer . . . the game of audacious Revolution for the sake of change; so politics, like war, has to submit to the spirit of the age, and to call in the aid of science: for the art of government can only be practised with success when it is grounded on a knowledge of the people governed, derived from exact observation.”16 It is no surprise that Farr himself was an epidemiologist, a man who built his career on studying and controlling the spread of disease in populations. Michel Foucault has noted that the emergence of biopower and its incorporation with disciplinary power is a central characteristic of the modern liberal state. Whereas disciplinary power that emerged in earlier times sought to produce normative individuals by subjugating them to predefined parameters through methods of training, surveillance, and punishment, biopower regulated social life from the interior of the individual by compelling the individual to embrace and reenact such power. In other words, the ultimate objective of biopolitics was no longer about the disciplining of the body of the individual but the regulating of life at the general level so that the entire population could be governed as a species.17 In this context, statistics, which provided the condition for conceptualizing the entire population as a conglomeration of generalizable and serializable individuals, was particularly indispensable to biopolitical interventions. Significantly, the new regime of empirical knowledge was vital not only to the European governments that were managing the inherent dangers of capitalist modernity in the major urban centers. As the age of revolution gave way to that of empire, industrializing European powers with imperialist ambitions constantly found themselves in fierce competition with one another both at home and abroad. In order to acquire new materials, labor, and markets, these industrial powers routinely set up colonial administrations to run their overseas empires. Statistics was deployed to measure and compare the status of the state continuously against imperialist rivals and mobilized to govern the empire through its perceived ability to render incommensurable


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cultures into a supposedly universal and scientific temporal and spatial order conducive to the logic of capitalist production and exchange. In the same fashion, statistics also enabled the colonial powers to overcome their sense of fear and alienation vis-à-vis the native populations whom they neither understood nor were able to conquer by sheer military force. These colonial powers, needless to say, did not use statistics to actually attempt to understand cultural differences in local terms or to confront the incommensurability question. As Talal Asad has argued, statistical methods enable ignoring the commensurability question altogether by redefining the problem in a different framework.18 Moreover, as the building blocks for embedded narratives and arguments, statistical facts are far from neutral. What statistical analysis often provided in the nineteenth century was the moral justification for interventions based on a colonial logic that stipulated that all societies be mapped onto a civilizational hierarchy defined by the industrial West. The purpose of the collection and comparison of facts, as the Statistical Society of London put it, was to “illustrate the condition of mankind” and to “develop the principles by which the progress of society is determined,” as well as to identify “the character of uncivilized nations.”19 In this regard, the question of state strength inherited from political arithmetic clearly did not disappear entirely. Like the question of population, it found its way into the discourses and practices of colonialism. Together, civilizational status and population constituted the parameters, justification, and framework through which the industrial powers set out to conquer and govern a large part of the world. As a result, the statistical science that emerged in the nineteenth century was more than just a new “style of reasoning,” tending to reduce the complexities of the human world into simple and calculable data. It was also a “style of domination,” for it helped to produce a hierarchal order through the essentialization and reification of categories such as race, culture, and nation and subjugated those at the bottom to colonial conquest, governance, and the civilizing mission.20 In the same inaugural speech, Farr declared confidently, “Asia will be gradually drawn into the domain of science in the north by Russia, while in the south and east she is enlightened and led out of Oriental immobility by England. If China has really an authentic census . . . it is of little scientific value. But we must not despair; the statistical flag may yet float over that multitudinous empire.”21 In no uncertain terms, Farr used the desire for conquest as a metaphor to articulate the desire to use statistical facts to establish a global order. His critique of the Chinese census, or the lack of thereof, far more so than Samuel Wells Williams’s similar observation made a few decades earlier, ominously


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spelled out the underlying logic of statistics as a discursive intervention in the age of colonialism and industrial capitalism. It foretold a story in which the civilizing mission of statistics and social science would extend well beyond the formal empire of the European nation-states, leaving no territory uncharted, no individual unenumerated, and no indigenous mode of knowledge unshaken.

american social science and china’s factual deficiencies Indeed, even when Farr was making his projections, modern statistics was making inroads into China. In addition to being used heavily by the colonial administrations in the treaty ports, modern statistics, or at least elements of it, was incorporated by Qing reformers to update indigenous statecraft practice as part of their ongoing bureaucratic reform.22 For the most part, however, the development of survey-based social science was due to American influences. Since the turn of the twentieth century, driven by a sense of evangelical responsibility and the goal of American economic expansion, American policy thinkers and social scientists found themselves increasingly engrossed by the so-called “China problem,” believing that any modification of the social life and structure of this immense country by means of social science would help to make the world safer for the American vision of industrial capitalism. Although the American conception of social science was not epistemologically different from that of its European counterpart, American thinkers and social scientists were generally not sympathetic to the often crude and overtly racial categories associated with European colonial governance. As latecomers to the game of imperialism, those in the United States were more interested in expanding the country’s influence by constructing a global order based on the propagated ideology of equality among nations rather than a hierarchy among empires. The Wilsonian doctrine of national selfdetermination was a clear manifestation of this American world order.23 After World War I (1914–18), American social scientists further distanced themselves from what they regarded as the ideology- and conflict-imbued Old World. Driven by the tenet of American exceptionalism, they believed that they could stay aloof from ideology and religion and construct their own enterprises of social scientific knowledge production by emphasizing objectivity, specialization, and professionalism.24 In many ways, the development of American social sciences early in the


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twentieth century has to be understood against the larger backdrop of the era’s unprecedented expansion of industrial capitalism. The intensification of industrialization as well as the rise of liberal activism during the American Progressive era (1890s to 1920s) led to a demand for a new way of governing the population and new applicable social knowledge. As a result, independent research institutions, granting agencies, and foundations came into being as the brokers for a new kind of cooperation among academics, government, and business. As the prototypes of the modern think tanks, these early nongovernmental organizations consciously distanced themselves from traditional religious charities and devised their policy recommendations and social programs based on extensive research conducted by social experts and scientists. At the same time, the global expansion of industrial capitalism propelled many of these foundations into roles as major players in the development, promotion, and implementation of social science research and social engineering programs outside the United States. A prime example was the Rockefeller Foundation, with its extensive involvement in social engineering projects in Asia, Europe, and Latin America.25 Even though most donors to these American foundations were motivated by a sense of evangelical calling as well as a belief in American Manifest Destiny, the foundations they sponsored seldom articulated their overseas interventions in the terms of culture and race that constituted the underpinning logic of European colonialism. The Rockefeller Foundation, for instance, presented itself as a promoter of the “well-being of mankind throughout the world.”26 Rhetorically speaking, this invocation of humanity was not much different from the aforementioned claim to use social statistics to study the condition of mankind, human happiness, and progress made by the Statistical Society of London. In practice, however, it was a radical departure from the European colonial discourse. Whereas European colonialism used social science and social statistics to demarcate “uncivilized” societies from “civilized” Others, the American version of the civilizing mission was framed in terms of universal rights and modernization that mirrored the progressive social activism of domestic politics.27 In this sense, despite the fact that the European colonial civilizing mission of the nineteenth century and the American modernization project of the twentieth century both deployed empirical social science to legitimize the existing structure of colonial domination and style of intervention, they were guided by rather different conceptual and ideological principles. Specifically, rather than focusing on direct colonial governance through the management of differences, American social science practitioners placed far greater emphasis on training, collaboration, and native participation in their


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attempts to deploy social science and engineering projects to uplift and remake non-Western societies. Despite these fundamental differences, American social scientists, like their European predecessors, constantly complained about the absence of social facts about China and regarded the Chinese social world as a mysterious frontier waiting to be surveyed, studied, and reformed. They called this “big unknown” of the Chinese social question an enormous “opportunity” for the West to construct a liberal democratic and modernized China through a broad range of social interventions such as public health programs, mass education, public opinion management, and social science training.28 And, as chapter 6 will show, it was through these U.S.-supported institutions that Chinese social sciences—especially sociological and economic studies—reached their full-fledged development. Even if the American influence on the development of Chinese social science did not really begin until the 1920s, colonial assertions that the Chinese people were irrational, unscientific, and ignorant of facts about themselves had had an impact on Chinese intellectuals since the end of the nineteenth century. Those who brought these messages to China in the second half of nineteenth century were mostly American missionaries, regarded as China experts, or so-called “China hands,” because of their determination to venture beyond the foreign-occupied treaty ports and seek direct contact with the local population.29 Samuel Wells Williams, for instance, who considered himself sympathetic to the Chinese people and rejected the notion that the Chinese were “the apes of Europeans,” called the Chinese “disregard of truth” the most deplorable aspect of their character. When his influential work The Middle Kingdom was updated and revised in 1883, nearly four decades after its original publication, he again reminded his readers that no alteration had been made to the chapter on censuses, “for until there has been a methodical inspection of the Empire, important questions concerning its population must be held in abeyance.”30 Among those writers who propagated the idea that China was a land without facts, Arthur Smith created the most vivid images in his derision of Chinese “national character.” First published in 1894, Smith’s Chinese Characteristics, supposedly the culmination of his years of close observation of the Chinese people when he worked as a missionary in south China, postulated that the manners and customs of a people were the moral dimension of geography and history. The book instantly became the most widely read book on China in English, and it was translated into many other languages, including Chinese and Japanese.31 Smith’s mockery of the inability of Chinese to understand and cite facts properly in their daily lives was


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quickly perceived by Chinese intellectual elites as an insult to the Chinese national psyche, and it prompted many of them to believe that China’s severe deficiencies in factual knowledge were responsible for the country’s backwardness. Like Williams, Smith contended that if there were such a thing that could be “dignified with the title of a Chinese ‘census,’ it could only be ‘the last guess at the case.’ ” He, too, believed that neither facts nor the conception of the fact had ever existed in China. Indeed, according to Smith, his primary contribution was precisely to fill in the blanks by providing “illustrations of a Chinese social fact” that would reveal “the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth” about the Chinese people and their society.32 Smith and Williams, in a strange way, were therefore linked not just by their Christian faith, but also by their faith in the ability of facts to reveal the truth about China as well as convert the Chinese to the supposedly universal logic of science. Indeed, for Smith, the people’s indifference to factual accuracy was both a cause and a manifestation of the extent to which Chinese society was in total chaos. According to him, living in China was a constant frustration, for there were no statewide standards for language, currency, or units of measurement, nor were there consistent names for cities and towns. In chapters with titles such as “The Disregard of Time” and “The Disregard of Accuracy,” he offered a parade of examples to demonstrate just how indifferent to precision the Chinese people were. He not only remarked that Chinese civilization had not advanced enough to be acquainted with the Western idea that “time is money,” but he also contended that the Chinese were ignorant of the importance of accurate spatial measurement. He observed that distances between locations in China were often calculated not in absolute spatial terms, but instead were reckoned according to the relative difficulty of traveling between them. He alleged that in this land without facts even the distance from A to B could be different from that of B to A when it came to a hill slope or in a river.33 As someone who grew up in a rapidly industrializing world, Smith seemed to have had difficulty understanding or appreciating that the Chinese practice of using transportation costs and time as units of measurement, although utterly incompatible with the conceptions of time and space associated with capitalist modernity, was just as rational in a highly commercial but preindustrial context. Smith was also very distressed that the Chinese were ignorant of the most basic numerical knowledge of their bodies. Here are some of his most satirical and memorable testimonies to the factual deficiencies of the Chinese national character:


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1. “His weight is thus known” (circa 1920s). Chinese boys have their height measured during a public health campaign carried out by the Rockefeller Foundation.

An old man is “seventy or eighty years of age,” when you know to a certainty that he was seventy only a year ago. The fact is that in China a person becomes “eighty” the moment he stops being seventy, and this “general average” must be allowed for, if precision is desired. . . . A few people are “ten or twenty,” a “few tens,” or perhaps “ever so many tens,” and a strictly accurate enumeration is one of the rarest of experiences in China.34 A servant who was asked his height mentioned a measure which was ridiculously inadequate to cover his length, and upon being questioned admitted that he had left out of account all above his shoulders! He had once been a soldier, where the height of the men’s clavicle is important in assigning the carrying of burdens. And since a Chinese soldier is to all practical purposes complete without his head, this was omitted.35

Sarcasm aside, Smith’s remarks clearly emphasize the importance of facts and their inherent relationship to governance. Specifically, his comments implied that social facts not only allowed the state to deploy new ways of


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conceptualizing and governing the social world using exact knowledge; it also anticipated the arrival of a new kind of political subject, individuals who were capable of embracing and reactivating the same governing framework for understanding and identifying themselves. As we shall see, for Chinese intellectuals, although the category of “national character” was already outmoded by this time, negative remarks such as Smith’s clearly motivated Chinese intellectual elites to overcome this alleged fault of the so-called Chinese national character.36

four hundred million as an enumerative imaginary The absence of an accurate census did not prevent European and American observers from imagining China in statistical terms. Many of them, drawing on missionary and Chinese sources, began to introduce their own estimates of the Chinese population. Although these estimates at times varied by hundreds of millions, four hundred million stands out as the most commonly cited estimate of the Chinese population at the turn of the twentieth century. In fact, this number would continue to stand in as the population estimate for the next half century. For many foreign observers this estimate not only reminded them of the lack of a reliable census in China, but it also conjured up images of opportunity and fear because of the enormity of the Chinese population. In 1903, for instance, the American diplomat John Watson Foster described the potential peril of the China problem: “Four hundred millions, sturdy, and passionately devoted to ancient customs, might be changed into a warlike people bent upon avenging their wrongs.”37 In 1937 Carl Crow, an American market surveyor, published a book called Four Hundred Million Customers, highlighting the Western fantasy of the vastness of the Chinese market. Similarly, when China was engulfed in a bitter fullscale war with Japan, a pro-Chinese documentary called 400 Million (1939) was made by Joris Ivens to show the heroic Chinese resistance against the Japanese invasion and the vast humanitarian crisis created by the war.38 Meanwhile, the Chinese quickly picked up this enumerative imaginary of four hundred million to express their own hopes and fears. For many, the idea of four hundred million was a political trope for China’s potential national strength and social solidarity. This number seemed to capture the political imaginations of bewildered pro-Qing reformers and anti-Qing revolutionaries alike. Zou Rong (1885–1905), one of the most vocal and radical Han Chinese nationalists to call for a revolution to liberate the Chinese from


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Manchu rule, was among the first to use this figure to articulate a nationalist agenda. In his provocative The Revolutionary Army (Geminjun), published in 1903, Zou Rong called upon his countrymen to overthrow the Qing dynasty and expel the ruling Manchus: “You 400 million of the great Han race, my countrymen, whether man or woman, aged or elderly, in the prime of life, young or child, carry out this revolution. It is the bounden duty of one and all.”39 And he was not alone. Anti-Manchu revolutionaries who adopted a strong racist tone often referred to the political state of China as the subjugation of four hundred million Han Chinese by five million corrupt and incompetent Manchus. They therefore called for the establishment of an exclusively Han republic based on blood ties.40 Likewise, many Manchu elites who tried to speed up the reform of the dynasty called for the integration of the five million banner people into the social body of Qing China in order to create a seamlessly inclusive and united constitutional state of four hundred million people to counter the encroaching foreign powers.41 In practice, it did not seem to matter whether the five million banner people were added to or subtracted from the nation of four hundred million; the number four hundred million was a powerful trope for both the Qing and Chinese nationalists in envisioning the strength of the respective political communities they sought to produce. The significance of this number, in other words, did not rest on its statistical value but on its ability to enunciate the potency of the imagined community vis-àvis the menacing outside world. For others, a nation of four hundred million, or even just half that number, could also be enormously burdensome. Many male writers, for example, used the same enumerative logic to characterize the Chinese female population as two hundred million useless women with bound feet. In response, some female thinkers rejected this male-centered characterization and highlighted the unique power of the “200 million women comrades.” Other female writers accepted many of the male premises but called for reform and education for China’s “200 million sisters,” so women, too, could exercise their rights and duties.42 No one seemed to play a greater role in inscribing in the Chinese consciousness the number four hundred million, including the dangers and opportunities that came with it, than the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen. In numerous political speeches and writings Sun constantly repeated the catchphrase “four hundred million compatriots” (siwanwan tongbao) to arouse the public and make them aware of the necessity of forging a vast and cohesive political community. But he also frequently reiterated his view that the present population of four hundred million was nothing but “a plate


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of loose sand” that was disorganized, chaotic, and dysfunctional. Although Sun eventually dropped the idea of building an exclusively Han nation and instead opted for a multiethnic nation incorporating all the populations of the Qing empire, his political aspiration remained the building of a strong social body of “four hundred million compatriots.” When Sun’s party overthrew the Qing and established a republic in late 1911 and early 1912, this image was perfectly captured by a newspaper editorial on New Year’s Day of 1912, an editorial in which the author declared that the entire Chinese population was now “four hundred million newborn babies,” immature yet hopeful.43 Significantly, as I will show in greater detail in the next chapter, despite the endless Western criticisms of China’s factual deficiencies, as part of its New Policies the Qing government had launched a comprehensive national census using mostly Western census techniques imported from Meiji Japan as well as some preexisting ideas from indigenous statecraft. For the first time, therefore, the idea of a bounded and quantified social body appeared as an object of state knowledge.This notion of population, based on the modern political principles of abstract equality and autonomous citizens and made possible by statistical thinking, replaced the older statecraft approach that had defined the state and its people using the vague, infinite, and allinclusive idea of tianxia (all under Heaven).44 The outcome of the nearly completed census received little attention, however, as it was neither put to use nor widely circulated due to the collapse of the dynasty in 1912. Therefore, despite the Qing’s frenetic efforts to reconceptualize the entire population in modern enumerative terms, the significance of the enumerative imaginary of four hundred million rested on its reference to the health and strength of the Chinese aggregate social body, not its statistical value.

the idea of factual deficiencies as epistemic violence The use of four hundred million as a political trope to connote an upbeat vision of China’s potential and hope did not, in any event, last long. The collapse of China’s longstanding dynastic order and the founding of the new Republic brought neither peace nor solidarity as promised by the revolution. Almost immediately after the founding of the Republic, the dream of building a strong and democratic nation was tarnished by the politics of betrayal, terror, and factionalism. Internally, the nation degenerated into a period of warlordism and militarism without a functioning national gov-


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ernment between 1916 and 1928. Externally, the continuous deterioration of sovereignty and the loss of national prestige were exemplified by the Treaty of Versailles (1919), according to which German-occupied Shandong province was handed over to Japan rather than returned to China by the Allied powers, even though China supported the war efforts of the Allies by supplying them with laborers. Against this distressing domestic and global backdrop, many Chinese intellectuals began to question the wishful idea that China could soon become a nation four hundred million strong. For them, it became painfully clear that a top-down political revolution led by intellectuals and urban elites, as was the case in the Republican Revolution in 1911, could not possibly forge a strong and cohesive nation capable of defending itself against foreign intruders. They also pointed their fingers at what they regarded as Chinese tradition, which, according to them, was the main obstacle to China’s reform and modernization. In short, if China needed to be reconstituted in order to survive in a social Darwinist world, the people themselves had to be remade first. For the initial generation of Chinese social scientists, many of whom were trained outside China, and especially in the United States, the remedying of China’s factual deficiencies and the remaking of the Chinese people would require all Chinese to embrace scientific and rational thinking. For them, the number four hundred million, rather than being a metaphor for the potential strength of the Chinese social body, was a symbol of China’s factual deficiencies and backwardness. The prominent U.S.-trained social investigator Li Jinghan, for instance, launched a vehement attack on the catchphrase “four hundred million” in a university textbook that he wrote especially for students of social survey research: When I went to elementary school at six, the Chinese population was said to be four hundred million. And the expression “four hundred million compatriots” could be heard everywhere. By the time I graduated from elementary school, the Chinese population was still four hundred million. When I graduated from middle school, I read my younger brother’s geography textbook. It still said our country’s population was four hundred million. When I graduated from university, my little niece’s textbook still stated that the Chinese population was four hundred million. When I returned to China after a few years of studying abroad, I took a glance at the textbooks used by my nieces, and even some grandnieces. The Chinese population remained four hundred million.45

Li, furthermore, provided an international context for his ridicule of the Chinese fixation on the notion of four hundred million. Returning to China af-


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ter studying in the United States, he was well aware of the negative implications of factual deficiencies when it came to governing and state building: In 1926, the customs office estimated that China had a population of 4.48 hundred million. In 1927, the post office claimed that it was 4.87 hundred million. A British statistician, however, contended that it would be an exaggeration even to say that China had a population of three hundred million. Previously, a German scholar, based on the statistics on salt consumption, determined that the Chinese population was only 2.32 hundred million . . . . Readers! The United States is believed to be the strongest and wealthiest nation in the world and its population is no more than 1.1 hundred million. The discrepancy between our [lowest and highest] estimates alone has already exceeded two hundred million. You can forget about asking questions about such things as population density, gender ratio, or age distribution, for this country has no idea what its exact population is. Not even an approximation.46

According to Li, the Chinese disregard for the most basic social facts was an indication that the Chinese people were a “muddleheaded people.” Not unlike Liang Qichao and other late Qing thinkers, he contended that Chinese society was in complete disarray because China was “a republic without citizens,” since only a small portion of the population could be considered “qualified citizens.” The rest, he lamented, neither had knowledge of their own society nor themselves and were therefore helplessly plagued by superstitious ideas, wicked doctrines, and exploitation. Significantly, although Li did not cite Arthur Smith directly in his depiction of the Chinese people, he actually repeated each one of the negative and memorable images of the so-called Chinese national character created by Smith, including even the example in which a Chinese soldier had neglected his own head when he reported his height to the interlocutor.47 Li’s mockery was not sarcastic, however, but instead conveyed a sense of utmost urgency. How could a deficiency of facts be a laughing matter if it was indeed a root cause of China’s backwardness? As Jing Tsu has noted, failure and weakness could often become the impetus for nationalism, propelling change and actions.48 Li was certainly not the only intellectual to deride the Chinese inability to be exact as a way to draw public attention to China’s alleged factual deficiencies. Almost a decade earlier the prominent philosopher and student of positivism Hu Shi had published a very popular short story called “The Tales of Mr. Chabuduo” (1924). In this satirical story Mr. Chabuduo was given his name because he loved to use the expression “cha bu duo,” which means “almost,” “about,” or “nearly,” in his daily life.The “virtue” of Mr. Chabuduo,


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2. Matching the medicine with the illness (1933). “Using scientific methods to survey society is like inviting a good doctor to diagnose the patient.” Doctor: “I think I’d better use an X-ray to scan him.” Nurse: “I have to measure his temperature every hour.”

in a nutshell, was his inexactitude. According to Hu Shi, Mr. Chabuduo was the most famous Chinese person because he represented all Chinese. Ultimately, Mr. Chabuduo died of illness because his neighbor went to an address that was similar to the one he was supposed to go to and brought back the wrong doctor, one who specialized in cows rather than humans. Mr. Chabuduo, nonetheless, was content to be treated by the doctor because his name was almost the same as that of the doctor he had wanted. As he died, Mr. Chabuduo expressed no regret. “A living person and a dead person are almost the same” were his famous last words.49 Indeed, since the publication of the story, Mr. Chabuduo has become a symbol of the failure of Chinese culture. Even decades later, the rural reformer James Yen, whose rural reconstruction project and related surveys will be discussed later in this book, lamented that the frequent use of the expression “cha bu duo” was an indication of the Chinese people’s lack of appreciation for the importance of facts and exactitude. Like other Chinese


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intellectuals, he contended that the Chinese people were as alive as they were dead, and that the nation would never recover from its illness unless its people could get rid of their chabuduo attitude. In this regard, by appropriating the colonial gaze deployed by Western observers, intellectuals like Li Jinghan, Hu Shi, and many others did more than just internalize and reproduce the discourse of deficiencies. They also used the negative aspects of the Chinese character invented by the industrial West to critique China’s social ills, hoping that the public’s awareness of its own lacks and failures could lead to energy for national revival.50 All of these impulses were summed up succinctly in an illustration in one of Li’s books, which attempted to show the importance of social survey research by invoking the popular image of China as the “sick man of Asia” waiting to be diagnosed by science (see figure 2).51

traumatic awakening As part of his attempt to persuade readers to take social survey research seriously, Li wrote a long autobiographical preface to his social survey textbook. The most compelling passage is when he recounts his personal experience of how the lack of factual knowledge about one’s country could be tremendously embarrassing and humiliating when subjected to a foreign gaze: I used to enjoy sitting in the front row of the classroom when I was studying in the United States. One day, when the male and female ratios of different countries were the subject of discussion in the graduate seminar on social problems, the instructor suddenly inquired about the male-to-female ratio in China. . . . Since there were no such statistics in China, I could only say that I had no knowledge of it. Some days later, when the instructor asked about the wage index in China, I could not answer either. . . . Every time the instructor inquired about Chinese statistical data, I would be terrified and sweat. . . . Soon, I chose not to sit in the front row and instead moved to the middle section of the room and eventually to the back. . . . Other countries have statistics on the various kinds of social problems, but we do not have statistical data for even the most basic subjects of our country. . . . This situation surely is a great shame to our nation.52

Li’s personal experience resonated with those of other Chinese social scientists. In 1930, when the nineteenth meeting of the International Statistical Institute was held in Tokyo, the statistician Chen Huayin, the Chinese representative to the meeting from the Nationalist government, ended up


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quarreling fiercely with his Western colleagues about the exact population of China. Being publicly derided by Western statisticians for ignorance about their own population statistics was seen by the Chinese as a huge embarrassment for China. This encounter was even cited in the guidelines for the 1931 census of the city of Guangzhou as a reminder to officials and census takers about the critical importance of censuses in modern governance.53 Li’s recounting of the life-changing experience that galvanized him to become a career social investigator is also vividly reminiscent of a wellknown and widely examined case that has often been cited as the moment of the birth of modern Chinese literature. In the preface to his collected short stories Call to Arms, the prominent Chinese writer Lu Xun recalls the incident that caused him to permanently alter his career path, inspiring him to make the change from medicine to writing.54 Around the time of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), when Lu Xun was studying medicine in Japan, his teacher showed him and his classmates a slide of a public execution by the Japanese military of a Chinese man who allegedly had spied for the Russians. Not only did the violent and racist image upset Lu Xun and prevent him from joining the cheering of his Japanese classmates, but he also found appalling the completely apathetic Chinese bystanders who seemed to enjoy the spectacle of the execution. Lu Xun hence concluded that it was the minds of the people rather than their bodies that needed to be cured: “The people of a weak and backward country, however strong and healthy they might be, could only serve to be made examples of or as witnesses of such futile spectacles; and it was not necessarily deplorable if many of them died of illness.”55 Li’s confession, although rarely noticed by historians, uncannily resembles Lu Xun’s on many levels. First, Li’s argument suggested that although China might have a population of four hundred million, as long as they remained inept, incapable of embracing science and social facts, China would remain weak and undeveloped. Moreover, in their own ways, both stories illustrated episodes of colonial violence. Even though Li’s teacher had no intention of embarrassing him, the sense of humiliation Li felt was hardly selfinflicted. Rather, he was a victim of what Gayatri Spivak has called “epistemic violence” as a consequence of the colonial encounter.56 That is to say, even though China was not fully occupied by the colonial powers, the colonial gaze essentially broke down and remade the old Chinese epistemic order according to its own image. As a result, not only was the native society depicted in an unfavorable light, but native intellectuals—those historically responsible for safeguarding the native system of knowledge—were made to feel ashamed of their inability to converse based upon the new knowl-


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edge framework that was being imposed on them. Furthermore, both incidents revealed the degree to which the self was implicated and embedded in the political imaginary of nationhood in the minds of modern Chinese intellectuals. Just like Lu Xun, Li not only had internalized the symbolic violence against the Chinese imagined community, but he was also compelled to reproduce the violence and humiliation and pass it on to his countrymen, demanding that they reform themselves and become modern citizens of the nation. Finally, for both Li and Lu Xun, their encounters with symbolic violence not only compelled them to pursue a lifelong career that would enable them to testify against the violence of colonialism. Their experiences also legitimized their intellectual and political claims, as they elevated themselves, respectively, into a self-appointed social investigator and a fiction writer on a heroic mission to awaken and rescue what they considered the apathetic, muddleheaded, and helpless masses. In so doing, they effectively turned themselves into active agents rather than passive victims of the colonial civilizing mission. The narratives by Li Jinghan and Lu Xun about their personal experiences were in many ways powerful testimonies that colonial violence was never just military and political.The outcome of epistemic violence was that while the Chinese could continue to claim ownership of their culture and history, they could no longer control the meanings of their culture and history or how cultural and historical knowledge was produced. In short, if we see trauma as an extensive breach in the ego’s protective shield, the imaginary Chinese national psyche suffered a complete breakdown and became disoriented in the wake of the epistemic violence inflicted by the Euro-American powers.57 In her study of the widespread emergence of trauma in the twentieth century, Cathy Caruth notes that one characteristic of trauma is its recurrence as traumatized victims continually recall their painful experiences. When it comes to a society as a whole, Caruth notes that collective historical trauma actually produces a discontinuity or generational fault line that marks the beginning of ongoing testimonies in which those who did not experience the trauma firsthand nonetheless become the new witnesses.58 In this respect, if the personal testimonies by Lu Xun and Li Jinghan appeared as two narratives based on the same overarching script, it was not simply because they were responding to the negative depictions of Chinese society and national character invented by Smith; instead, it was also because both authors were witnesses to an ongoing historical episode of epistemic violence, of which Smith’s caustic remarks were simply a manifestation. Thus, whereas Lu Xun renarrativized the disarray of Chinese society and Chinese national


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character through the spectacle of the beheading of a fellow Chinese in front of an apathetic Chinese mob, Li reanimated the deficiencies of China and its people through his confession of his own classroom experience. The experience of epistemic violence inflicted on China, in other words, is a collective trauma frozen in time, one that could be retold, reactivated, and relived continuously. A salient effect of historical trauma of this magnitude was its role in the constitution of new subjects. By using their alleged personal experiences, modern Chinese intellectuals such as Li Jinghan and Lu Xun invited or even forced their readers to confront and witness the colonial violence themselves, awakening them to the subject position of politically aware citizens who feel ashamed about their nation’s deficiencies and at the same time are determined to strengthen the nation. As Caruth argues, since traumatic experience exists outside of time, a new subject is born when “a subjectivity ‘gives time’ to an event that is frozen outside of it.”59 For Lu Xun, modern fiction was a way to make individual readers politically conscious and critical of their own society. For Li, numeracy was virtually a form of political literacy, as he argued that the mastery of social facts was a basic requirement for becoming a Chinese citizen. According to Li, the Chinese people, especially the rural population, had no knowledge about the world, their nation, their county, their district, or even their own village. Surveys should therefore be used “to present the local conditions vividly in front of the eyes [of the masses], moving their hearts, arousing their passions and interests in the locality.” Social facts, he further contended, could instill in members of the public pride as well as shame, turning them into “qualified citizens.”60

seeking truth and facts The idea that social facts could be used to cultivate both pride and shame about one’s location and the nation implied that social scientists themselves, not unlike fiction writers, were essentially the arbiters of the narratives that social facts were supposed to reveal. Indeed, Li Jinghan and his fellow social scientists knew full well that in order for China to recover from the destruction brought about by epistemic violence, they had to seize control of the epistemological order by producing facts about Chinese society themselves, even though this meant that they had to adopt the very structure of knowledge that traumatized them.To put it somewhat differently, even as Chinese social scientists were traumatized by the images of China and the Chinese people depicted by Europeans and Americans, they were galvanized to re-


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sist and rework the colonial images imposed on them through the use of the same political technologies. This new paradigm of knowledge, however, was hardly an innocent enterprise of fact collection built in an intellectual vacuum. Rather, it was developed at the expense of the indigenous cosmology and knowledge system.This overwriting of one knowledge system upon another was captured in Li’s discussion of the contrast between social survey research and indigenous scholarship: In the past, Chinese historical records were mostly documentations of the rise and fall of dynasties. There was hardly any fact about the livelihood of the people. When such facts did exist, they were fragmentary and unreliable. And when numbers were involved, they were particularly inaccurate. . . . Since China had plenty of local gazetteers, one imagines that they would provide plenty of useful material. That was not true, however. Most of these documents focused on the sages and local heroic figures. Next, they focused on rivers and mountains, history, the military, and calamities. There was very little information about the social structure and the people’s livelihood.61

Li’s criticism of the neglect of the social world in indigenous scholarship highlighted an expansion into an entire field of knowledge that was inconceivable in the past, even as Chinese concepts of empirical inquiry had evolved over the centuries. Historically, the Neo-Confucian art of government was based on a set of moral principles that was believed to be derived from the classical knowledge of the sages. The compilation of the classics and the writing of history were therefore vitally important for an imperial regime that needed to assert itself as the arbiter of history as well as the gatekeeper of knowledge in order to legitimize its claims to moral authority and heavenly mandate. By the early modern period, however, the emphasis on classicism increasingly was being challenged by a growing number of scholars who questioned the validity of using only a few selected texts compiled in recent centuries to understand the past. These scholars argued that rather than simply applying hermeneutics and interpretive skills to a small canon of works, the original classics that presumably contained the ancient wisdom first had to be reconstructed and authenticated using the method of evidential research (kaozheng). This philological approach of “seeking truth from facts” (shishi qiushi) was further vindicated by the defeat of the Ming dynasty by the Manchus in 1644, which many scholars regarded as a sign of the Ming’s failure to adhere to the wisdom of the sages. History, in this respect, remained didactic, for it was used to explain the rise and fall of previous dynasties through their success or failure at adhering to the moral principles of high antiquity.


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This new emphasis on empirical, albeit mostly textual, evidence did more than simply introduce an alternative approach to retrieving the ancient wisdom in order to guide the present. It also led to the rise of specialized academic fields such as philology, archaeology, mathematics, and astronomy, and it ultimately led to an intellectual atmosphere that was highly conducive to the development of science and technology, which, as Benjamin Elman contends, laid the groundwork for the rapid embrace of European science and technology during the Self-Strengthening Movement in the second half of the nineteenth century.62 Yet, as the assaults on indigenous approaches to history and classics by Li Jinghan and others clearly indicate, eclecticism was out of the question emotionally and politically for iconoclastic thinkers of the Republican period. After all, the shift of a knowledge paradigm is never negotiated on purely epistemological grounds but is instead driven by political urgency and cultural sensibilities. Neo-Confucian statecraft might have coexisted rather unproblematically with European science and technology during the Qing’s Self-Strengthening Movement, but this was no longer the case with the arrival of social science, when Chinese intellectual elites believed that China was fighting for survival as a civilization and a nation. Their sense of urgency compelled intellectuals to ask new questions, embrace new methods, and deploy new evidence in order to adopt a social scientific epistemology that changed the temporal and spatial locations of “truth” and “fact,” as well as the very meanings of “truth” and “fact” themselves. In sum, while the categories of truth and fact remained constant, their meanings had changed drastically in a matter of decades. Specifically, whereas the old truth resided in the moral principles established by the sages, the new truth was now contained in the ideologies of scientism, social Darwinism, and the progressive view of history.The pervasiveness of this newly established regime of truth was further demonstrated, often violently, by the wealth and power wielded by the global system of the nation-states and industrial capitalism, which in turn was held up as the highest form of ethical order. Similarly, whereas Neo-Confucian statecraft relied on philological evidence and textual analysis to retrieve the truth established in the past, the new rationality of government focused on the collection and analysis of the positive facts of geographically bounded societies that respective states claimed to represent and govern. Under this new epistemological order, the old cosmological order that celebrated antiquity and imperial hierarchy was declared invalid. In its place was a new universal order that privileged progress and popular sovereignty. The social survey movement that took place in the first half of the twentieth century served to assemble and reify this new conception of time and space by producing empirical knowledge of the


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Chinese social world, as well as by locating the temporal and spatial specificities of China in the new universal order. The impact of this new regime of truth on indigenous knowledge was far-reaching. In addition to elevating the social fact to a category for conceptualizing the human world, it also dictated what were to be considered as social facts and hence admissible evidence, how to generate them, how to present them, and what to do with them. Thinking with social facts, in short, entailed new political motives, new questions, new modes of representation and reasoning, and even a whole new experience of being in a community and in the world. When Chen Changheng, a U.S.-educated economist, published A Treatise on Chinese Population in 1918, for example, even scholars trained in the indigenous knowledge system acknowledged the new social scientific representation as visually striking. Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940), a progressive thinker who was trained in the indigenous scholarly system, drove home precisely this point when he endorsed Chen’s new book. Although Chen’s book was the most comprehensive introduction to the Malthusian controversy ever published at the time, Cai never mentioned its arguments, instead raving about its style. The most significant contribution of Chen’s work, Cai contended, was that it introduced a whole new way of representing knowledge by using statistical charts and tabulations.63 According to Cai, there was no shortage of attention to the population question in Chinese statecraft scholarship.What was missing were these captivating representational techniques. He lamented that although China had long prided itself as a “literary country,” the old-style scholars really did nothing but waste their time polishing their essays. He also chastised these scholars for being inattentive to the validity and accuracy of their methods and theories. During his tenure as the Republic’s first education minister, Cai repeatedly berated the old Chinese education system as vulgar, disordered, superficial, fearful, discouraging, and deceptive.64 Although he had studied in Germany briefly, he was an admirer of the American philosopher and educator John Dewey (1859–1952) and believed that ideology, politics, and religion had no place in education, scholarship, and social reform. Later, as the chancellor of Peking University, Cai was instrumental in the creation of an intellectual hotbed for the New Culture Movement from the mid1910s to 1920s as well as the May Fourth student protests of 1919. Disillusioned by the failure of the Republican experiment and what they considered the persistence of “traditional” culture, Cai and other progressive intellectuals forcefully called for the embrace of science and democracy as a way to save the nation.65 It was within this context that Cai cherished Chen’s representational style, for it seemed to epitomize precisely the New


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Culture ideals of rationality, science, and accessibility. He concluded that Chen’s book was an extraordinary accomplishment because it had made the Chinese population problem “understandable at a glance” (yi mu liao ran).66 This emphasis on form over content is reminiscent of Bruno Latour’s observation of the epistemological transformation associated with modern science. Latour questions the conventional claim that the ideas of the great thinkers were primarily responsible for the so-called scientific revolution in the first place. He instead credits the rather contingent invention of new inscriptions as a crucial factor that made the scientific revolution possible. According to Latour, “The rationalization that took place during the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ is not of the mind, of the eye, of philosophy, but of the sight.” This revolution involved the combined use of scientific inscriptions such as numbers, charts, maps, and images both to render the complex, unfamiliar, and invisible human condition into a simple and legible picture, and to create a new condition whereby social scientific knowledge of the human world could be understood. Latour particularly emphasizes how scientific inscriptions were produced, juxtaposed, circulated, and consumed.67 In this regard, even though Cai characterized Chen’s work as a breakthrough in representational style, this change of style was not a trivial matter, as it was linked to a whole different mode of knowledge production and circulation.68

a new style of reasoning First and foremost, the emergence of the social fact, itself intimately related to modern statistics, represented the arrival of what Ian Hacking has called a particular “style of reasoning” that was simultaneously enabling and limiting, a style that had with drastic intellectual, cultural, and political implications. It was enabling because social scientific and numerical abstractions enabled studies that utilized modeling, comparison, taxonomy, derivation, and so forth that were otherwise inconceivable. It was also limiting and excluding, however, because it was by definition incommensurable with other styles of reasoning.69 Most Chinese intellectual elites in the early twentieth century experienced the enabling effects of social scientific thinking. Specifically, social science allowed Chinese intellectuals to construct a new epistemological foundation for the emerging social and political order to replace the one that had been discredited and invalidated as a consequence of the collapse of the Qing.The social scientific mode of knowledge production and representation also enabled Chinese political and cultural elites to produce


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3. Literacy as the foundation of the nation (1927). The countries being compared are China, the United States, Germany, Japan, and England.

new narratives of China’s past and present in the larger global narrative of progress. Nowhere was this more vividly demonstrated than in a series of illustrations included in a 1927 social science textbook by Cai Yucong. In one case, for example, the quality and quantity of the Chinese population were compared to those of several major world powers, each represented by the icons of their national flags (figure 3).70 While the image obviously encouraged readers to imagine the existence of a homogenous Chinese social body that was dividable only in terms of literacy (the illiterate were represented by a large rectangle wrapped by the flag of the Republic, the literate by a significantly smaller supporting base that appeared to be made of bricks), it simultaneously highlighted the shortcomings of China compared to other nations. By placing the huge cube representing the illiterate on top of the much smaller one representing the literate, the image conveyed a sense of


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4. Mandatory education and national progress (1927). The countries being compared (from top to bottom) are England, Switzerland, the United States, Germany, Belgium, France, Denmark, Sweden, Holland, Italy, and China.

crisis and unsustainability, as if the Chinese nation were facing an imminent collapse if it continued to be overburdened by a huge ignorant crowd. Similarly, in another illustration (figure 4), Cai Yucong highlighted the role of state-sponsored education in national progress.71 Here the number of years of free education provided by a state was symbolized by the length of its respective train, a common symbol of modernity and progress at the time. China, represented by a significantly shorter train, lags behind in its race toward the future. These pictures, in short, were not only representations of China but also illustrations that advanced a linear view of history and a social Darwinistic argument about the strength of the nation in a global context. What was significant about this change in representational style was more than just the prioritization of the social fact as an epistemological unit. In presenting narratives of the laws of nations, social mechanisms, historical


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progress, and racial struggles, these social facts presupposed such newly emerged analytical categories as race, nation, and society as part of ontological reality. Indeed, when Benedict Anderson argues that the census and map as methods of “totalizing classification” were among the most pivotal political technologies of nationhood, an important part of the underlying mechanisms that actually made the imagining of the nation possible through these technologies was the social scientific mode of knowledge production and representation.72 Particularly, it was through the display of social facts using abstract inscriptions such as numbers, charts, and graphs that a sense of togetherness and simultaneity among members of an imagined community was being developed and articulated. Individuals and groups that previously belonged to different temporal and spatial realms, in other words, were now linked together as subjects and observers of these social facts. The social scientific style of reasoning would not have been so effective and persuasive had it not also provided the condition for a new kind of visual experience in which strategies of seeing also became those of knowing, namely, Cai Yuanpei’s “understanding at a glance.”73 Closely related to this process was the catalyzing role of print capitalism. Since the late Qing, the circulation of a huge quantity of empirical facts generated by various surveys and censuses had been facilitated by the development of modern print media such as newspapers, journals, magazines, books, and posters. As technologies improved, these printed media were able to deliver not only text but also compelling illustrations and photographs to an ever-expanding audience at an accessible price. The advancement of printing technology led to the dissemination of social scientific knowledge not only to the urban population but also to rural dwellers. In rural areas, where the reproduction and circulation of such information was hindered by low literacy and the lack of resources, Chinese intellectuals and social scientists routinely carried with them simple statistical charts, graphs, and diagrams so that they could communicate social facts about China to the public through exhibitions and lectures. These education campaigns were effective means of enlightening the masses with new narratives about their social and political existence.74 In short, technologies of mechanical reproduction and scientific inscriptions together made the social scientific way of reasoning, seeing, and knowing increasingly available to all members of the imagined community in ways that were not possible before. In the span of approximately a century starting in the mid-nineteenth century, the political landscape of China went through a rapid transformation against the basic backdrop of the transition from dynastic empire to nation-


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state. At the center of this process was the shift from the notion of the Mandate of Heaven to that of popular sovereignty as the basis for political legitimacy. Under the premises of this new political order, as the people emerged as both the source of political authority and the object of governance, contending political parties had to produce the empirical contents of the social world they claimed to represent and govern in order to justify their political programs and indeed their very political existence. Politicization of the population meant that a once amorphous populace was now regarded as a social field with hidden mechanisms waiting to be decoded. It was through this social field, which was legible and comprehensible only through social facts and methods of social science, that the future of the Chinese nation was articulated, conceptualized, and debated. This rise of the social as a field of knowledge and practice involved the drastic refashioning of the old paradigm of “seeking truth from facts” into a new paradigm of knowledge production and circulation. Unlike their Neo-Confucian predecessors who upheld ancient wisdom as truth and classical texts as facts, Qing and Republican intellectuals—regardless of whether they were reformers or revolutionaries—were now compelled to search for a very different kind of truth and facts. The rise of the social scientific fact in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury China, in this respect, was an event of monumental significance particularly because of its epistemological, cultural, and political ramifications. Specifically, the new paradigm of knowledge production and circulation associated with social survey research not only enabled new ways of reasoning, seeing, and knowing, but it also entailed a new mode of being in the community. In other words, social surveys became a political necessity in this context not only because they produced empirical knowledge of the social world for the state, but also because they provided new specifications for how individuals and groups should relate to the state and to one another. And since social facts produced by surveys are, by their nature, prescriptive rather than merely descriptive, these facts never just innocently disclosed the nation to itself, as they seemed to promise, but actually constituted arguments about the nation and prescriptions for social life. For this reason, despite the trust we have placed in the modern notion of facticity, the history of the production of social facts in China was inseparable, as I will show, from the nation’s political and cultural history.


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From Divide and Rule to Combine and Count

When the Manchus defeated the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) in the seventeenth century, they not only acquired additional populations and territories, but they also inherited perhaps the most sophisticated bureaucratic apparatus in the early modern world.1 The existing Chinese bureaucracy and its governing ideology was indeed indispensable to fostering and maintaining a self-proclaimed universal empire that incorporated Manchus, Mongols, Muslims, Tibetans, and other Inner Asian ethnic groups, with their various lordships, political centers, and forms of authority, into a Confucian and cosmopolitan regime.2 In other words, despite the prominence of a Chinese bureaucracy and Confucian ideology, the Qing empire was not truly a Chinese dynasty. Rather, as many historians have observed, it was a central Eurasian or Inner Asian empire that appropriated Chinese bureaucratic, economic, and cultural resources for its imperial ambitions.3 At the heart of the Qing imperium was a system of joint rule by the Manchus, their Inner Asian allies, and the Chinese. This carefully orchestrated divide-and-conquer approach and power-sharing arrangement not only enabled the Manchus to tap into Chinese cultural resources and enlist support from the Chinese literati, but it also allowed the regime to receive political and military backing from Inner Asian peoples. At the same time, it prevented these potential competitors, especially the powerful but fragmented Mongol tribes of the north, from combining to form a viable threat to Manchu rule.4 The complicated political structure of the Qing empire was evident in the many ways in which it managed its populations. Prior to the arrival of the national census in 1909, the Qing did not have a unified census method. Instead there was an ensemble of census and survey practices that can be subdivided into three groups, each with its own distinct counting method, 50


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Divide and Rule to Combine and Count

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reporting mechanism, and administrative rationale. Starting from the top were the “jade registers” (yudie), the lineage registrations of the imperial household and the nobility. These genealogical records connected histories with myths, lives with stories, and therefore played a central role in inventing the lineage and heritage of the ruling class and the foundational narrative of the dynasty.5 The second category focused exclusively on the banner population (qiren), a hereditary caste that consisted primarily of Manchu, Mongol, and other Inner Asian tribal and clan-based elites, but also Chinese military personnel and their families.6 Since this demographic segment constituted the military and political basis of the multiethnic empire, these census records functioned as a political and military inventory that ensured the strength of the regime. Because members of banner organizations were listed hierarchically according to the military structure, these records also reinforced the identity of each banner group vis-à-vis the Han Chinese as well as other banner groups. Working in tandem with this census was the household registration of the general Chinese population who were liable for tax and conscription. This last category, which was by far the largest, also was linked to the baojia system devised for local defense and communal surveillance. Beyond these three groups there also were groups that were not governed or ruled by the Qing, not even indirectly. The system somehow still accounted for these peoples in the cultural cosmological order of the empire, as evidenced in ethnographies, drawings, and travel writings. Precisely because of the coexistence of multiple genres of censuses, focusing solely on the census of the Han Chinese or the banner people, as most historians have done, can hardly do justice to the complexities of the imperial census practices of the Qing. This chapter will first offer an overview of how the Qing empire counted different population segments. I argue that if the act of counting was a way for the regime to enunciate its authority over a group of people, the method of counting represented how and to what degree a particular group was subjugated to its rule. Second, I will discuss the national census of the late Qing that took place between 1909 and 1911 and analyze how this new census represented a drastic departure from its predecessors. I argue that the rise of this first-of-its-kind national census in China was inseparable from the Qing’s transformation from a dynastic empire to a nation-state based on the ideas of constitutionalism, popular sovereignty, and secularism. The emergence of the people as the source of political legitimacy as well as the object of governance entailed a new mode of knowledge production that enumerated each member of the population that the state claimed both to represent and to govern directly.


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early modern surveys of territories and peoples In the same way that censuses were used to create the Qing’s imperial subjects, imperial knowledge projects such as territorial reconnaissance and surveys were needed to create and define the territorial parameters of the empire. These cartographic, geographic, and ethnographic projects, largely in the form of the travel diaries and gazetteers of local scholar-officials, which accumulated over time, constituted a depository of knowledge that was indispensable for local control and governance. Even more significantly, by the seventeenth century the regime was launching large-scale projects as part of its colonial enterprises.7 Mark Elliott, for example, has shown how Qing rulers set out to transform the undefined region between today’s China, Russia, and Korea into a sacred territory bearing special symbolic and political meanings in order to establish a separate territory-based Manchu identity in the midst of a predominantly Chinese population, as well as to secure this imaginary homeland from the potential threat of adjacent states. This process involved the use of ritualized journeys, literature, maps, and surveys.8 In a similar vein were the “Kangxi atlases,” as they are commonly called by historians. Conducted under the auspices of the Kangxi Emperor (1654–1722), these extended as far as Tibet and the southwestern China, utilizing the latest European cartographic science supplied by Jesuit missionaries who hoped to use their scientific knowledge and services to the court to convey their Christian messages to the Qing ruling elites.9 The “atlases” and other similar knowledge projects were instrumental in converting undefined frontier spaces into imperial domains with cultural and political meanings. As the empire expanded westward as part of the ongoing territorial rivalries among the various central Eurasian players, Kangxi also commissioned a territorial survey of the northwestern region that is known today as Xinjiang province.This project, however, remained incomplete until 1755, when the Qianlong Emperor, the grandson of Kangxi, was able to dispatch Jesuit mapmakers and surveyors to the areas after his forces successfully conquered the region. This study, Xiyu tuzhi (The Geography and History of the Western Territories), was not only one of the most comprehensive studies of the region at the time but was also one of the largest surveys undertaken by the Qing. Although some of its information was assembled simply from preexisting local studies and historical texts, the study as a whole provided abundant up-to-date information covering a broad range of topics that were particularly useful for administrative and military purposes. The ability of the Qing to map the entirety of such a vast empire using the


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latest cartographic techniques, according to historian Sun Ji, was unmatched in the early modern world.10 In addition to cartography, ethnographic depictions of peoples at the peripheries of the empire represented another major genre of the production of imperial knowledge. The vast collections of “illustrations of tributaries” (zhigong tu), which depicted scenes of peoples from foreign lands participating in tributary trade during the Qianlong reign (1736–96), were cases in point. By displaying and juxtaposing the tributary activities of non-Han groups directly under imperial authority as well as peoples from afar, these illustrations conveyed a sense of control and domination, and of a universal order that was essentially ethnocentric. Closely related to these illustrations of tributaries were the so-called “Miao albums,” which exhibited the customs and lives of various ethnic tribal groups on the southern frontiers, including today’s Guizhou, Yunnan, Guangdong, Hunan, and Taiwan, and categorized them in a hierarchal order based on their degrees of differentness and exoticness. Informed by the Neo-Confucian principle of evidential research, and augmented by the European engraving techniques introduced by Jesuits, these images showed a high level of detail and precision.11 In brief, there is no question that the Qing rulers were adept at using ethnography, cartography, and travel writing to render the geographically and spatially diverse local worlds into a legible and universal order for the purposes of imperial domination. As in the case of Europe, the Qing’s early modern colonial expansion was not only driven by trade and military conquest, but it was also sustained and made possible by cultural production.12 In this respect, even though the notions of their universalities and ideals of order and legibility were not the same, the logic and motives behind the competing knowledge projects carried out by different early modern states were not all that different.13 At the same time, it is important to note that although the Qing were capable of combining these different bodies of knowledge of the surrounding territories and peoples to construct a unified and universal order, the knowledge projects themselves remained fractured. These projects, while rendering lands and peoples legible for the early modern state, were not designed to create commensurable and calculable information as would be required in the modern context.14 Finally, since the imperial frontiers were not fixed boundaries, their locations were determined primarily by the ability of the imperial authority to project its power. As a result, in the frontier regions some population groups could fall under and then out of the control of the empire, and therefore could be subjugated to different survey and census regimes over time. As well, they could sometimes be subject to multiple state authorities si-


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multaneously. In some cases, the tributary peoples in the peripheral regions could become enumerable and taxable, either partially and fully, like ordinary imperial subjects in the core of the empire. Immediately after the establishment of the dynasty, for instance, local authorities were instructed to use the Ming census template to count the number of adult males and their dependents of the “core populations” (fumin). As for the “peripheral populations” (bianmin), the Qing regime was only interested in finding out their total household numbers. The Qing household registration guidelines also specified that certain ethnic groups in the southwest, who had been “cultivated” and “domesticated” (jiahua) long ago, should be counted in the same way as the core population. Ethnic groups in the Inner Asia region were to be counted and reported using local categories such as “clan,” “tribe,” or “stockaded village” rather than “household.”15 In any case, like their early modern European counterparts, populations under the Chinese dynastic state did not exist independently from the state. What we have come to call the “Ming population” or “Qing population” today was not the natural social body of the dynastic state but the conscious political creation of the imperial regime.16

banner census and identity maintenance Although the empire as a political form is always based on a set of hierarchical and inequitable relationships between the metropole and the periphery, as well as the privileged and the underprivileged, the Qing was not a concentric structure composed of a Chinese metropole and an “ethnic” periphery, and therefore does not fit into a simple pattern of core and periphery. The multicentric nature of the Qing can be seen in how the Chinese literati continued to use sinocentric rhetoric in official documents while the vast areas newly added to the empire as a consequence of the Manchu conquest were actually governed by a very different political system.17 In other words, not all the peripheral populations were depicted as exotic and inferior, as those in the southwestern regions were. The Qing court, given its nature, had to utilize mechanisms to incorporate and elevate the Manchus and Mongols into a central hierarchy. This is particularly well illustrated by how the banner population, which consisted primarily of Manchus and Mongols who resided in separate enclaves and enjoyed state stipends and other privileges, were managed. More specifically, while banner troops and their families were subdivided into hierarchical groups identifiable by the color


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and design of their banner flags, they formed a political and military core within the Chinese numerical majority of the population. The banner census was a pivotal technique for inventing and managing the hierarchical structure of the empire. For the Manchus especially, the census was critical to maintaining their collective identity. Specifically, the topdown banner census records made by the state also often functioned as family genealogies that were connected to the collective memory of the state. During the period from 1735 to 1744, for instance, the court commissioned an extensive genealogy project covering the major Manchu clans. The final product was an eighty-volume work mentioning more than twenty thousand individuals.18 The convergence between the family and the state was even more evident in the genealogical charts associated with the census records.19 Although genealogical in nature, these records were more than just spontaneous attempts at data compilation from the bottom up. Instead, they were part of the larger networks of banner censuses that were devised to maintain the power and identity of the ruling regime. Often these genealogical charts were used to elucidate a family’s relationship to its ancestral past within the context of the empire, identifying not only how the ancestors of the present generation came to associate with the regime historically, but also the heroic sacrifices made by the previous generations as well as the accolades and accomplishments they received. To the extent that the so-called Manchu ethnicity was an ad hoc political invention made possible by the invention of a common language, origin story, and collective memory, these banner censuses played a particularly important role in the institutionalization and maintenance of the Manchu identity. Specifically, just as imperial lineage linked the Manchu imperial household and nobility to the origin myth, the census of the Manchu bannermen gave them a shared genealogical past.20 In doing so, it defined the cultural and ethnic foundation of the empire and demarcated the banner people from the larger population. In fact, even before the establishment of the Qing empire, genealogies recording ancestral lines, military accolades, and social statuses already existed widely among the Manchu clans. With the conquest of China, these genealogical records, augmented by Chinese bureaucratic practices, multiplied quickly both in type and quantity. In addition to these genealogical records, censuses devoted solely to the administrative, political, and military structure of the new state were added.21 In a population that was predominantly non-Manchu, the census records pertaining to the Manchu clans certainly served the urgent needs of preserving the cultural and ethnic identity of the Manchu bannermen, yet they also


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fulfilled the important function of enumerating and managing the ruling caste, particularly the Manchu and Mongol troops and their families. In short, regardless of the variety of these different types of records, they served a similar function, which was combining the otherwise diverse groups of tribal clans into a powerful ruling caste minority within a multiethnic empire. In spite of its importance in nurturing a stable military and establishing a political base for the empire, the banner system was constantly plagued by corruption, inefficiency, and fiscal strain. During the formative years of the dynasty, when wars were frequent, large exoduses of low-ranking banner soldiers presented numerous opportunities for financial fraud.22 In peacetime, the state found it costly to feed the large number of surplus bannermen, who were often economically unproductive and unable to sustain themselves. By the Yongzheng reign (1722–35), the “livelihood problem” of the banner people became so serious that it was a constant concern for the very fiscally minded emperor.23 As the system continued to drain the imperial coffer and became increasingly unsustainable, surplus bannermen and their families were eventually allowed to leave the segregated garrison towns, mixing with the general population and managing their own livelihoods, even though they continued to maintain their hereditary banner status. Meanwhile, in addition to the regular periodic banner census updates, the court also deployed various types of census records to launch additional investigations to discover illegal relocations, false registrations, and other irregularities. Such endeavors to maintain the integrity of the banner census records were always conducted with painstaking detail. Sometimes the authenticity of a household register would be corroborated by genealogies and local gazetteers. In 1734, during one of these auditing campaigns, a certain Yang family’s banner status was proven to be fraudulent after auditors using several sets of records tracing back to the previous two generations found discrepancies in the family genealogy.24 In the same year, a cavalryman with the surname of Wang was also discovered to have used false information to establish a new household for financial gain. In addition, he had registered his niece as his own daughter and illegally included his mother as a recipient of a special stipend for which only certain old women were eligible.25 In fact, hundreds of cases of illegitimate new household registration alone were unearthed during the early years of the Qianlong reign.26 Knowing that these cases represented only the tip of the iceberg, the Daoguang Emperor, when he first assumed the throne in 1820, followed the practice of his predecessor and gave all households who had committed such forgeries three months to confess their crimes.27 He also issued an edict


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promising that those who came forward would be pardoned and allowed to keep their stipends for life. In the event that the imposters or their illegally registered family members had participated in battles and won military accolades during their tenures, their offspring would even be allowed to continue to serve in the military by transferring to the Green Standard Army, which was composed of the Han Chinese soldiers who operated alongside the elite Eight Banners troops. In contrast, those who refused to confess, once discovered, would be punished and stripped of all benefits. Subsequently, in one audit alone the court discovered more than 3,200 cases of civilians improperly assuming the banner identity.28 Numerous investigations were also launched to examine possible illegal relocations of bannermen and their families. None of these new measures, however, were able to mitigate the economic burden caused by the banner troops in any significant way. Indeed, the livelihood problem became more severe in the second half of the nineteenth century due to changing global economic conditions, population pressure, and natural calamities, as well as political and military crises. In fact, investigations such as these continued until the very end of the dynasty.29 At any rate, responses to such fraudulent activities suggest that although the state embraced leniency and flexibility, it also refused to compromise either the integrity of the banner system or its commitment to precise record keeping.

the imperial general census as benevolent arithmetic Although some forms of census existed in ancient times, the first large-scale and comprehensive census in China was conducted during the early years of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). After attaining control of the central plain, Ming Taizu, the founding emperor of the dynasty, was particularly keen to collect population information due to the urgent needs of political consolidation. “The world has been pacified, except that household information remains unclear. . . . I am no longer sending my troops to war, but to the locales to register all the households,” he declared in 1371.30 The early Ming censuses focused particularly on the gross number of households (hu), as well as the number of adult males (ding or zhuangding) and their dependents (kou). They also made an effort to register other information related to familial well-being such as the number of widows and orphans. Each household was required to fill in a “household certificate” (hutie) under the supervision of a local headman, who functioned as an intermediary between


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the government and local residents. An auditing system was established to ensure accuracy and accept local appeals.31 After this initial round of canvassing by troops, local authorities were required to submit periodic updates to the central government’s Board of Revenue (Hubu). During the course of the dynasty there were twenty-seven census updates, accumulating an estimated 170 million household registers in a heavily fortified imperial archive in Nanjing built specifically for housing the records.32 These “yellow registers” (huangce) were often used in conjunction with the so-called “fish scale registers” (yulince), a relatively primitive form of cadastral survey, to assign tax responsibilities to local communities. Closely related to these efforts to collect information about the land and its people was a local institution known as lijia, a variant of a similar ancient practice called baojia. Although the lijia system, according to which local communities were organized into clusters of 110 households each, was used for mutual defense and surveillance and even the supervision of the moral conduct of local residents, its primary purpose was to afford a systematic approach to extracting tax revenues.33 As the intermediaries between local society and state authority, the local elites responsible for running the system were particularly crucial to imperial governance as they enabled the state to reach the local world without direct intervention.34 In spite of the unprecedented thoroughness of the early Ming census, historians have noticed that its quality gradually deteriorated over the course the dynasty. Indeed, many of the later “updates” were actually produced years in advance simply to fulfill procedural and bureaucratic requirements.35 Not surprisingly, many historians and social scientists contend that the deficiencies of these imperial censuses are signs of the incompetence of the imperial state. Others accuse the imperial state of being structurally biased against women, children, and many ethnic minorities, who were systematically undercounted or entirely uncounted.36 These arguments, however, miss the important fact that the census during the Ming dynasty was inherently connected to tax collection. In fact, the Board of Revenue was the only organization in the central government that collected these registers. Moreover, while taxation was certainly crucial to the survival of the state, the Ming tax system was linked to a set of statecraft practices that was different from those of modern governance. Specifically, whereas the modern state seeks to maximize tax revenues by constantly refining its assessment methods, the Chinese dynastic state also aspired to follow the principle of benevolent rule. The Ming’s tax-driven census or household registration, also known as bianding (the compilation of ding records), was in many ways designed to achieve such a delicate balance.


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Historically, the legal definition of ding was an adult male between sixteen and forty years of age who was liable for conscription.37 Depending on the circumstances, tax, corvée labor, or military duties could be used to fulfill the ding obligation. By the time of the Ming, there was already a sizable standing army, so ding was used simply as an instrument for assessing and levying taxes.38 In addition, ding tax was hardly a straightforward levy based on the number of adult males since many households were not required to pay taxes. For example, local elites who served the government in semiofficial capacities were always exempt from such obligations. Families who had made significant contributions and sacrifices to the dynasty in the past might also be exempt. Generally, the gross number of ding reported to the central government by local elites and officials was the result of compromises, negotiations, and evasions (both known and unknown) that took place between the local world and the various levels of government.39 It was conceivably in the interests of local authorities to report or negotiate a lower number of ding to alleviate the burdens of the local population. Likewise, the central government could reduce the local ding quotas to demonstrate its benevolent rule in difficult times such as during natural calamities. In this sense, the ding tax was just a regulatory tax quota that spelled out the local tax obligation. Partly because of the need for flexibility, the methods of assessing the ding numbers also were highly diverse and complicated, as they varied not just across time but also from place to place.40 In short, because the enumeration of able-bodied men functioned principally like a tax quota, the tally of these men was neither a reliable nor a particularly meaningful population index. Most demographic historians can agree only that the actual population was probably somewhere between four to six times of the recorded number of able-bodied males. Furthermore, the ding, although a concept dealing with the practical and material concerns of taxation, was equally related to the symbolic and ideological aspects of imperial governance.The deployment of a rather flexible ding formula to levy tax was consistent with the Confucian ideology of “government by goodness” (renzheng), which dictated a tax policy based on the principle of nourishing the people and relieving their financial burdens.41 When the Qing empire ascended to power in the mid-seventeenth century, it inherited the tax-driven census and the lijia system from the Ming. By the eighteenth century, however, in light of sustained peace and prosperity, the regime’s priority was to remedy the destruction and surging ethnic tensions brought on by earlier wars and conquests. In 1713, at the outset of a period of unprecedented economic growth, Emperor Kangxi declared that local ding quotas would be frozen permanently in order to “nourish


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the population in the times of prosperity.”42 Then, in 1729, as part of the ongoing project of fiscal reform, the Yongzheng Emperor, Kangxi’s successor, further reassigned all existing ding quotas to the land by converting the ding quota system into nothing more than a fixed land tax, which further obliterated the demographic connotations of ding and essentially ended the centuries-old linkage between census and tax.43

from tax collection to population control Even though the fiscal reform of the early eighteenth century had made the number of ding entirely irrelevant to tax payments, the counting of ding was not abolished immediately since it was one of the few tools by which the dynastic state could attempt to make sense of the human world. The unprecedented economic growth and population explosion during this period made the Qing state aware of the need to get a better picture of the population for the purposes of state security. According to historian Wang Weihai, the Qing court hoped that the separation of the counting of ding from tax collection would make local communities more forthcoming in reporting the actual number of able-bodied males. In 1772, the court decided to abolish the practice of the counting of ding and instead to register and manage the population by relying heavily on the baojia system, which, although it bore the name of an older pre-Ming system, was a significant update from the lijia system of the Ming.44 From this point on, the primary functions of household registration became communal surveillance, local defense, and population management. As a result, household (hu) and baojia rather than ding became particularly important categories in imperial statecraft. Similar to its Ming predecessor, the baojia system under the Qing organized every ten households into a jia and every ten jia into a bao, all the under supervision of a semiofficial local elite.45 New initiatives were added, and local officials were expected, for example, to wield greater control over the system. A certificate listing the able-bodied males of each household, the forerunners of the modern doorplate, was supposed to be placed near the entrance of each household. More importantly, in response to rapidly changing social and economic realities, the baojia system paid particularly close attention to the individuals and groups that were in constant transit. Mobile populations such as traveling merchants, migrant workers, wandering monks, beggars, and even fishermen were expected to be accounted for by the baojia household registrations without exception. Compared to the lijia system


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of the Ming, then, the household-based census associated with the baojia system during the Qing was more rigid and far-reaching. In some cases the state even made attempts to extend the baojia system, or at least some variation of it, to the non-Han populations residing in the frontier regions.46 Under the Qing baojia system, an ideal household was a joint family comprised of several conjugal or even extended families that might include, but was not limited to, hired laborers and their immediate family members.47 Each household was then represented by the household head. Although during much of the Ming dynasty women and children were often neglected or underreported because they were deemed not relevant to the extraction of tax revenues, efforts were made to include them under the baojia system of the Qing, even though the actual quality of data was still determined by local circumstances and official competence. Meanwhile, on the surface at least, the household seemed to be an extension of the imperial patriarchal order as it manifested and reinforced the political and ethical order of the familial state. More often than not, however, what was being regarded as a household was not necessarily an extended family but multiple families living under one roof for livelihood reasons.48 By the eighteenth century, as imperial expansion and economic development demanded a more active approach to managing the general population, the general census began to assume a greater role in imperial governance. The increase in the floating population, internal migration, and the incorporation of ethnic groups into the vast empire were all pressing problems that the Qing empire needed to confront. Many Chinese statecraft thinkers responded to the unprecedented economic and demographic growth by delving deeply into questions about political economy and population that also concerned many European statecraft thinkers at the time.49 Nevertheless, even though the baojia system was remade to cope with these challenges, the surge of large-scale peasant uprisings and sectarian revolts in the nineteenth century ultimately suggested that the system needed a radical overhaul if it were to stay relevant. In fact, in the aftermath of the Taiping Rebellion (1851–64), which inflicted the greatest destruction by far on the empire, whatever was left of the baojia system was thoroughly destroyed. In the minds of some Qing officials, the system appeared to be so archaic that when the Qing national police system was being implemented in the 1900s, police administrators sought to distance the new system from the old baojia system.50 Late Qing officials also, albeit often unsuccessfully, urged local authorities not to use the old baojia model to constitute the new police forces. In this sense, with or without influence from the industrial


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West in the nineteenth century, the Qing was ready for a major administrative and institutional overhaul in order to deal with its complicated social and economic challenges.The violent encounter with the industrial powers simply catalyzed the reform movement and launched it in a particular direction.

the national census of the late qing In many ways, the Taiping Rebellion permanently altered the political landscape and the fortune of the Manchu court. Local and regional elites, as a result of their critical role in defeating the Taiping rebels, rose to prominence in provincial as well as national politics. They became the main promoters of the loosely connected Self-Strengthening Movement (1860s–1900s), which aimed at empowering the empire by embracing modern technologies and industries. This trend toward decentralization continued as the legitimacy of the central government was further shaken by its defeats in the Second Opium War (1856–60), the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), and the Boxer Uprising (1899–1900). Facing internal unrest and external pressures, the Qing empire looked to Meiji Japan for inspiration for its imperial rejuvenation. Increasingly, Japanese modernizing and state-building projects were widely admired not only by Qing officials and intellectuals but also by Manchu leaders inside the court, who hoped that such projects could reunite the court and country in wake of the dynasty’s unprecedented crises. In this sense, the New Policies (Xinzheng) that began in the early 1900s and included the establishment of a national police system, a national census, a constitutional monarchy, and other ambitious undertakings represented a new phase of the Self-Strengthening Movement, in which the court sought to nationalize the various modernizing projects with the hope of reversing the course of decentralization and shoring up its political legitimacy. Even more importantly, these modern bureaucratic machines and political technologies adopted by the Qing entailed a new kind of rationality of government in which the relationship between state and society would be transformed and Chinese society would be reconceptualized and remade. At the center of the national census was the Ministry of Civil Affairs, which was first established as the Ministry of Police (Xunjinbu) in 1905. In November 1906, acknowledging that “policing is only an aspect of civil affairs,” Qing reformers redefined the work of the Ministry of Police as “civil affairs” and assigned to it an expanded mandate and augmented powers.51


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The new Ministry of Civil Affairs also incorporated some of the functions historically held by such long-established imperial institutions as the Board of Revenue (Hubu), the Board of Rites (Libu), and the Board of Personnel (Libu).52 Together with the Bureau for Constitutional Preparation (Xianzheng biancha guan), the Ministry of Civil Affairs became the most important player in the preparation for a Meiji Japanese–style constitutional state. Immediately after its establishment, the ministry planned to implement a national census enumerating all the individuals and households of the entire population. In a July 1908 decree, the court announced that the census would be launched on the first day of 1909.53 Door-to-door canvassing, however, did not actually begin until the spring, as preparations were still underway at the beginning of the year. Compared to the various types of old censuses, which collected demographic data for the general population merely as a by-product of tax assessments and local defense, or which consisted of military inventories and genealogical records for the banner population, this stand-alone census, which sought to collect statistical data for the entire population using a singular enumerative framework, was a radical departure. It was true that the former Ministry of Police had actually reregistered all the households in Beijing using a somewhat similar template as early as 1906.54 That particular census, however, was limited to the capital city and was aimed at curbing antigovernment activities, urban crime, and other emerging social problems. It was no more than an extension of disciplinary power focusing on the surveillance and control that were characteristic of conventional police work.55 The national census implemented by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, in contrast, not only was greater in scope, depth, and detail but also implied the demographic and territorial reconceptualizations that underlay the Qing dynastic empire’s transition to a nation-state. Because of its convoluted and ambitious objectives, the new census was linked to other surveys and activities that were carried out simultaneously. These included, for instance, cadastral surveys, the redrawing of administrative boundaries, and the installation of household doorplates. Moreover, the census was connected to the new national police system, education reform, a literacy campaign, and a whole range of institutional reform initiatives that would ultimately lead to the proposed constitutional monarchy scheduled to be established in 1916 (see table 1).56 In many ways, because the new census was built practically on top of the old one in a hasty manner, new concepts and practices were often represented as old while old ideas and categories were appropriated for new purposes. In the following, in order to unravel the complexities of the new national census and demonstrate why it marked a major departure


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table 1. The implementation of selected New Policies 1908

1909

1910

Political assemblies

Establishment of local assembly

Establishment of provincial assembly

Establishment of national assembly

Census and population management

Proclamation of guidelines

Implementation of household enumeration

Police

Frontier integration

Establishment of the banner reform office

Education

Compilation of literacy textbooks

Expansion to subprefectures, departments, and counties

Expansion completed

Literacy textbooks published

Establishment of county and prefecture literacy

from its predecessors, I shall discuss the new methods, procedures, and conceptual implications by highlighting its major features.

Old Categories, New Meanings The national census, or what the Qing regime referred to as hukou diaocha (surveys of households and individuals), consisted of two stages. The first stage, which took place primarily in 1909 and 1910, was a household registration that, at least on the surface, resembled the old census method.57 The second stage, which began in 1911 and was supposed to be completed in 1912, involved the counting of individual citizens. For the Qing reformers who designed the census, the juxtaposition of the old and new censuses was neither contradictory nor redundant; instead, they argued that it was a “synthesis of the finest principles of the Eastern and Western nations.”58 Use of this self-conscious eclecticism to enumerate the population was not entirely unproblematic, however. At times the architects of the census themselves seemed to struggle to reconcile the dual approach of using both the household and the individual to reconceptualize the nation-state. For example, as much as the reformers liked to emphasize the continuity between the old and the new, their conception of the household in the first phase of the census was no longer the same as that of the older baojia or lijia systems. This was due to the fact that social and economic dislocations during the late im-


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1911

1912

1913

Implementation of individual enumeration

Proclamation of household law

Implementation of household law

1914

Expansion to villages

1915

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1916

Completion of expansion Completion of reform and integration Beginning of village literacy campaign

Literacy rate increased to 1%



perial era had significantly complicated the supposed correspondence between a household and an extended family. In other words, although the idea of family or extended family (jia) remained rather central in everyday Chinese life, by the nineteenth century many households identified by the old registration were simply amalgamations of economic families residing in the same physical location.59 In order to clear up this confusion, the new census systematically broke down the old amalgamated household into one primary household (zhenghu) and, when applicable, several subordinate households (fuhu).60 In so doing, it also began to make natural or familial households visible. Under the Household Registration Law (huji fa), prepared in 1911, the ministry tried to further define the household in almost primordial terms and suggested that it represented the quintessential elements of Chinese culture. Specifically, it contrasted China with the industrial West and Japan, and it argued that the household was never an important category in either Europe or the United States because of the “individualistic” (geren zhuyi) character of these societies. Likewise, the ministry maintained that despite the strong presence of the family in Japan, the patriarchal system had rendered the category of the household only secondarily important, as Japanese law recognized the eldest son of an extended family as the inheritor of the household fortune regardless the number of households or subhouseholds that existed within


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the extended family.61 Thus, in the process of justifying the household as an enumerative category, the ministry also began to inject cultural meanings into what had been a primarily economic and administrative category. An even more drastic departure from the past took place in the second phase of the census, which focused exclusively on the enumeration of individuals. Specifically, the architects of the new census increasingly recognized the importance of using the individual—the indispensable component of the liberal state—as the basic building block of the nation. Whereas the old system constantly maintained a distinction between nanding (able-bodied males) and nukou (female dependents), the new census scheme regarded all individuals as kou, a term that literally means “mouth [to be fed]” but had been used to refer only to dependents in the previous censuses. By referring to all individuals—men, women, and children—as kou, the conceptual blueprint of the new census essentially bypassed the imperial patriarchal ideology. This new emphasis on the bare existence of autonomous individuals as the ultimate foundation of the nation-state was also closer to the objective of establishing a liberal constitutional order. Therefore, as much as Qing reformers insisted that the new census represented a continuous evolution rather than a radical break from the past, the emergence of a universal and transcending framework—whether it was through the household or the individual or a combination of both—to reconceptualize the entire population without the previous heterogeneous local mediations suggested otherwise.

Representational Politics The use of the individual and the household as two competing ways to conceptualize the population led directly to one of the central characteristics of the modern nation-state: regardless of its actual political form and ideological inclination, the authority of the nation-state is legitimate only when is perceived as consented to by the people. In the case of the Qing, this new representational politics was articulated in terms of the constitutionalism that entered China by way of Japan.62 The Qing officials who designed the census even referred to the census outright as the “basis of government by constitution.”63 Accordingly, the official plan was to call for the use of some kind of general election to generate half of the legislators in the proposed bicameral parliament to be established 1916.64 In addition, consultative assembly bodies were to be set up at the provincial and local levels as a way to show that even provincial and local politics were based on broad representation.65 The actual functions of these mechanisms,


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however, remained unsettled and were under constant dispute. For their part, local and provincial elites wanted to use these mechanisms to protect their interests so that their privileges and obligations to manage local affairs would not be diluted by the ongoing state penetration and centralization. The court, in contrast, was less interested in the idea of power sharing or local self-government. Instead, it hoped to use these local and provincial assemblies to cultivate the elites and inculcate the larger population with civil responsibility and loyalty as a way to unite the court and the country.66 Regardless of their disagreements, these layers of consultative and representative bodies at the local and provincial levels were in some way embodiments of the indigenous idea of local self-government that was fast gaining currency among the statecraft thinkers of the late imperial period.67 Yet they also represented a departure from the traditional idea of local selfgovernment, for this old form of political participation, however indirect and superficial, was increasingly being reconstituted as the foundation of the legitimacy of the nation-state. In short, although details of elections and local self-government were still being worked out when the dynasty collapsed, the relationship between the anticipated new political order and the needs of a direct and accurate enumeration was indisputably clear. The national census, in this respect, involved not just the surveillance and control characteristic of the old baojia registration system, but also the production of new social imaginaries essential to modern representational politics and political life. As such, the census was part of the theorization and performance of the idea of popular sovereignty that constituted the emerging Qing nation.

Exactitude Another way to show whether or not the new census constituted a rupture with past censuses is to examine how the ministry actually conceptualized and implemented the census in practice. Although the ministry appropriated many old enumerative categories for the purposes of the new census, it often rejected outright the old census methods. For example, the ministry repeatedly emphasized the need to collect accurate data and warned of severe punishment for those who continued the “old habit” of recycling previous data or fabricating the number of able-bodied males.68 When the local authorities in Guizhou province asked to make adjustments to the new practice according to “local customs” at the outset of the household registration, they were immediately rebuffed by the ministry.69 Using a unusually


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harsh tone, the ministry referred to requests such as this one as the sort of antiquated practice that encouraged “officials from the top to the bottom to deceive one another” and further asserted that all the official records accumulated in the past several thousand years were nothing more than a mockery. Ministry officials often invoked an expression from Neo-Confucian evidential research and urged local authorities to adhere to the principle of “seeking truth from facts,” insisting that household statistics be collected without any modification of the procedures set forth in the guidelines.70 Instead of searching for the wisdom said to be discovered by the ancient sages using textual evidence, however, the Qing reformers now upheld population statistics as the truth. The insistence on accuracy and uniformity across the entire country, including even the frontier regions that the government did not control directly, was simply unprecedented. Foreign observers at the time, as well as some Chinese social scientists during the Republican period, agreed that this was the most accurate census ever produced in China.71 In comparison, the old baojia household registration reached a degree of relative accuracy only when local officials were under tremendous pressure from the central government due to specific imperial concerns. But even under such extraordinary historical circumstances, the quality of these baojia-related censuses was still highly uneven across the empire, not to mention that multiple standards and census templates were tolerated or even encouraged for many complicated political and practical reasons. The emphasis on exact enumeration was one of the reasons that the new census often generated fear, misunderstanding, and resistance. For example, since the goal of the old censuses had been to determine local defenses and taxes, not population statistics, the accuracy of the number of able-bodied males produced in the past was contingent upon a range of external factors, from state policies to local compliance. Normally, whether the number of ding were submitted by local headmen or were predetermined by other factors, no actual canvassing was necessary.72 The insistence on accuracy in the new census was thus often regarded by local communities as an attempt to exploit them through new taxes and conscription. At any rate, all misgivings and resistance aside, the national census of the late Qing was by far the most accurate census ever produced up to this point, even though the counting of individuals in the second phase was never completed. Similarly, this was also the only comprehensive census ever attempted in China in the first half of the twentieth century. After the Qing, although successive governments made various attempts to count or estimate China’s vast population, the next national census did not take place until 1953, when the Communist regime had consolidated its control of the mainland.73


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Direct Enumeration Closely associated with the emphasis on accuracy was the need for direct enumeration carried out by trained census takers and experts over whom the ministry could have full control. In order to achieve this, the ministry established two official titles: investigative supervisor (diaocha zhang) and investigator (diaocha yuan). According to the census guidelines, all supervisors had to be directly appointed and sent by the ministry. The supervisor, who would be located in one of the provincial coordinating offices, was then responsible for filling the investigator positions in the prefectures and counties under his jurisdiction.74 In a few well-established urban centers such as Beijing, where the modern police force was already in place, investigator positions were staffed by police officers. Otherwise, census takers were drawn from the local and regional elites and gentry.75 For regions outside China proper or outside the traditional province system, such as Mongolia and Xinjiang, the ministry reluctantly had to rely on the local tribal and banner military leaders to compile census data, since the local communities in these regions were organized according to the existing tribal or military hierarchies (see chapter 3). Mapmaking and cadastral surveys, meanwhile, also were handled by personnel and assistants selected for their expertise and training, not their local connections. In sum, whenever possible, the ministry envisioned a transparent and systematic process of professional data gathering with minimal local interference. The direct contact between the census takers and those who were being enumerated was yet another reason the new census instilled fear and anxiety among the rural population. Previously, since the leaders of the locally run baojia registration system were responsible for compiling and reporting household information to the authorities, the old census process had been completely decentralized. In the new system, in contrast, a relatively small group of trained investigators representing the ministry was appointed to canvas all the households in an entire region. These designated investigators, although they often came from the general region, were therefore not always local in the strictest sense. During a major anticensus uprising in Lianzhou county, Guangdong province, in 1910, resentments against the authorities escalated precisely because investigators were not from local villages but instead dispatched from the county seat.76 Interestingly, at the same time, the direct contact between society and the state also created possibilities for producing a new kind of political subject. Under the new system, although household heads were responsible for filling out the census form distributed to them within ten days, designated


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investigators were required to visit all households to verify the information directly.77 In cases where illiteracy prevented the household head from fulfilling his obligation, the investigator would need to complete the form himself together with the enumerated subject. For the first time, therefore, individuals—or at least household heads—were required to report their names, native places, ages, occupations, and other livelihood information through direct interaction with the state. In this regard, as the census deployed a new grid of administrative categories to reconceptualize the demographic and territorial landscapes, individuals were put in a situation in which they were asked to reimagine and identify their own existence using the same new administrative framework. Although the effect of this subject formation was less pronounced among the villagers who rioted against the intrusion of the state, it nevertheless had a great impact on the educated elites, including the Manchu bannermen who had been enumerated separately in the past.

Legibility Also linked to the process of exact and direct enumeration was the plan to carry out the census effectively and systematically by imposing a new geography of administrative and jurisdictional boundaries. The jurisdiction of each census supervisor was divided into districts and subdistricts. Although these administrative boundaries were based upon existing ones, at times new boundaries were also introduced according to local politics or other practical considerations. This process entailed the making of new maps and charts as well as the conducting of cadastral surveys in strategic sites.78 Although the purposes of these activities were chiefly legal and administrative, they did have fiscal implications, which would eventually become the basis of grievances for many anticensus rioters. Furthermore, these newly defined and reified administrative and judicial boundaries furnished the basis for the policing, local election, self-government, and other initiatives of New Policies that were implemented or proposed.79 As part of the process, each household (including subordinate ones) was identified, marked, and numbered. Information such as the names of the administrative district and subdistrict and the street were inscribed on a metal household doorplate, or menpai, along with an assigned number (see figure 5). The numerical plate would then be hung on the exterior of the household entrance, making it directly visible to the police, officials, and residents. By imposing and reinscribing a set of administrative parameters on local communities in such a conspicuous manner, the connection between individual households and the state was elevated and prioritized.80 In this


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5. Designs of census verification form and doorplate used by the Qing government during the census campaign between 1909 and 1911.

sense, in the process of reorganizing and converting the human world into a uniform, uninterrupted, serializable, legible, and calculable spatial order parallel to that of the census grid, a new conceptual and physical relationship between the state and the population based on modern governmentality was formed. Soon after the hastily prepared census began the ministry decided to add able-bodied male (ding) and school-age children (xuetong) to the census list of enumerative categories, reinforcing its claim that the census was crucial to formulating government policies such as conscription and education reform.81 Together with the more rigid and well-defined concepts of the household and the individual, the new census was therefore an important step forward in rendering the once amorphous population legible and making it susceptible to modern disciplinary and biopolitical technologies.


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Making New Citizens As mentioned earlier, the most profound aspect of the Qing national census was its acknowledgment of the individual, in addition to the household, as most basic enumerative unit and hence the foundational building block of the social body. This new politics of representation, however, would remain nothing more than a performance unless those whom the state claimed to represent also actively embraced and participated in the new political life. The quasi-liberal order that the Qing reformers aspired to construct was predicated especially upon the existence of autonomous, free, and politically aware citizens who were not readily available as yet. The argument that the existence of political citizens was the precondition for a nation-state was best articulated by Liang Qichao, a leading liberal thinker and promoter of constitutionalism. In a series of influential essays called the “New Citizens” (“Xinmin”), published in 1902, Liang repeatedly emphasized the importance of augmenting national power by fomenting a new kind of political subject through education and political participation. Following this same line of reasoning, officials implementing the New Policies also linked the preparation for constitutionalism to the development of new textbooks and the improvement of the literacy rate. The number of people who were literate and aware of their own obligations, according to the moderate goals set by the Bureau for Constitutional Preparation, would be 2 percent and 5 percent, respectively, in 1915 and 1916.82 However small these percentages were, they clearly spelled out the aspirations of the Qing reformers and the liberal logic that they sought to construct. The census was a vital move in providing a road map for constructing this new political order. The hope of turning the new political imaginaries created by the few into aspirations shared by all nonetheless remained a major challenge. The first successful extension occurred among the large number of student trainees and assistants from modern schools and academies. As participants who played an important role in assisting in the cadastral surveys as well as in the installation of household doorplates, these motivated and educated young men from around the country often became ready converts to the new administrative techniques and the ideology of the emergent nationstate. Around this time American social thinkers, too, were placing a great emphasis on this utilitarian function of social surveys. They argued that social surveyors, by taking an active interest in promoting the survey, ensuring accuracy, disseminating survey results, and encouraging public interest in paying attention to the social problems that were being examined, would


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contribute to the realization of the measures put forward by the survey. Social surveys, in other words, were in effect a form of “true education” because they secured the participation of surveyors by turning them into more intelligent, valuable, and useful citizens.83 In his well-known and commonly cited work about scientific governance, James Scott characterizes the modern state as a political machine that constantly seeks to make the world legible, calculable, and governable. In contrast, the premodern state, he contends, was “partially blind.”84 Scott and those who have repeated his argument in various contexts are certainly correct that social scientific statecraft needs to reduce the complexity of the social world into a specific kind of abstract, calculable, and legible order for scientific intervention. However, evidence from the Qing suggests that the so-called premodern state was not more or less blind. To be sure, the Qing dynastic state did not produce the kind of information that would be required for modern governance. Still, it was fully capable of rendering its vast and diverse population and territory into a legible, knowable, and governable order in its own terms. It even demonstrated flexibility, sensibility, and sophistication in managing a complex empire by mastering multiple governing and enumerative systems simultaneously, something that is often conceptually and ideologically inconceivable for the modern nation-state, which emphasizes equality and uniformity. Or, put differently, if the dynastic state was indeed partially blind due to its inability to see the social world the way the modern state does, then the modern state, too, as I will show in the next chapter, was equally blind in its own way because of its failure to understand crucial aspects of human life that were not accessible through scientific rationality alone. For this reason, I argue that the transition from the so-called “premodern” to the “modern” should not be portrayed as the emergence of a legible and governable world. Rather, it should be understood as the shift from one form of legibility and governmental rationality to another as a result of a change in the political order.The nation-state, which no longer saw hegemony and domination under Heaven as its geopolitical goal, now aspired to independence and self-determination within the international system. This entailed mastery of the latest political technologies to construct a social body and geobody with a discrete population and well-defined boundaries that the state could claim to represent. Under this new governing logic, the human world was no longer dictated by the old cosmological order but now was subjugated to the ideologies of progress, science, and social Darwinism. As such, the old expression “seeking truth from facts” (shishi qiushi) ceased


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to be the study and authentication of classical texts in order to retrieve the truth discovered by the ancient sages. Rather, it came to be about making sense of the mechanisms of the social world through the collection and analysis of empirical contents or facts. The implications of this national census were indeed profound. By insisting on counting each individual and household directly using the same set of methods and categories, the new census essentially replaced the old hierarchical order with a new social order in which men, women, children, Han, Manchu, and so forth were all treated as equal and autonomous enumerative units that constituted the social body. The new census marked the beginning of a great social and political experiment in which intellectual elites and the governing regime searched for new ways to remake and reimagine the political community by new claims of science and reason. Even though the census was never put to use, its significance was evidenced by the widespread fear, resentment, and violent resistance it triggered, as I will show in the next chapter. And all these took place at a time when the academic social sciences had not yet started to develop in China in any significant way.


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Foolish People versus Soulstealers

Shortly before midnight on May 19, 1910, hundreds of villagers, beating drums and shouting vulgar words, burst into the home of He Mingdao.They demanded that He, an appointed census taker for the ongoing national census, hand over the register that contained their stolen souls. When the villagers found out that He had already sent the register to the county police headquarters, they began to loot and demolish his home. Fortunately, He and his family survived the mob assault. The next day He rushed to the county seat, crying and begging for help. As the county prefect dispatched police officers to investigate, the mob destroyed the homes of at least two more census takers and almost drowned the eighty-year-old mother of one of them. The furor did not stop there. Two days later more than a thousand villagers besieged and eventually destroyed a local police station.1 These events, which took place in East Village of Nanning county, Anhui province, were among the countless incidents that unfolded across the Qing empire after the launching of the new census by the Ministry of Civil Affairs (Minzhengbu) the previous year. While the particulars were different in each case, the violence in Anhui was instigated primarily by a rumor that the census takers were canvassing household information in order to steal the villagers’ souls, either to sell them to foreigners or to use them for railway construction by placing the registers underneath the railroad tracks and bridge columns. One version of the rumor alleged that for every five feet of railroad track, one soul was needed to stabilize it. Another version asserted that a soul was needed to support each bridge column.2 It is unclear how the rumors began, but the commotion caused by the soulstealing scare was widespread. In South Village of the same county, homes of at least three census takers were also vandalized. An investigator in another nearby village was severely beaten and thrown into a pond. The only census tak75


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ers who managed to survive such ordeals unscathed were those who able to surrender the registers to the angry villagers immediately. In these cases the mob quickly destroyed all the records, leaving the census takers, their families, and their property unharmed. Meanwhile, across the province, after many census takers in multiple counties were systematically attacked because of alleged soulstealing activities, others quickly tendered their resignation to the authorities. Subsequently, all affected census operations in Anhui province came to a complete halt.3 In fact, when these anticensus riots began to proliferate in 1909, the Qing regime was already experiencing a series of uprisings against the broad range of reforms collectively know as the New Policies, of which the national census was a part. Like other riots protesting the New Policies, the anticensus riots were relatively small in scale in comparison to the other major sectarian rebellions and revolutionary insurgencies happening around the same time, and thus they have not received much attention from historians. Still, the violence of these riots was brutal and the destruction they caused was widespread. In one incident in Shandong province alone, at least five or six hundred villagers were reportedly killed after several tens of thousands of them engaged in pitched battles with government troops.4 The rioters not only assaulted troops, local government militias, police officers, investigators, and local gentry; they also looted and destroyed numerous police stations, schools, academies, and churches. In some incidents they even murdered county prefects, magistrates, and foreigners.The sudden outburst of violence against the census operations, in short, highlighted the intensity of the confrontation between the census-taking authorities and the villagers. It revealed the novelty of this census, and how deeply it terrified the rural population. Whereas the previous chapter examined the motives, rationale, and bureaucratic procedures of the hitherto neglected census reform during the late Qing, this chapter analyzes the fears, resentments, and popular riots prompted by the census.5 My focus is on those who resisted the census and related state activities. Although the greatest emphasis will be on the actions and rationales of the rioting villagers, since the rural masses represented the bulk of the Chinese population at the time, I also will analyze the stiff resistance mounted by the frontier populations, which under the old imperial order had been ruled indirectly and not subjugated to such a standardized statewide enumeration. Together, these riots and acts of resistance by the rural and frontier populations reveal the novelty of the new national census and the direct contact it required between society and state. They also illustrate that although the epistemology of empirical social science enabled a new kind of social legibility and state intervention, it also


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precluded other means of understanding and engaging the human and political world that had been quite effective and useful in the past.

anticensus riots For the Qing regime, the national census represented an essential first step in remapping the social world, in creating a framework without which new government initiatives such as education reform, public health programs, and constitutionalism could not be implemented.Yet, as the incidents in Anhui reveal, millions of the people who were being enumerated experienced things differently. When the census began in full force in mid-1909, spontaneous resistance also arose in the provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi, Yunnan, Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shanxi, Shandong, Rehe, and even on the outskirts of Beijing. The response of the Ministry of Civil Affairs was to urge local authorities to step up their communications efforts, such as educating the public about the purposes of the census and the New Policies using vernacular notices.6 Often these endeavors were to no avail. The first wave of unrest began in Jiangxi province in 1909. In June alone there were more than a dozen riots that often resulted in the injury and even the death of census takers, officials, and soldiers, as well as the looting of official residences and provincial granaries. Riots continued to proliferate in the province well into September.7 In many of these incidents, which often involved up to several thousand villagers, local militias and regular troops were eventually mobilized to quell the violence. Some of the occurrences in Jiangxi were due to the widespread belief that the census would lead to new taxes and conscription.8 But many other incidents, similar to those in Anhui province, were triggered by the fear of soulstealing for the purpose of railroad construction. As in other soulstealing riots, Jiangxi rioters attacked and looted not for economic gain but to express their frustration and fear caused by the new government intrusions. The rioters’ goal was to retrieve the register books from the census takers and local authorities in order to destroy them. For many of the Jiangxi rioters, the urgency to act was further heightened by a local version of the rumor that suggested that a person would die in seven days after he or she was canvassed by a census taker.9 Indeed, historically, visions of sorcery permeated the popular culture of the lower Yangtze region. Historian Philip Kuhn has vividly documented how underlying social and economic anxieties in the second half of the eighteenth century set off an outbreak of soulstealing scares in Jiangsu province in 1768.10 In an uncanny fashion, the new census, which took place at a time


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when uncertainties were heightened by the profound social and economic changes in the late Qing, seemed to further conjure up the haunting images of soulstealing from the past. In 1910, as the census campaign intensified, so did the anticensus riots driven by fears of taxation, conscription, and soulstealing. In Zhejiang province, the district magistrate from Changxing county tried to use monetary incentives to speed up the enumerative process, only to have many locals interpret his plan as proof of a plot to steal their souls for foreigners to use in levee construction.11 Subsequently, the villagers destroyed many of the homes belonging to investigators and village heads. The rioters also looted and destroyed a number of schools, police stations, and churches across the province. In neighboring Jiangsu province, an investigator, himself a local scholar from Rugao county, mistakenly collected the actual dates of birth of the villagers, as opposed to just their ages, as he was instructed. Coincidentally, a family of three died of a contagious disease soon after his visit to them. Soon, rumors about the census taking as a way of stealing personal astrological information (shenggeng bazi) ran amok.12 Whereas the soulstealing panics were triggered by the collection of personal and household information, the fear of new tax and conscription quotas was especially instigated by the previously described installation of doorplates in front of each household during the enumerative process.13 In Daipu county of Guangdong province, for example, terrified and angry residents burned down a local academy in protest, which, ironically, led to even higher tax levies for reconstruction. Similar riots resisting the installation of household plates took place in other counties as well.14 During one such incident in Xin’an county, Guangdong province, in June and July of 1910, the riot even turned into a sort of female cult movement, as its leader, an elderly woman, reportedly attracted a large number of female followers. Not only did the rioters attack the homes of the local gentry and besiege the local police station, the group also stormed into the county district office and pressured the magistrate to recall all census takers. Even after their demands were met they continued to go from door to door to solicit financial contributions. On July 12, several thousand female rioters carrying incense congregated again in front of a local temple. After the organizer delivered a speech, they took the incense to a nearby site to worship a seven-star banner they had erected, calling up spirits to further empower their resistance. Alarmed by the seriousness of the matter, the county magistrate dispatched troops to arrest five of the organizers. Thousands of followers subsequently marched to the county seat with the hope of rescuing their leaders. Since the city gate was closed in anticipation of the


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siege, the women continued to protest outside the gate for the next two days until they were dispersed by the reinforcement troops.15

the political world of the rural masses Compared to the hundreds of well-organized and well-armed revolutionary insurgencies of the time, the spontaneous, local, and short-lived anticensus riots, however widespread they might have been, were not a serious menace to the regime. Official narratives routinely dismissed the claims of anticensus rioters, referring to them simply as “foolish people” (yumin) or “foolish villagers” (xiangyu). The urban-based newspapers, for their part, sometimes showed their sympathy for the villagers by lamenting the senseless loss of life as tragic and beyond comprehension. Nonetheless, as much as the journalists were saddened by the official blunders and corruption that had triggered some of these incidents, they, too, ridiculed the “foolish” and “barbaric” actions of the villagers, which they saw as caused by nothing more than a gross misunderstanding. Much like the officials, the intellectual elites disdained the popular beliefs of the peasants and resented the disorder caused by their “irrational” and “superstitious” behavior. In order to help the newspaper’s urban, educated readers understand these seemingly incomprehensible yet widespread actions, one article even provided an in-depth profile of the “foolish people,” depicting them as superstitious, unreasonable, irrational, and susceptible to instigation.16 Implicit in such elitist condemnation of the foolish behavior of the rural populace was a conception of history and civilization that privileged the linear and progressive historical time characteristic of the secular nation-state. Within this historical framework, as Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, those who failed to embrace the values of the Enlightenment were cast as not only “foolish” and “barbaric” but also backward and prepolitical.17 For the modernist elites, the lack of political consciousness in the rural people, or what the intellectual elite subsequently called the “peasants,” represented an obstruction to the formation and progress of the Chinese nation.They believed that if China were to enter into the modern world, it must first transform these supposedly foolish people into enlightened political citizens who could participate in the secular political life as prescribed by modern social science. In short, the elites simply did not recognize the riots as a form of political resistance. Instead, they regarded the allegations made by the villagers, as well as their violent resistance, as nothing but evidence of the villagers’ backwardness.


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It is not difficult to understand why the elites, who embraced a modernist discourse, dismissed the phenomenon of rioting villagers as no more than a matter for alarm, but it is important for us to comprehend why the census aroused such widespread fear and resistance among the rural population. As historian Luise White has noted, rumors have to be taken seriously, and sometimes even at their face value, since they often “articulate and contextualize experience with greater accuracy than eyewitness accounts.” Moreover, she contends that the more widely a rumor circulates, the more likely it is to be true because it has to conform to the laws of plausibility in some way.18 Indeed, the Chinese villagers’ suspicions were not entirely unfounded. The census was terrifying to many not because of the new technologies and procedures involved, but because of how old ideas and practices were being invoked in a new context. For example, although the ministry emphasized that the purpose of the national census was different from that of the old household registration, the new census also retained many of the old enumerative categories. The ministry even mentioned taxation and conscription in its rationale for the census, and it returned “able-bodied male” as a category soon after the census had begun.19 All of these were perhaps just residual rhetoric in a census that the ministry consciously framed as the combination of the best principles from East and West. The ministry might have felt uncomfortable abruptly abandoning enumerative categories that had existed for centuries. Still, the government had not counted the actual number of able-bodied males for tax or conscription purposes, except on limited occasions and in some particular counties, since the early Ming dynasty, in the fourteenth century. The significance of the idea of ding was even further diminished by the fiscal reforms of the mid-Qing. Its reinstatement in the new national census thus inspired concern in many people’s minds. To make matters worse, just as opportunistic criminals liked to spread rumors in order to stir up a riot for their own gain, corrupt local officials and gentry sometimes used the census to extort surcharges. The ministry itself was quite aware of the bullying behavior of these local elites. It urged census takers to act professionally and canvass the households in a “calm and polite” manner. It also specifically forbade extortion of any kind, yet it was nearly impossible to eradicate such problems.20 For instance, when a circuit intendant named Zuo Shaozuo was sent to investigate the fourmonth-long anticensus uprising involving tens of thousands of rioters in Lianzhou county in northwestern Guangdong, he quickly discovered a pattern of inappropriate behavior and corruption on the part of regional and local officials and elites. Even though Zuo himself worked diligently to co-


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ordinate military campaigns against the rioters, in his personal diary he also repeatedly blamed corrupt officials and bullying local elites for causing problems in the first place.21 A further source of trouble derived from the fact that, although local authorities were instructed to use the budget originally set aside for the now abolished baojia system to cover the costs of the new census operation, the scale and complexity of the new census required a lot more resources. Without adequate financial support from the already bankrupt central government to implement the census and other initiatives of New Policies, new local taxes to fund these projects were often inevitable.22 Such was the case in poverty-stricken Yunnan province, where an uprising was triggered by the new taxes imposed by local officials to fund the manufacturing of doorplates. Again, in adjacent and equally poor Guangxi province, several thousand rioters were massacred by the suppressing forces after they rose up against new local levies associated with the New Policies.23 Indeed, even Zuo Shaozuo himself secretly admitted in his diary that new taxes would probably be introduced for various initiatives of the New Policies after the installation of doorplates was complete. He subsequently concluded that the rioters who resisted the installation of doorplates in Guangdong were “foolish people who are not all that foolish.”24 If the rioting villagers who believed that the new census would lead to new taxes and conscription were not really foolish, then what about those who accused the census takers of stealing souls and those who invoked spiritual powers to fight the government? As newspaper articles and official documents show, officials and educated elites seemed to have had no other way to respond aside from portraying the rural masses as barbaric, irrational, backward, and, above all, as modernity’s others waiting to be civilized. Yet the rural masses, for their part, were far from standing outside history. The anticensus riots were in many ways a modern political response to the intrusion of the modern state and to colonial exploitation.25 In her study of rumors about vampires in colonial Africa, Luise White notes that hearsay and rumors triggered by colonialism were themselves social imaginaries embedded with complex political meanings. As such, rumors were significant stories not because they were either true or false, but because they were stories being “told with truths.”26 After all, in addition to public concern about the possibility of new taxes and conscription, there was widespread discontent about the trustworthiness and competence of the Qing regime during this time even among local and provincial elites. After the humiliating Sino-Japanese War, the failed 1898 reform movement, and the disastrous Boxer Uprising, much of the good faith and commit-


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ment to the regime formerly demonstrated by the local and provincial elites was gone. By the turn of the twentieth century it was unclear if the original mantra of the Self-Strengthening Movement (ziqiang yundong)— namely, “Chinese learning for the essence, Western learning for utility”— was still relevant. Once upon a time, Chinese reformers had believed that the use of Western cannons and gunboats could preserve the integrity of Chinese institutions. By now, however, most of them realized that it was Chinese institutions and bureaucratic culture that were in dire need of renovation. In a climate where the ideas of progress and civilization were firmly linked to discourses of race and social Darwinism, many nationalistic Chinese reformers even began to develop strong anti-Manchu sentiments and to wonder whether the Manchus were capable of remaking China. To the regime’s credit, despite its many problems, its New Policies reform, however imperfect, were as radical and progressive as could be imagined.27 Within the span of a few years, constitutional monarchy, local self-government, a new police force, a new legal code, and a new national census, among other initiatives, were implemented or at least proposed. Even the centuries-old civil examination, which arguably was the soul of the old Confucian state, was abruptly abolished in 1905, resulting in the old academies and curricula being replaced by new ones.Yet, ironically, for many local and provincial elites who had already lost faith in the Qing regime and would rather strengthen China’s sovereignty on their own terms, these initiatives only intensified deep-seated suspicions of the motives and competence of the regime. Contingent factors aside, a fateful element that catalyzed the revolution in October 1911 was precisely the political backlash caused by the government’s attempt to nationalize the provincial railway systems by using foreign loans. Many provincial leaders and investors, who had been responsible for the development of those railways as part of the Self-Strengthening Movement, were dismayed by the government’s aggressive grab for power after decades of political decentralization. They also suspected that the government was selling out China’s interests to foreigners. Of the various attempts to recover China’s railway rights from foreign powers, the local activism in the lower Yangtze region was among the most engaged and vocal. In Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces, according to historian Mary Rankin, the movement to stall the government’s attempt to use foreign loans to finance railways projects attracted not only male elites, but also urban residents from all walks of life, including even beggars. These anti-Manchu and antiimperialist movements, according to Rankin, constituted a form of popular nationalism that competed with state nationalism.28 To be sure, the rural populace did not share the vision of reformers or


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revolutionaries, or even that of urban commoners. They did not understand the political language used by the anti-Manchu Chinese nationalists who accused the regime of selling China out to foreigners. They were not nostalgic about the vanishing “essence” of Chinese culture in the wake of the colonial encounter. But, as the bottom stratum of the population, they were the ones most vulnerable to the burden caused by the Qing’s military defeats, political concessions, and mounting war debts. They also felt tremendously insecure as a result of the deteriorating social and economic conditions caused by the continuous advance of industrial capitalism, the penetration of missionary activities into the hinterland, and the emergence of new technologies associated with the foreign powers. Their profound distrust and resentment of Western encroachment were epitomized in the popular belief that Westerners, especially missionaries, were agents of unknown evil forces.29 Since Westerners, especially the missionaries who ventured into the hinterland and lived among the Chinese, were often targets of violence, it became standard practice for the government to make an extra effort to protect the safety of foreigners whenever local riots occurred in order to show its respect for international law after the embarrassment of the xenophobic Boxer Uprising. After several local churches and foreign residences were destroyed by anticensus rioters in Lianzhou county of Guangdong, for instance, missionaries were allowed to take refuge in the gunboats offered by the Qing navy.30 Such arrangements only confirmed the villagers’ suspicions that authorities were collaborating with the foreign devils, further detaching the state from the world of popular culture that the rural populace inhabited. It was no coincidence that accusations about the use of stolen souls for railway and other infrastructure work were heard in areas where activism to forestall foreign control of China’s railway rights was the strongest. Faced with a heightened sense of uncertainty and discontent, politically marginalized villagers formed their own ideas using the indigenous cultural resources available to them. These included not only ideas about tax and conscription associated with the old statecraft, but also the popular belief in spirits and deities. For the lower Yangtze region, this included the fear of soulstealing and other supernatural forces. One way or another, the rural masses took action against those they considered to be selling them out, attacking the individuals and institutions they thought to be conspiring against them, exposing the alleged exploitative schemes hidden in the unknown world, and calling up deities and spirits for self-empowerment. If the rapid circulation of rumors showed the extent to which the new census and other initiatives of the New Policies were felt, discussed, resented,


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and feared among villagers, the actions triggered by these rumors suggested the particular ways in which villagers made sense of the larger forces that colluded against them. When confronted with aggressive canvassing methods, intrusive questions, or the installation of doorplates, villagers quickly associated the unfamiliarity of the census with new and fearful technologies such as the modern railways, bridges, and levees that symbolized another kind of uncertainty. In short, the rioting villagers were hardly naïve; they knew quite well that these interlocutors were not acting alone. In their own way, the villagers connected the dots between the foreign devils and their mighty technologies, between the alleged soulstealers and the authorities. Herein lies a crucial difference between the soulstealing riots at the beginning of the twentieth century and the sorcery panic that took place in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. In the earlier era, the state played a role in mediating between villagers and a supernatural realm that was represented in the seen world by sinister “others.” Accused soulstealers were beggars and traveling monks who were outsiders in local communities. As strangers, they were singled out as suspected transgressors from the spirit world. The Neo-Confucian state, after all, acknowledged the presence of the supernatural world and presented itself as capable of defending the people from unwanted transgressions from the unseen world. From the worship of Heaven and Earth by the emperor to the sacrifices made to the City God by the local magistrate, imperial authorities constantly depicted themselves as coadjutors to their corresponding supernatural counterparts. By admitting the supernatural into the realm of politics, the imperial bureaucracy essentially positioned itself at the border that divided the visible and invisible worlds. As Philip Kuhn has shown, during the sorcery scare of 1768, monks and soulstealers were all potential competitors of the state.31 Therefore, even though the Qianlong Emperor and his bureaucracy eventually determined that there was no credible evidence that any soulstealing had occurred, the judicial process itself reinforced the position of the state as the ultimate adjudicator of both the seen and unseen worlds. The dynamics were vastly different in the soulstealing crisis of the late 1900s, however. During this new frenzy, the alleged soulstealers were elites and gentry from the same or nearby communities. Even though some of these elites might be hated for their previous bullying behaviors, many were respected members of the local communities.The allegations that these state representatives had lost their humanity and become transgressors from the spiritual world on the one hand, and the outright dismissal of these allegations as superstitious by the educated elites and the state on the other, suggest that a new fault line had emerged in the Chinese political terrain. On


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one side of this divide were villagers who used indigenous resources to make sense of and organize collective actions against the intrusion of the state. The authorities, operating from the other side, were increasingly detached from the supernatural realm to which they had once claimed access.The idea of a census, after all, was grounded on the premise that the human world, now increasingly seen as a social body, was an empirical reality that existed outside the state. In order to govern effectively, the government had to undertake studies of the social body by collecting and analyzing social facts. Thus, instead of engaging the empirical and the supernatural simultaneously by presenting itself as the adjudicator of both worlds as it once did, the late Qing regime was only interested in examining and intervening in the empirical world using a set of standardized and presumably scientific techniques. The spirits and deities, which made so much sense in the lives of the villagers, were relevant to the government only as social facts that testified to the existence of a prepolitical world of the rural masses that needed to be modernized. The drastic retreat from the supernatural realm did not necessary reflect the thinking of those who carried out the orders on the ground, however, as it was revealed in the case of circuit intendant Zuo Shaozuo’s suppression of the anticensus riots in Guangdong. After nearly three months of protracted battles, Zuo and his troops were able to advance slowly along the waterways using small gunboats. As his campaign gained traction, he predicted and lamented that many rioters would eventually be killed, and that their “innocent souls would be wandering in the wilderness.”32 He nonetheless was determined to press on, reassuring himself that any further proliferation of the insurgency would be an even greater disaster. In other words, although the spiritual world had become irrelevant in the political imaginaries of the modern state, Zuo’s passing reference to the wandering souls was a reminder that the unseen spiritual world was always there to haunt the believers and nonbelievers alike.

enumerating and civilizing the frontier populations The new census did more than just strive to enumerate directly and accurately all individuals and households within China proper. From the outset, officials from the Ministry of Civil Affairs also intended to extend the same census scheme to the entire population it claimed to represent and govern. This naturally comprehended the non-Han population, including banner


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troops and their families residing both inside and outside China proper. Part of the rationale for extending the census to the entire population, including residents of the frontiers, was the longstanding policy of strengthening the frontiers through migration, development, and direct rule that had begun in the second half of the nineteenth century. To that end, the Qing government had been trying to remedy its deficient knowledge of the region by launching a number of frontier surveys that involved territorial studies, analyses of economic and natural resources, and military reconnaissance. But after the turn of the twentieth century, as the Qing also increasingly sought to refashion itself as a modern nation by utilizing the latest political technologies and conceptual frameworks, the national census was no longer just a matter of acquiring knowledge of the region. It was also a matter of acquiring the ability to articulate territorial claims using a globally accepted political language. The new census, therefore, was a proclamation that the frontier region was an inalienable part of the social body and geobody of the nation. Furthermore, by standardizing its knowledge about the frontier, the Qing could potentially subjugate the frontier population to the same set of civilizing and modernizing initiatives as the rest of the population. Significantly, by insisting on counting each individual and household directly and separately regardless of ethnicity or social status, the late Qing national census essentially threatened to break down the hierarchal empire and rebuild it from the ground up based on the principles of abstract equality and autonomy among individuals as well as among households. For many frontier elites, this was seen as a challenge to their longstanding local social fabric and political structure, as well as considered to pose the ultimate threat of direct social intervention by the central government.The contrast between the implied new sociopolitical order and the existing one was quite startling. Until now, the frontier regions had experienced different degrees of indirect domination by the Qing, and their relationships with the Manchu court had often been ambiguous and complicated. Tibet, for example, had entered into tributary relationships with more than one empire and was therefore under a form of suzerainty with the Qing.The Xinjiang and Mongolia regions similarly enjoyed a high degree of autonomy and kept their own sociopolitical structures largely intact. For centuries the Qing regime could manage these frontier areas only indirectly, through the Office of Frontier Affairs (Lifanyuan, renamed the Lifanbu in 1906). This office, first established in the early seventeenth century to serve as a liaison with the various Mongol tribes, soon began to coordinate other frontier groups after the Qing had fully conquered Ming China and advanced into the western regions. The recently established northwestern province of Xinjiang is one loca-


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tion in which the changing politics of enumeration in the frontier regions can be seen. Although the area officially had been integrated into the Qing empire in 1884, the provincial administrative infrastructure had not yet been extended to every corner of the province at that time. The Yili region, located in the northern tip of Xinjiang, which had been caught up in the border disputes between Russia and the Qing in the 1870s and 1880s as a consequence of the Muslim Rebellion, was precisely such a frontier contact zone in which the Qing had difficulty projecting its firm control. When the Qing reconquered the area in 1881, several thousand Kazakh warriors and their family dependents switched sides again and rejoined the Qing empire. Noting that the “Kazakhs are rough people,” the central government quickly reincorporated the returnees into the existing system of indirect rule and instructed the Office of Frontier Affairs to enumerate and regulate them vigorously. At the same time, while the government wanted to ensure that these former rebels abided by Qing law, it also tried to show its respect for the local heritage and political authority. Under this arrangement, a pyramid system of household heads (huzhang) with different levels of authority and obligation was designated for every fifty, one hundred, and one thousand households, respectively. As the influx of Kazakhs continued in the subsequent decades, new household heads were added to ensure the proper management of the two Kazakh tribes, which, by around 1908, had a combined population of nearly nine thousand households.33 Despite the steady population growth, the Qing government continued to rely on the household heads to enumerate and manage the local population in order to avoid stirring up unnecessary political agitation. Since much of the frontier region was still under indirect rule in 1909, the Qing authorities had tremendous difficulty in implementing its policies in the frontier region. In fact, the Ministry of Civil Affairs had no choice but to continue to rely on the Office of Frontier Affairs to serve as mediator between the central government and the local elites. Still, both ministries were pressuring local tribal leaders to apply a standardized national scheme to enumerate their people.34 For local elites, this proposal to conceptualize the frontier peoples in the same way as the population within China proper was profound and troubling. Instead of enumerating the local population in the frontiers according to the existing political structures, the new census would prioritize the household and the individual as the basic enumerative units. In so doing, the new census would, symbolically, at least, break down the existing hierarchical military structure and social fabric and integrate the frontier inhabitants into the larger social body made of abstract but equal and autonomous households and individuals.


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In spite of the aspirations of the Qing regime to impose its new administrative blueprint on the frontier regions, the historical legacy of indirect rule proved to be a difficult obstacle to overcome. Handicapped by a lack of direct authority and the power to implement their policies, the central government had little choice but to rely on the established frontier leadership— local overlords, tribal leaders, and banner commanders—to enumerate the frontier population.The Ministry of Civil Affairs could only supervise these operations remotely and indirectly through the Office of Frontier Affairs. Such an indirect arrangement gave local elites the perfect opportunity to resist and delay what they deemed intrusive policies. As a result, although the new census was relatively successful in areas where provincial officials could undertake the census operations directly, this was not the case in the remoter regions, including Yili, where self-rule was still the norm. In these cases, demands by the central government to break down population statistics according to the new census template—namely, in terms of households, men, and women—were repeatedly ignored by defiant tribal leaders. The Kazakh leaders instead kept submitting only the aggregate number of households, as they had before, even though they were repeatedly given specific examples to follow by the Office of Frontier Affairs and the Ministry of Civil Affairs.35 In other words, even if the new census did not aim to dismantle and replace the old census immediately but instead worked alongside it, the new census already anticipated a new social relationship that would challenge the existing way of life on the frontiers.The same problem also occurred with the banner populations in other frontier regions, where the Qing government had to rely on banner commanders to carry out the census. Most of these banner commanders also refused to submit census data according to the requested format, if they submitted any data at all. Mongolia, in particular, lagged far behind the other regions in the census-taking process. Passive resistance certainly helps to explain why the Qing often failed to enumerate its frontier populations.When the Qing abdicated in 1912, census taking was largely completed in most provinces, but census reform and the civilizing mission in the frontier regions were nowhere near completion.36 The national census carried out in the final years of the Qing was a first step toward the construction of a new sociopolitical order at the onset of China’s modern political upheavals. Certainly, sophisticated census methods had already been established by the Ming and Qing regimes prior to the twentieth century for tax and security purposes. In the century leading up to imperial China’s unprecedented internal and external crises, the baojia household registration under the Qing became even more rigorous and


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focused, making it perhaps one of the most invasive censuses in the early modern world. Yet not only was the quality of late imperial censuses highly uneven, but these censuses also covered only the Han Chinese residing in China proper. Manchus, Mongols, Muslims, and scores of others with different levels of privilege were counted using different templates and incorporated into the empire through different ruling and governing systems. This was because the Qing empire was composed of different population groups with their own historical memories and political relationships with the regime. In contrast, the census from 1909 to 1911 sought to represent and govern the entire population in a uniform manner, and it did so particularly through the idea of citizenship and representational politics rather than through the variegated mediations of ethnic and political hierarchies, local lordships, or even supernatural forces. In this regard, although the national census retained some ideas and categories from the older imperial censuses, ultimately it was a radical departure from them. The remapping of the empire as a nation-state and the conversion of imperial subjects to national citizens entailed a new kind of knowledge production that emphasized direct, consistent, and comprehensive enumeration. In association with this mode of knowledge production was also a new style of reasoning that tried to make sense of the human world through abstraction, categorization, comparison, and statistics. In short, what the national census strove to construct was a legible and calculable population made of abstract individuals and households that were susceptible to disciplinary and biopolitical interventions such as policing, surveillance, education, public health, and the like that were being spelled out or at least hinted at in the census guidelines. In addition, even though the idea of the social was still not articulated and theorized in great detail, the new social relationship described by the national census certainly anticipated the emergence and politicization of the social in decades to come. This new rationality of government displaced the morality of the NeoConfucian multiethnic empire that emphasized not just classical knowledge and an all-encompassing universal civilization, but also imperial patriarchy, ethnic hierarchies, and competing lordships. In its place was a new ethical order associated with the global system of nation-states, industrial capitalism, and social Darwinism. In the process, the new rationality also simultaneously shut out the supernatural realm that was an inherent part of everyday life within the imperial state.37 In other words, in spite of its promise to use observable phenomena to make invisible social mechanisms legible, the new social scientific statecraft actually lost the ability to gain access to aspects of the human world that the old statecraft had been able to


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incorporate. Put differently, what could not be seen or counted by the social scientific ways of seeing did not really count. The riots and resistance against the census by the rural masses and the non-Han frontier elites under the Qing’s indirect rule revealed the fears and resentments harbored by a significant segment of the population. Without sharing the epistemology of social science or participating in the political assumption of the nation-state, the villagers and non-Han elites found the so-called legible, rational, and commonsensical order that the modern state sought to construct utterly unintelligible or irrelevant. They continued to make sense of the world around them using the cultural and political frames of references that they knew best. They revolted against the census that seemed to embody the physical exploitation, supernatural harm, and general hardship that ultimately were caused by colonial encroachments, state intrusion, and the advent of global capitalism. In that sense, these riots and resistance can also be understood as protests against the hegemonic order of modernity that aimed at challenging and replacing all other competing forms of temporality, experience, and loyalty. Nonetheless, although riots such as these certainly might have further destabilized the already agitated local communities, they did not directly contribute to the revolutionary uprisings and downfall of the Qing dynasty a year later. The anger harbored in the local communities would be unleashed en masse on a later day. The Revolution of 1911 that overthrew the Qing was a very different kind of uprising; it was a political revolution driven by urban-based political elites who, not unlike those who sought to reform and preserve the dynasty, held the same contemptuous view of those who resisted the civilizing initiatives of the state. Thus, although the revolution overthrew the old dynastic regime, the underlying conception of time and space that the Republic sought to establish actually displayed a remarkable degree of continuity with the goals of the late Qing. Indeed, for Qing reformers and Republican revolutionaries alike, the anticensus riots were nothing but a vindication that the prerequisite for China’s revival was to educate the “foolish” and barbaric people into enlightened national citizens for the emerging nation. The downfall of the Qing dynasty in 1912 marked the beginning of another phase in which the intellectual elites frenetically raced to civilize the Chinese social world.


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The Nationalization of Facts and the Affective State

On April 15, 1932, the archaeological fieldworkers from the national government who were working about a kilometer east of Wuguang village in Anyang county, Henan province, knew that they were onto something important when they observed the soil color as well as the ceramic remains nearby.1 They had every reason to believe that this was one of the many sites that could help historians confirm the existence of the Shang dynasty (1576–1046 b.c.e.) with concrete evidence, and hence ennoble Chinese history by extending it further back in time.2 But as they began to dig a tenmeter-long trench in order to further assess the site, an intimidating mob led by an influential local landlord with the surname Xu arrived. The furious landlord accused the fieldworkers of intentionally destroying his ancestral tombs and demanded that they leave his premises immediately. A few days later, Li Ji, an archaeologist and the field director, invited local officials to mediate the conflict and tried to explain to Xu that they were merely conducting scientific research and had no intention of damaging his ancestral tombs. Xu, however, was not convinced; he subsequently filed a lawsuit against Li and accused him of conspiring with local officials to steal treasures from his family tombs. The evidence, according to Xu, was that the excavated trench was only “a few steps” away from one of the ancestral tombs. Li and his colleagues, for their part, contended that Xu’s accusations were groundless and insisted that the site was quite a distance from said tombs. Indeed, they were not unaware of the ramifications of intruding on someone’s ancestral tombs since geomancy (fengshui xue), an elaborate system of knowledge that claimed that the location of a house or tomb had significant influence over the fortune of one’s family, had been a popular cultural practice for centuries. Any attempt to interfere with an ancestral tomb, even by the Nationalist government, which vigorously preached secularism, would 91


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The Nationalization of Facts

be regarded as a serious criminal offense.3 For that reason Li’s team claimed that they had always been careful in their excavations in order to avoid unnecessary confrontations with local residents. Facing a legal challenge, the Institute of History and Philology (IHP) of the Academia Sinica, the sponsor of the archaeological survey, decided that the landlord’s bullying must be stopped and filed a countersuit against him for defaming government officials and field researchers. In its own defense, IHP cited an ordinance on the preservation of ancient artifacts that had been passed just two years earlier, according to which “any collection and excavation of ancient artifacts must be conducted by academic institutions that are directly under the jurisdiction of the central or local government.” Although the infrastructure of the Academia Sinica was still very rudimentary in these early days, researchers of IHP were highly conscious of the IHP’s status as part of the nation’s highest academic body for carrying out “scientific research” (kexue yanjiu). IHP researchers therefore asserted that they had “state-sanctioned privileges” to carry out archaeological excavations, including even those of ancient tombs. In fact, by the time this incident occurred, the IHP team had excavated more than twenty ancient tombs. The institute maintained that its right to excavate tombs was similar to the right to conduct an “autopsy of the human body in medicine”; they were scientific inquiries with which no one had a right to interfere. As for the landlord’s family tombs, the institute expressed no interest in them, claiming that the tombs’ existence suggested that whatever was below them would have been tainted and was consequently of “no academic value.” To further debunk the landlord’s claim that everything above the ground should be considered his property and that only artifacts below were the property of the state, the institute, again quoting the new preservation codes, stated that “ancient artifacts buried under the ground as well as those extending to the surface from below the ground are all properties of the state.” It further argued that because the excavation team was carrying out an “important mission of advancing the nation’s academic research,” the action taken by local authorities to protect them was entirely appropriate.4 Since the IHP had both the law and local authorities on its side, it seems that, as far as the litigation was concerned, the overwhelming quantity of evidence and arguments marshaled against the noisy landlord was an overreaction. However, this legal dispute should be understood in the larger operational context of the institute. Since its establishment in 1928, the IHP’s survey projects had suffered many setbacks due to the ongoing military conflicts between the Nationalists and local warlords as well as between the


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Nationalists and the Japanese. In fact, the Anyang survey itself would be interrupted again in 1937 when a full-scale war between China and Japan erupted. The need to have firm military and administrative control over the survey areas was made obvious by a recent series of acts of local resistance against the institute. In 1928, when the IHP first began the Anyang archaeological survey, a prominent local scholar from the region immediately insisted that any survey of the area must be conducted only by the locals themselves.The dispute soon escalated into a major quarrel between the central and local governments over the question of property rights, and it was eventually settled only after the Nationalist regime aggressively stepped up its control over this newly acquired territory.5 But the confrontations ignited by the IHP also reflected a deeper disjuncture between the old and new paradigms of knowledge acquisition. Specifically, while the IHP approached the site as a source of valuable scientific evidence that might testify to the history of the Chinese nation and of social evolution, local antiques collectors and dealers were interested in searching for antiques (guwu). Doctors of traditional medicine, on the other hand, who referred to the oracle bones used for divination by the legendary Shang ruling class as “dragon bones” (longgu), were interesting in obtaining these bones to grind into a powder for medical use. Meanwhile, Neo-Confucian scholars who practiced evidential research were primarily interested in the texts inscribed on these oracle bones for philological studies. Of the utmost urgency to the IHP, then—even more important than examining what it regarded as scientific evidence—was to protect and preserve the integrity of these sites from potential contamination and destruction by what it characterized as “illegitimate” users. As part of its self-legitimatizing project, the institute also launched education campaigns to persuade the public that its fieldworkers were different from the notorious antiques dealers who routinely stole burial artifacts for profit.6 It specifically argued that the mission of the institute was to preserve and collect scientific evidence and “national” (guoyou) properties that could verify the historical existence of the Chinese nation.7 In short, what was really at stake was more than the IHP’s rights to excavate; it was the legitimacy of a new paradigm of the production of scientific knowledge, as well as the authority of the emerging nation-state. In this chapter I explore the institutional and field practices through which empirical evidence of the nation was produced in the period of National Reconstruction (1928–37), when the Nationalists strove to reestablish themselves as the legitimate leaders of a national government after years of warlordism and factional politics under the new Republic. My first subject of


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inquiry is the symbiotic relationship between survey-based social science and the nation. Particularly, I argue that while survey-based social science helped to produce the nation by constructing facts about its history, culture, people, land, and so forth, it also needed constantly to invoke both the idea of the nation and the idea of science to establish its authority and legitimacy. The chapter will begin with a brief examination of the intellectual movement known as National Studies (Guoxue) and its fate. National Studies practitioners deployed the claims of science and nation to formulate a partially survey-based knowledge paradigm that was meant to be an alternative to the version of science and reason that originated in the West. The movement was quickly dismissed by scholars who prioritized the universality of science over this knowledge paradigm that sought to create a sanctuary for indigeneous scholarship. This universalist approach, which was driven a self-understanding of being more scientific and placed greater emphasis on the systematic collection of empirical evidence or so-called scientific surveys, ultimately became the prominent paradigm of the production of social scientific knowledge shared by intellectual elites from a broad political spectrum. The second line of inquiry delves deeper into what these intellectuals actually meant by a “scientific survey.” In spite of the fact that the rhetoric of science and the rhetoric of nation were mutually reinforcing in these survey projects, reason alone was not enough to produce credible knowledge and scientific claims. I contend that in addition to the motivation provided by nationalism and the practical value of governmental support, other nonscientific factors such as personal conviction, rhetorical strategies, and the ability to endure hardship were all indispensable factors in the production of social scientific facts. The final part of the chapter, therefore, is an analysis of the crucial role of emotion and sentiment in the production of social facts. The sources for this chapter were produced primarily by the Institute of History and Philology and the Research Institute of Land Economics (RILE). On the surface, neither of these state-sponsored institutes seems to have been responsible for conducting research directly related to the social and population questions. Nonetheless, they are the focus of my inquiry for three main reasons. First, unlike in our highly professionalized academic disciplines today, where the objects of studies are often well defined, “society” remained a rather novel and elusive concept in China during the first few decades of the twentieth century. As a result, by “social survey research,” Republican intellectuals often meant to include more than simply issues that were narrowly confined to the domain of sociology. For them, studies of eth-


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nic minorities and economic activities, history, philology, and archaeology were no less central to the social question. At the very least, these academic fields were part of the discursive processes whereby the Chinese social body was being demarcated and constructed. Not surprisingly, as we shall see, many social investigators would be involved in multiple types of surveys during their careers. And, as a matter of fact, the IHP even formally incorporated ethnology, along with history and philology, as one of its three main research areas in 1934. Second, since the political boundaries of the Chinese nation remained vulnerable to territorial incursions by the industrial powers, a top priority for the Republican cultural and political elites was to defend and sustain the territoriality of the social body and geobody of the nation. Consequently, even before they set out to collect facts about the population for governing purposes, they first needed to produce empirical evidence to define who was included in the social body. As we shall see in the surveys conducted by the IHP and RILE, philological, archaeological, and land economic surveys were often used to reinforce the boundaries of the geobody by converting ethnic minorities in the frontier regions into members of the social body. Finally, both institutes left behind a large quantity of primary materials that allowed me access to detailed information about the everyday processes of survey practices, information that is rather difficult to discern from the materials available from other surveys. Even though the Chinese social survey movement was not a monolithic process, but instead involved competing political parties, conceptual categories, and survey methods, these records of day-to-day field operations, which document the sentiments, emotions, and thoughts of countless little-known fieldworkers, are important testimonies of how facts were produced and how facticity was understood by the practitioners, not just the theoreticians. These materials, in other words, open an invaluable window for us to examine a facet of the profound epistemological shift that took place during a crucial moment when Chinese elites were searching for new ways to understand, defend, and rebuild the fragmented nation.

the rise of national studies Even before the Nationalists launched the Northern Expedition (1926–28) to reinstitute themselves as the legitimate leaders of the national government, Chinese intellectuals were already searching for ways to reestablish a sense of cultural and political certainty in the wake of the collapse of the


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Qing dynasty and the failure of the 1911 Revolution. Two presumptions particularly stood out in their quest for a new and stable order. The first was their acceptance of the nation-state as the highest form of political and ethnic order and their belief that China must reconstitute itself as a modern nation within the global system of nation-states. The second was their complete conviction that science, because of its presumed transhistorical and transcultural qualities, offered the proper method for rebuilding a foundation for political discourse, even though what they meant by “science” was contested and never properly defined. Chinese intellectuals’ attempt to engage the categories of “science” and “nation” in the early 1920s was best illustrated in a wave of spontaneous but loosely connected movements known as National Studies, which aimed to establish a new epistemological foundation for the nation. In many ways, these movements were offshoots of the ongoing iconoclastic intellectual upheavals of the New Culture and May Fourth movements that began in the previous decade. Yet the idea of National Studies was not an outright rejection of the Chinese past, but rather an attempt at “rearranging and systematizing the national heritage” (zhengli guogu).8 Under this program, the classification of knowledge that had previously been canonized by the Qing regime was replaced by a supposedly more systematic and rational scheme that heavily incorporated Western academic disciplinary divisions. According to most of the proposed schemes of reclassification, for example, the study of classical Chinese texts was reduced to one discipline among the various natural, human, and social sciences. In a sense, what its advocates did was superimpose the idea of National Studies as an overarching structure that could simultaneously account for both the Chinese and Western knowledge systems without eroding the significance of the former or privileging the latter. Despite their denials, scholars of National Studies were heavily indebted to the late Qing scholars who sought to defend the core values of Chinese civilization by introducing the binary construct of substance (ti) vis-à-vis function (yong) as a way to account for the significance of both classical learning and Western learning.9 The twentieth-century proponents of National Studies nationalized and rearticulated the substance of Chinese civilization as the Chinese “national essence” (guocui). National Studies scholars, most of whom were trained in the West, sought to reframe the indigenous system of knowledge so that they could call it “science” without entirely rejecting the past. They were thus in a rather paradoxical postion, as many of them did not possess an adequate understanding and appreciation of the old knowledge system to conduct an overhaul of it. For example, when Hu Shi, an American-trained positivist and a


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key advocate of National Studies, joined the faculty of Peking University, he was surrounded by some of the most prominent scholars of evidential research in the country. By his own admission, he constantly felt insecure because of his relatively inferior training in Neo-Confucian scholarship. Nonetheless, like many modern intellectuals, he carefully carved out an intellectual space for National Studies by developing new agendas, research programs, professional networks, and institutional apparatuses. Precisely because of its intention to accommodate both the old and the new, National Studies was in many ways a hybrid knowledge. For example, primarily text-oriented evidential research continued even though National Studies scholars also acknowledged the importance of empirical evidence outside the text. As a result, scientific surveys were added as a complementary approach to get at a new realm of facts that had previously been ignored. This was particularly true for knowledge fields that were identified as practical knowledge, such as history, geography, and geology. In 1922, for example, the editorial of the inaugural issue of the Journal of the Historical and Geographical Society contended that science and practical learning had long been neglected in China. The journal identified survey and evidential research as two complementary methods of empirical inquiry that would lead to overcoming these deficiencies, and the journal featured the methods prominently in two independent sections.10 If the method of National Studies remained hybrid, so did the knowledge that it sought to discover. The continuous emphasis on the study of classical texts using evidential scholarship endorsed the belief that there existed a realm of knowledge that was accessible only through indigenous methods. At the same time, practitioners of National Studies also believed that the indigenous knowledge system, however unique, must be made compatible with the ideas of social Darwinism and the progressive view of history characteristic of Western knowledge. The inaugural editorial in the Journal of the Historical and Geographical Society further asserted that the objectives of historical and geographical studies were to “demonstrate the evolution of mankind in terms of temporal continuity” as well as “the relationship between mankind and nature in terms of the extensiveness of space.”11 Most of the journal’s subsequent survey studies operated within this overarching scheme of Western civilizational discourse. As much as the National Studies movement was indebted to the late Qing binary paradigm of embracing Chinese learning as the essence and Western learning as the function, those who identified themselves as practitioners hardly saw themselves as defenders of the establishment. Quite the contrary, in order to fashion their own identity as adherents of the new


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approach, they established new institutions to legitimize their claims and painted those still trying to cling to the old approach as cultural conservatives. At the center of the movement was the School of National Studies at Peking University. Established in 1922, the school was the first Westernstyle academic research institution in China and was an innovator in its organization, curriculum, and the dissemination of its findings.12 It was subdivided into a number of specialized “research groups” that used scientific surveys to study vernacular languages, archaeology, local customs, folksongs, and so forth.13 Among these projects, the ethnological surveys of folksongs and customs by Gu Jiegang and others were particularly upheld as an exemplar of fine National Studies scholarship. Trained primarily in the classical tradition, Gu was interested in history and archaeology. Instead of trying to retrieve moral wisdom from the sages, however, Gu was highly skeptical of the authenticity of the textual sources and questions written by generations of scholars before him. This approach of studying the past through “doubting antiquity” (yigu) was not drastically different from NeoConfucian evidential research even though twentieth-century practitioners no longer regarded the past as the source of moral authority in any way. Nonetheless, the use of ethnological surveys to supplement existing historical and archaeological research, the elevation of the culture of everyday life as an object of study, the new institutional structure, the dissemination of knowledge through modern printed media, and, above all, the invocation of the rhetoric of science and nation were key elements that distinguished National Studies from Neo-Confucian scholarship. Riding the tide of the ongoing iconoclastic intellectual upheaval, the National Studies movement quickly spread and gained currency, especially among younger scholars. Other universities soon followed the lead of Peking University and established their own schools of National Studies. Subsequently, many of the research findings, including survey results, were published in academic newsletters, journals, and books developed specifically for that purpose for an emerging nationwide scholarly audience. But unlike the relatively large-scale and collaborative projects at Peking University, most other surveys were small and unsystematic. There was also little discussion or theorization of what the idea of a survey really meant aside from the ritual of visiting the field. Still, if anything, the uncoordinated and spontaneous surveys associated with National Studies slowly contributed to the creation of a new discursive space and firmly established the survey as a legitimate or even necessary mode of producing knowledge for the nation.


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the scientific survey Despite its rapid proliferation, National Studies soon met with criticism.This criticism did not come from the cultural conservatives who were under attack from National Studies scholars, but rather from researchers who championed the importance of science, objectivity, and empirical observation. Whereas scholars who pursued National Studies clung to the idea that there were elements of Chinese culture that required a unique mode of knowledge inquiry, their challengers were uncompromising promoters of the idea of science as a universal mode of knowledge production. For lack of a better term, this latter approach can simply be called “the scientific survey.” By using this term, however, I do not mean to suggest that I share their contention that their methods were more scientific or objective, merely that they distinguished themselves from their predecessors by vigorously calling for the use of a unitary scientific approach to examine all evidence. One of the harshest critics of National Studies was Fu Sinian, the very same person who invented the slogan that was appropriated by advocates of National Studies, “rearranging and systematizing the national heritage.”14 Fu argued that Chinese tradition required a scientific overhaul. Unlike scholars of National Studies, who simply incorporated indigenous scholarship into the structure of Western academic disciplines and called the entire package “science,” he relentlessly questioned the idea that scientific knowledge could be culturally and nationally specific. He argued that methods of producing knowledge about the human world had to be identical everywhere, just as the natural sciences were. There could be no exception made for history and philology. If there were such a thing as National Studies, he pondered perplexedly, “Why should not mathematics, astronomy, physics, and chemistry all become National Studies? Why does National Studies apply only to subjects such as history, philology, and folklore?” To strengthen his argument, he pointed to the racist and derogatory connotations embedded in the underlying cultural exceptionalist assumptions of National Studies that many of his peers had failed to recognize: “Terms such as ‘National Studies’ or ‘China studies’ [Zhongguo xue] are unfortunate. The reason that Westerners created the term sinology [zhina xue, literally ‘sino-logic’] was to equate it with Egyptian logic and Asiatic logic. Do we really want to see ourselves the same way?”15 For Fu, National Studies was inadequate not simply because it was enmeshed in the outmoded substance-versus-function binary, but also because it inevitably fell into the trap of self-essentialization and self-colonization set up by Western academic discourse. In his analysis, any-


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thing that hesitated to embrace wholeheartedly the universalist spirit of science could only be self-defeating. Fu was also dissatisfied with the endless personal conflicts that plagued the National Studies program at his home university in south China.16 In 1928 Fu established the Institute of History and Philology under the auspices of the prestigious Academia Sinica, a consortium of national research institutes directly sponsored by the Nationalist government. This move allowed him immediately to gain full access to state resources and to form a new scholarly community to advance his research agenda. The timing was crucial. The Nationalists had just completed their two-year military campaign and recaptured the heartland of north China, including major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing. As a result, they were increasingly recognized as the rightful Chinese government both domestically and internationally. The regime was in the process of launching an ambitious National Reconstruction project that would involve a broad range of modernization programs covering areas such as education, public health, economic development, and infrastructure building. Indeed, the Academia Sinica was first established in 1927 by the Nationalist regime even before its military campaign officially began as part of its preparation to retake and rebuild China. Initially, the research consortium consisted of only three institutes.17 No institute for history and philology was planned, but Fu managed to form his own institute using his academic stature and the backing of his powerful friend, Cai Yuanpei, the president of Peking University and onetime education minister. At his institute, Fu undertook the project of rescuing the study of China from both National Studies and Western scholars. Yet, as much as he insisted that his methods were more modern and scientific, his institute actually existed in a field of contradictions. Specifically, Fu accepted the primary scholarly fields of Neo-Confucian evidential research or the so-called “traditional” scholarship that he sought to reject, namely, history, archaeology, and philology, as the main areas of research for his institute.18 Although not a fan of National Studies, he did not dispute the objective of “rearranging and systematizing the national heritage” by means of science. For him, China was a legitimate object of study so long as it was not examined using culturally exceptionalist logic. Chinese scholars, Fu maintained, should study geological and biological phenomena within China simply because it was convenient to do so: If more than half of our research materials are inside China, that is not because we are specializing in the study of the nation, but because these Chinese materials are in our own hands and therefore more con-


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venient. . . . Regardless of the type of history or philology, as long as they are scientific, there can only be one approach. Therefore, these kinds of knowledge are absolutely not differentiated according to a national logic, but only according to the division of labor due to geographical convenience.19

In truth, Fu’s own passion for Chinese materials was driven by a profound sense of nationalism and anti-imperialism. This contradition was revealed by his close associate Li Ji: “They [the Europeans] were determined to come to China to survey our languages, measure our bodies, excavate our ancient artifacts, and research all of our customs.These ‘academic raw materials’ were no doubt ‘being removed and stolen by the Europeans’ day by day!”20 However, as long as China did not have a scientific way to collect these materials, it would have to surrender its facts to foreign researchers. “For the research expertise rendered by those Western scholars of Oriental studies [dongfang xue], which even the Japanese dare to imitate in recent years, the Chinese can only wave their hands to express their gratitude,” Fu lamented.21 Reminiscing decades later, Li Ji further elaborated on Fu’s reasoning: [Those] ambitious Western scientists [in China] . . . were not relying primarily on their political advantages; they had a set of more compelling academic justifications to tell the Chinese, and those who listened to them would easily be convinced. How could China, with all its chaos, refuse these academic works? How would the deteriorating warlord governments understand the significance of these works? Besides, the materials that they [the Westerners] paid attention to were mostly those we had ignored. No matter what standard we used, we had no sufficient reason to refuse to allow them to collect the materials that we had abandoned.22

In short, for Fu and his fellow researchers, their eagerness to collect facts about China was not at all about the convenience afforded to them because they lived in China. Rather, they deeply felt that it was their calling to collect facts that rightfully belonged to their nation. For them, these facts, whether geological data, paleontological evidence, cultural artifacts, folklore, architectural motifs, or social statistics, constituted the particularities of China in a unified global order. As such, they insisted that any attempt to understand these facts, which they regarded as the property of the Chinese nation, must be handled by the Chinese themselves. Not surprisingly, they urged their fellow Chinese scholars to resist the Western “cultural invasion” and survey the empirical evidence of China themselves in order to save the “soul of China.”23 Specifically, for practitioners of the scientific survey, saving the “soul of China” meant turning the empirical evidence of the na-


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tion’s culture and history into objects of investigation using the supposedly universal and unitary methods of science. Fu and his IHP colleagues, with political support from the government, succeeded at portraying their research undertakings as more scientific than those of their opponents. Having won that battle, they increasingly came to regard as their mission the defense of the academic rights of China. According to Fu’s plan, the first major project to be carried out by the IHP was the aforementioned Anyang survey, since military conflicts had subsided in the region. In addition, he emphasized the importance of studying the southern province of Guangdong, a stronghold of the Nationalists. His interest, however, was primarily in the minorities whose cultures and languages were endangered by the presence of the Han Chinese. These proposed minority surveys were in turn part of a larger scheme to survey all the minorities along the Chinese borders.24 This, in part, was also driven by the Nationalists’ policy of cultural and ethnic assimilation, since a better understanding of the frontier regions would help the government to devise policies to integrate those areas. Later, according to Fu, the survey operations of the IHP would move westward along with the expansion of the Nationalist regime. Significantly, Fu’s survey plan did not stop at the Chinese borders. He hoped that the IHP’s survey operations would eventually reach Central Asia and hence would achieve his dream of moving beyond Chinese materials. His idea of conducting surveys in Central Asia evidently derived from both scientific and symbolic concerns. At the academic level, Fu mentioned on many occasions that it was imperative to study China in a larger context, and the mutual influences between Chinese and Central Asian cultures represented a perfect case for him. Symbolically, Japan had also recently sent survey teams to Central Asia to compete with their European counterparts. Although he did not mention so explicitly, Fu obviously hoped to use the occasion to stake a Chinese claim in this ongoing global academic competition. The most revealing aspect of his plan, however, was his intermediate survey plan. He envisioned the IHP extending its work to Southeast Asian studies, or what he called nanyangxue, in just a few years. He wrote, “It has long been acknowledged that nanyang has abundant geological and biological materials. It is now gradually recognized that nanyang has abundant anthropological materials. Nanyangxue ought to be part of Chinese knowledge.”25 The significance of this goal was revealed in part by the value-laden term nanyang itself. While nanyang refers to the Southeast Asian region, it literally means “the southern seas,” and therefore represents a sinocentric worldview. During China’s imperial past, for example, Japan was referred to as dongyang (the eastern seas) and the West as xiyang (the western seas),


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respectively. The politics behind these terms cannot be more obvious. In the first half of the twentieth century, as Stefan Tanaka has shown, toyo—the Japanese counterpart of dongyang—had ceased to carry any sinocentric connotations but signified only the East or the Orient, as opposed to the Occident. In the meantime, toyoshi (Oriental history) was emerging as a body of knowledge in Japanese academic discourse that aimed at redefining Asian civilization and elevating the status of Japan vis-à-vis the West.26 In the same fashion, in order to downplay the cultural connection between Japan and China and to assert Japan’s superiority over China, Japanese scholars began to refer to China as shina, the Japanese equivalent of zhina, a term that Fu clearly understood as racist.27 In a sense, whereas the enterprise of toyoshi and shina provided the intellectual justification for Japan to conduct historical studies as well as social and economic surveys in China, and subsequently facilitated Japan’s military aggression, Fu’s proposed nanyangxue and its related surveys also seemed go beyond asserting China’s academic rights and state sovereignty. Instead, they came dangerously close to resembling the colonial intellectual enterprise that he sought to defy.

instituting science, producing facts Although Fu’s ambitious goal of conducting surveys outside China was never achieved, the IHP was without doubt a key player in the Chinese social survey movement. Its contribution to the production of the Chinese social question was particularly manifested in its study of China’s minorities in the context of Chinese civilization using historical, philological, and ethnological surveys. In the remainder of this chapter, I will primarily use cases from the IHP, as well as supplementary examples from the land surveys conducted by the Research Institute of Land Economics (RILE), to examine the field research process whereby facts about minorities were produced. Although my contention is that, in spite of social science researchers’ unrelenting faith in science and passion for facts, what were regarded as scientific methods and factity were never self-evident or well-defined. I will particularly use Fu Sinian’s correspondence with two of his researchers to analyze how and why some empirical findings were accepted as credible facts while others were deemed unsatisfactory by the IHP. In the summer of 1928 Li Guangming was one of many researchers sent by the IHP for its first foray into the ethnically diverse remote southwestern region to study minority populations. Soon after Li left for his survey assignment in Sichuan province, and after he had submitted only two re-


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ports that resembled travelogues, Fu began to realize that Li’s working style did not resemble that of a modern fieldworker but was rather like that of a “traditional” or “evidential research” scholar. To make the matter worse, Li had also exceeded the budget significantly, even though he had failed to produce any useful empirical findings. On February 1929, half a year after Li had vanished into the field, Fu finally wrote him a lengthy letter complaining that he had failed to follow the predefined IHP protocols. “Of all the operations that we have, none just demand money without submitting reports and ignore the budget like yours,” Fu wrote.28 Fu then gave Li a painstaking list of advice: (1) avoid relying on others and endure the suffering yourself; (2) buy more artifacts and textual materials, and eliminate unnecessary expenses; ( 3) avoid becoming intrigued by local politics; (4) learn a minority language and record its general grammatical pattern; ( 5) submit reports frequently; (6) pay close attention to the local communal life rather than the floating political events; (7) do not just wander around; the acquired knowledge has to be systematic; (8) take more photos; (9) do not establish any liaison in the Chengdu [the provincial capital] area.29

In many ways this checklist is as revealing as it could be in illustrating the drastic differences between the old and new methods of research. Generally speaking, the items on the list can be grouped together into four main subjects, namely institutional teamwork and collaboration, objectivity and systematization, positivism and direct observation, and the endurance of hardship. First, although scholarly collaboration facilitated by academies and the government occasionally existed in the imperial era, the type of teamwork and collaboration centering around an academic organization such as the IHP that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century was decidedly new. Indeed, as far as social survey research was concerned, research institutions themselves were very much part of the method. To begin with, in order to be effective and successful, research projects had to be thought through in advance with well-articulated methodologies, procedures, and objectives. Operational details such as budgets, personnel, equipment, and itineraries also needed to be clearly defined and extensively discussed in research plans and proposals.30 The IHP also sought to use its advantage as a state agency to solicit in advance local administrative, political, and even military support in order to safeguard its operations.This last point was particularly crucial, as many of the IHP surveys were conducted in remote and dangerous zones over which the Nationalist government did not have direct control.


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Once in the field, fieldworkers were required to submit for evaluation frequent reports on their findings and progress. Finally, once the researchers returned from the field, their findings were to be published in academic journals and occasionally in newspapers and other printed media for public distribution. By these standards, Li Guangming’s failure to submit reports and his inability to adhere to the budget were clear indications of his inability to work as a modern researcher according to the new paradigm that emphasized planning, teamwork, collaboration, and institutional structure. However, in an attempt to rescue his mission, Li did eventually attempt to submit more reports, and he even began to discuss how some of his travel experiences could be turned into academic articles and books.31 Closely related to the IHP’s emphasis on institutional collaboration was its insistence on objectivity and systematization. While traditional literati wrote about their observations and feelings in order to demonstrate their scholarship and role in officialdom, modern fieldworkers were expected to conduct research programs systematically and objectively based on predefined protocols. During the summer of 1928, Li was only one of the fieldworkers sent to the southwestern region.32 His survey, in other words, was only a segment of a larger systematic study of the southwestern region based on standardized methods. Li’s failure to comply with the standard protocols and his travelogue style therefore made his observations seem to Fu to be unfocused and unscientific. After criticism from Fu, Li tried hard to make adjustments.33 In a report submitted to Fu a few months after receiving the initial complaint, Li mentioned that he had purchased many relevant materials, and he even tried to discuss his survey methodology. For example, he categorized the data his team collected into three groups based upon their level of reliability: evidence collected though direct observation by fieldworkers, information obtained from either the “barbarians” (fanren) or other knowledgeable informants, and unverifiable hearsay. “If you still think we are as though ‘appreciating flowers from a running horse,’ ” Li wrote desperately, “then we don’t know what else to say.”34 Fu nonetheless remained unimpressed by the superficiality of Li’s travelogue-style narrative reports. The third group of qualities that Fu emphasized, positivism and direct observation, should come as no surprise. It was never enough for fieldworkers to make superficial observations or generate knowledge based on existing literature such as gazetteers, local histories, and travelogues by previous scholars. Instead, Fu stressed the importance of empirical observation in social science research, which, after all, was how surveys were understood by Chinese intellectuals. “I am not like the literati, but just someone who tries to search for things [dongxi],” Fu wrote in what is commonly consid-


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ered the founding manifesto of the IHP.35 By “things,” Fu was referring to a broad range of empirical evidence that was unimportant in old-style scholarship. A case in point was the enormous fortune spent by the IHP soon after its establishment to purchase a large collection of imperial court archives from the Ming and Qing dynasties in order to ensure that these primary sources did not fall into the hands of wealthy foreign buyers such as the Japanese Southern Manchurian Railway or the Harvard-Yenching Institute. Although these materials were textual, they were not classical texts, and they were therefore irrelevant to old-style philological inquiries associated with Neo-Confucian evidential research. Many scholars who were interested only in classical texts and rare books were perplexed by the IHP’s enthusiasm for amassing these materials just for sake of amassing them.36 More importantly, the types of evidence that the IHP was collecting involved not only texts and historical artifacts but also abstract data generated through careful observation and documentation of the empirical world, including even visual and audio data. For example, IHP surveyors were instructed to learn the basics of the local minority languages by recording their grammatical structures and scripts. Portable dictaphones were used to record the sounds of these languages.37 Researchers also used photographs to document the physiological features, customs, and communal life of minorities. During these early days of social science, photography was particularly emphasized as an important component of social survey research. Even Li Guangming acted on Fu’s recommendation to purchase more textual materials and to take more photos, though he remained rather unsuccessful in learning any of the local languages.38 In the end, Li also largely failed to live up to one of Fu’s most important ideals for a fieldworker: the endurance of hardship during the fieldwork process. It is not insignificant that being willing to endure suffering was the very first item on Fu’s list of advice to Li. In spite of Fu’s constant attempts to contrast his own scientific and objective undertaking with that of the NeoConfucian literati, Fu’s ideal fieldworker was never just an innocent observer and collector of empirical evidence. In order to be capable of observing and documenting the truth, an investigator needed training, of course, but also determination, passion, and, above all, an enduring character. In this respect, Li seemed the very antithesis of the diligent field researcher. He hired five assistants, including a relative, to work for him. He refused to enter dangerous zones to make direct contact with the ethnic populations that he was supposed to observe.39 After Li had repeatedly failed to convince Fu that he was a competent researcher, he wrote to Fu in a last-ditch effort to earn back some respect and trust by showing that he had at least tried, and indeed that


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he had suffered greatly in the field: “My body has been very weak and I have already been sick three times. I am really not suited to be a member of this research team that travels into the wild and barbaric territory. Besides, my will is weak; I am sentimental and emotional. The suffering that I have endured during the past year has been the worst in my life!”40 A few days later, he again confessed to Fu again in another report, “Although I have learned a lot, the biggest benefit has been that I have discovered a lot of my own shortcomings. That is, as you have pointed out, ‘practicality, details, preparation, and independence’ have been missing from my research.”41

reason and sentiment The importance of enduring suffering and overcoming hardship as preconditions for producing credible facts, a requirement that has often been neglected or unacknowledged by practitioners of social science themselves, was perhaps best illustrated by the experience of another field researcher, Yang Chengzhi. Like Li Guangming, Yang was one of the many researchers dispatched by the IHP to China’s southwestern frontier to study ethnic minorities, history, and philology. Unlike Li, however, Yang was upheld by Fu as a successful researcher. Indeed, because of his outstanding performance in survey activities, the IHP eventually sponsored Yang to advance his studies in France. Among the many differences between Yang’s and Li’s performances, what particularly stood out in Yang’s survey was a heroic narrative of accomplishment. In other words, whereas Li’s survey report was a narrative of defeat and of begging for forgiveness,Yang’s was a story of overcoming adversity and the transforming of the self into a reliable witness of the nation and hence a competent observer of the truth. Yang, for example began one of his reports by boasting of his heroic endeavors, emphasizing how fearless and determined he was even though, according to legend, the “barbarians” in the region routinely kidnapped and cannibalized the Han Chinese. Like Fu and others who felt the urgency of collecting facts about China, Yang jotted in his field notes that “Westerners had long been conducting surveys in the area . . . but very few Chinese academics have done the same. What a pity it would be if we allowed only Westerners to acquire all these valuable data!”42 Life in the highlands, however, was unusually tough for urban young men like Yang. Soon after he arrived he fell ill four times within one month and he nearly died. At one point his illness was so severe that he had to smoke opium to alleviate his pain. Still, after recovering from his life-threatening


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disease and many other setbacks, Yang began to acquire some basic skill at conversing in the local language. Although mastering even the basics of a new language in such a short time is never easy, Yang emphasized to Fu that his unrelenting determination allowed him to overcome any difficulty.43 Not long after he resumed his journey, he reached the marketplace where local minorities and Han Chinese traded with each other. What first struck Yang about these “barbarians,” he wrote, was their primitive and violent looks— their worn-out clothes, weapons, high noses, and bare feet—and their awful stench. But the strangeness and exoticism of this nearly unreachable corner of the world seemed to dissolve quickly for Yang, as he came to believe that he could unravel the mystery of the place through anthropological concepts of time and human evolution. “This really is the hometown [guxiang] of anthropology and folklore studies,” he declared. Excited, he set up his camera and tried to document the scene, but he was immediately surrounded by a group of non-Han natives and became the center of a spectacle himself. This shift from the position of observer to that of the observed forced Yang into of moment of reflection: Seeing my outfit, camera, binoculars, water container, and traveling stick, they [the natives] must have thought bewilderedly that I was a bizarre-looking stranger. Soon, a twelve- or thirteen-year-old “barbarian kid” extended his hand into my pocket and tried to grasp my money. Fortunately, I was keenly aware of it. I seized his hand . . . and then took a picture of him. Aghast, none of them dared to move, and nobody knew who I was. (It had always been “the barbarian” who assaulted and killed the Han Chinese; no Han Chinese would dare to bully “the barbarian.”) At that time, I thought this [act of photographing] was like a kind of hypnosis . . . and this was certainly the best way to demonstrate my superiority.44

In other words, despite a brief moment of surprise, Yang was quickly able to reaffirm the unequal power relationship between him and the people he set out to study. He did so by deploying the social scientific gaze, itself backed by the power of technology, institutions, and the discourse of science, to tame these supposedly barbaric natives, rendering them silent, passive, and motionless. Significantly, although the equipment operated by these predominantly male fieldworkers seemed to be important in getting at and capturing the truth, also important was the self, including one’s senses and emotions, and the narrative technique used in the process. Far from being just an unassuming observer, the investigator needed constantly to assert his authority, trustworthiness, and credibility, and not only by emphasizing his training,


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equipment, and institutional support; the researcher also had to use rhetorical strategies that emphasized the hardship, suffering, and sacrifice that he endured on the one hand, and his courage, determination, and triumph on the other. In his field notes, in addition to proudly comparing himself to his childhood heroes Christopher Columbus and Robinson Crusoe, Yang also took pride in how he had earned respect from local officials by serving as the assistant to the local county magistrate for a dozen days after the former assistant died of illness. During that short period of time, Yang braced for the danger and served as a negotiator between the magistrate and the local minorities, defusing a major confrontation and gaining the trust of the locals. As a result, unlike Li Guangming, who was admonished by Fu for his political chitchat and meddling in local affairs, Yang’s involvement in local politics, which was packaged as part of his heroic quest and overcoming of hardship, was never questioned. Indeed, in nearly all of his field reports Yang’s empirical observations were juxtaposed with discussions of his personal feelings and emotions. In one report written late at night, in which he carefully organized his notes and analyzed the linguistic structure of the local language, he also lamented that he had not had any news from his family and friends for nearly five months. He confessed to Fu how sad and lonely he was, and that he sometimes even sobbed silently.45 The attempt to train fieldworkers in endurance and hard work is also evident in the enormous quantity of survey field notes produced by studenttrainees of the Research Institute of Land Economics. Officially established in 1932, RILE was under the jurisdiction of the Central Political Institute of the Nationalist government. The main objective of RILE was to produce countersurveys to refute the rural surveys conducted by the Communists. Indeed, by the early 1930s the need to counter the Communist expansion, not just militarily, but also via sound rural reform policies designed to win the hearts and minds of the rural population, became apparent as Communist land reform projects were rapidly gaining traction in areas outside the reach of the Nationalists. It was in this context that Chiang Kaishek, the leader of the Nationalist government, personally invited Xiao Zheng, who was finishing his studies in Germany at the time, to return to China to head RILE.46 During its nine years in existence, RILE dispatched hundreds of students to conduct surveys in areas that were under the control of the Nationalists. In spite of the fact that its main purpose was to serve in formulating a rural reform program as an alternative to that of the Communists, the data collected in these surveys were not narrowly defined in cadastral and economic terms. The student-trainees also collected a substantial body of material on folklore,


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Bicycle training for social surveyors (ca. 1930s).

customs, laws, local governments, geography, ecology, and so forth at numerous selected urban and rural sites. In many ways, what RILE researchers and surveyors had in mind was the larger project of National Reconstruction, which involved the building of highways and bridges, education, literacy campaigns, public health, and a variety of modernizing projects, even though the results of these surveys were never put to use due to the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War and the Civil War thereafter. As far as training was concerned, RILE operated like a graduate school. The students that were admitted, all of them university graduates, were required to take a year of course work before heading to the field for three months of practical field training. In addition, like other social investigators and fieldworkers, they needed to learn basic survival skills and were trained to operate survey equipment and ride bicycles. Upon their return the students were required to submit detailed reports and then write up their theses within a year. While they were in the field, student-trainees were asked to keep diaries to record their personal feelings along with their empirical findings. In short, they were required to juxtapose multiple literary genres, such as travelogue and autobiography, with social scientific and statistical data in their field notes. As a result, these diaries offer us an invaluable opportunity to examine


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7. Surveyors on parade (ca. 1930s). Student trainees and their supervisors march in the field, carrying equipment possibly for cadastral surveys.

the role of emotion and affect in the production of empirical knowledge about society and the nation. Not unlike Yang Chengzhi and other IHP investigators, fieldworkers from RILE constantly discussed and reflected upon the role of ceaseless hardship in becoming a witness to the truth. This is best illustrated in the experience Li Kuoqing, a rather typical student trainee. During his field trip Li recorded in great detail how the heat and humidity had made him sweat as he was conducting surveys in Gansu province. He also recorded how he was unable to sleep, either because it was too hot or he was awakened by rain in the middle of the night. Amid his discussion of the procedure of the cadastral surveys, he wrote: The life of the surveyor is very mechanical and full of hardships. This is especially true when he has to work under the broiling sun in the summer or in the bitter winds in the winter. He always has to hike in the mountains or in the wilderness from daybreak until dusk. Being a police officer is a tough job, but after all, he only has to stand two hours continuously in each shift. But the job of a surveyor is far more arduous than that.47

Although educated urban elites such as Li and his peers had obviously never before lived in such remote regions, they did not complain or protest their


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assignments. On the contrary, although they were compelled to document their suffering, they were self-conscious about the necessity of hardship. Li even quoted a local military commander who said how much the local authorities appreciated Li’s willingness to travel to this region and bear such hardship in order to conduct surveys for the well-being of the people, as if his own documentation of his hardship were not sufficient. Central to the claim of truthfulness in these reports, in short, was the persuasiveness of the fieldworker’s field experience. In authenticating his observation, the fieldworker did not merely make the claim “I was there,” a claim commonly associated with the construction of ethnographic authority. He also made the assertion that “I suffered, therefore I know” in order to substantiate his credibility and the authenticity of his data. The use of suffering in the field as a prerequisite and guarantee of credibility was not limited to the production of social scientific knowledge in remote regions, but it was also part of a broader cultural landscape of the production of social scientific knowledge in the Republican era. The personnel records of major research institutions always contained records of its field researchers’ ability to endure hardship. University textbooks on social survey research identified the ability to endure hardship as an important criterion for becoming a fieldworker.48 The prominent social investigator Li Jinghan described how he endured hardship in order to complete his famous investigation of the livelihood of rickshaw pullers. During the process of interviewing more than a thousand rickshaw pullers, he had to spend time with his interviewees for months. The noise, smell, filth, and other unpleasant experiences associated with the process, as he noted, were things that a Confucian scholar would never have to endure. He confessed that by the end of the project he felt that he had essentially been transformed into a different person, one who was capable of being a witness and bearer of the truth. Li concluded that those who lacked determination and patience would be vulnerable to defeat and were therefore not suited to be social investigators.Those who were willing to “eat a lot of bitterness” by enduring physical and spiritual suffering, in contrast, would be likely to succeed.49 There have been plenty of studies of how the Chinese cultural practices known as chiku (eating bitterness) and suku (speaking bitterness) were used by Communist Party cadres as well as ordinary citizens to affirm their political and ideological commitments. Cultural anthropologists, for example, are particularly interested in the significance of these practices in the construction of the self in postsocialist China. Some work has also been done by historians who analyze this phenomenon during the revolutionary era, showing how previous hardship and narratives of it could be turned into


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political and cultural capital years later.50 But as social survey field notes, textbooks, and training manuals show, field researchers from the Republican period, too, regarded bitter hardship and suffering as a necessary condition for making a moral self who was capable of collecting empirical evidence and generating social scientific truth. At one level, this practice of embracing and narrating bitterness exemplifies the omnipresence and omniscience of disciplinary power. In fact, the training of fieldworkers involved more than the disciplining of docile bodies, as would be the case in the army or factory. In order to ensure the moral propriety of those who were delegated to produce social scientific knowledge, research institutes such as RILE and IHP required their fieldworkers to submit their detailed daily or even hourly activities and thoughts for examination. In doing so, they not only put the external behavior of the fieldworkers under surveillance but also gazed into the inner souls of these knowledge producers. Meanwhile, although the everyday practices of eating and speaking bitterness were repetitive and ritualistic for the field researches, these activities were not really performative in the sense that the fieldworkers did not simply narrate their sufferings based upon a preexisting script. Each of them, on the contrary, was expected to experience and retell the story in his own way in order to effectuate his transformation into a modern political subject as well as into a competent and trusty observer. In this sense, the meticulous and constant discipline imposed on each fieldworker was not really limiting and coercive. As an example of what Foucault called the “technologies of the self,” the practice of eating and speaking bitterness was ultimately transformative and empowering. For instance, having experienced extreme hardship firsthand, the IHP fieldworker Yang Chengzhi nevertheless underscored the spiritual dimension of his adventure. “It is true that I have suffered immeasurable bodily pain [during the survey process], yet, spiritually, I feel extremely satisfied,” he wrote.51 And from the diaries of these fieldworkers, we see again and again how their experiences led to a sense intellectual maturity and political rebirth. As well, by constantly documenting and evoking hardship, these fieldworkers also achieved moral credibility and therefore the power to witness the truth of, for, and about the nation.52 This widespread practice of forming a moral and credible self through self-criticism was certainly not without cultural precedent in China’s imperial past. As many scholars have noted, it can be traced back at least in part to the Neo-Confucian idea of self-cultivation through good habits and self-discipline as well as the idea of attaining knowledge through the recti-


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fication of the self.53 Nevertheless, what was decisively new in the twentieth century was that this practice was turned into a political technology of mass mobilization.The Chinese Communist movement, for example, would never have been so compelling and penetrating had it not been able to use this practice of eating and speaking bitterness as a vehicle for ordinary citizens and party cadres alike to attain a sense of ideological purity and transform themselves into revolutionary political subjects. In this sense, the Chinese social survey movement, too, was a form of political awakening and mass mobilization among the chosen group of knowledge producers. The elevation of science and the nation, respectively, as the highest order of knowledge and political form was part of the continous attempt by intellectual elites to reestablish a much-needed sense of political and epistemological certainty in the aftermath of the collapse of the old dynastic order. During this process, at least two competing knowledge paradigms were conceived by Chinese intellectuals. The first was represented by the National Studies movement, which tried to install a structure of knowledge that was self-consciously scientific but not identical to the methods of science introduced by the industrial powers.This deliberate move to create a hybrid form of knowledge by incorporating indigenous ideas and Western knowledge, itself an outgrowth of a similar knowledge paradigm that emerged during the Self-Strengthening Movement of the second half of the nineteenth century, was not dissimilar to what Gyan Prakash has called the construction of “another reason” by Indian intellectuals through the combination of European science and indigenous thought in colonial India. However, according to Prakash, since the colonial government in British India was routinely underfunded and overextended, the colonial authority often had to impose ideas and scientific practices on the local population forcefully and violently. Subsequently, the oppressive nature of colonial rule frequently resulted in widespread resentment among the colonized population, leading the native elites to become aware of the hypocrisy and contradiction of the emancipative power of colonial science propagated by the British.54 Similarly, the attempt at creating a sanctuary for indigenous scholarship within the larger framework of Western knowledge can be seen as an expression of a desire to construct an alternative realm of reason among the scholars of National Studies. These scholars insisted that this alternative reason was a domain of knowledge that could be studied through exclusively indigenous methods, and they used the inner core of knowledge as the anchoring point for their resistance against the industrial West. Other intellectuals, however, were far more willing to embrace the ideas of an all-


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encompassing science introduced by the West. Among this latter group were Fu Sinian and his IHP colleagues, who believed that the cultural and political authority of the new Republic had to be built on the idea of universal reason that, rhetorically at least, was consistent with European science. Ultimately, this later paradigm prevailed, even though it, too, was simply built on the older knowledge practice instead of replacing it entirely, as its practitioners liked to believe. This perhaps marked a critical difference between modern Chinese intellectuals and their counterparts in colonial India. Whereas direct colonial rule often motivated Indian intellectuals to look beyond the model of European knowledge in order to achieve the emancipative promise of science, many Chinese intellectuals in the hypercolonial context were less ambivalent about European scientific knowledge. As the agents of nation building themselves, Chinese intellectual elites were preoccupied with modernizing projects in ways that were similar to how European colonial officials sought to transform and civilize the native population. Rather than receiving the ideas of science and reason that originated from the European Enlightenment critically, most of them were more interested in mobilizing the rhetoric of science and universal reason to assert their agency and implement their civilizing project. Still, this did not mean that this later group of Chinese intellectuals had no grievance with the claims of universality imposed by the industrial powers. However, instead of arguing that there existed an inner cultural essence impenetrable by European science, these scholars and social scientists chose to articulate the particularities of Chinese society, history, and culture in universal terms. For them, the scientific survey, however they understood it, represented a unitary method of knowledge acquisition. After all, although the goal of rendering the human world in terms of social facts is to make the world legible, comparable, and calculable for modern governance, facts, as observed particulars, are by definition unique and specific. The idea of the survey and the production of empirical knowledge of the human world, in this sense, enabled this later group of Chinese intellectuals to tap into the authority of science without giving up nationalist assertions about China’s uniqueness. Significantly, too, the successful production of facts involved more than just the use of reason and expertise, but also the assemblage of modern equipment, institutional infrastructure, political support, and military protection. But the combination of these factors alone was still insufficient. The so-called triumph of modern science, as I have shown here, required extrascientific factors that were often belittled, if not entirely unacknowl-


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edged, by believers and practitioners of these activities. Simply put, in spite of these intellectuals’ unmitigated faith in the universality and transcending power of empirical observation and systematic analysis, a pivotal aspect of their research activities was their sentiments. In their quest for facts and the truth about the nation, they time and again revealed the importance of endurance, patriotism, trust, and even strategies for narrativizing their sufferings. These were not factors that had merely facilitated the production of social scientific knowledge, but they were the very conditions and determining factors through which credible observers were trained, scientific authority was established, and truth claims were made. In short, as Johannes Fabian cogently puts it, “facticity itself, that cornerstone of scientific thought, is autobiographic.”55 It is precisely for this reason that the rise of the scientific survey in China was never a natural progression from the older form of knowledge to a more rational one. Rather, it was a cultural and political mobilization in which intellectual elites became the devotees of a purportedly new mode of knowledge production. This survey-based social science, itself built on the previously existing system of indigenous knowledge that was nonetheless refashioned as new, quickly emerged as a ubiquitous passion among the intellectual elites in their relentless search for a new political and epistemological order.


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Time, Space, and State Effect

In July 1928, shortly after the Nationalist regime consolidated its military control over a crucial part of China and reestablished its capital in Nanjing, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (Neizhengbu) officially called for a national census to be completed by the end of the year. According to the official plan, the census was to be carried out by local authorities based on guidelines and census forms established by the ministry. One important function of the census, to be sure, was to enable the regime to collect information for its ongoing campaign against the Communists. But, more importantly, the census was designed to acquire useful social facts for the new government so that local self-government and various social engineering initiatives under the ambitious National Reconstruction program could proceed with precise information.1 In spite of its ambitious goals, the census initiated in 1928 proved only marginally more successful than the first enumerative attempt in the Republican period, when, immediately after its establishment in 1912, the new government began the process of carrying out a national census especially for electoral purposes. Given the confusing political scene of the day, as well as the reality that local authorities were often staffed with officials from the imperial era, the 1912 census was mostly an attempt to recompile recent data collected by the late Qing government. 2 As the new Republic foundered, fragmentary efforts occurred as many regional warlords conducted their own censuses in order to implement tax, conscription, and various modernizing polices. Some two decades later, the Nationalist census, announced with so much formality, still, failed to achieve more than a patchwork of uneven data collection, which ultimately generated only rough estimates rather than precise and direct enumeration. In the end, the census that took place between 1909 and 1911 under the Qing remained the most 117


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comprehensive and accurate undertaking of its kind until 1953, when the Communist government carried out its first national census. Although the 1928 census was largely a failure, the exercise itself represented a significant effort in both methodology and intent. Specifically, in addition to benefiting from the refinement of social science and census techniques that had been developed around the world, the 1928 census took place in a nation-building context, when China, and especially its urban centers, was fast integrating into the post–World War I global capitalist order. The economic and political imperatives of the Nanjing Decade (1928–37) called for the production of a new kind of knowledge about the social world. The new census subsequently went beyond the collecting of basic information such as age, gender, and household structure to gather detailed information on various aspects of social life as well, potentially making the body and life of each member of society far more susceptible to disciplinary and biopolitical intervention. In addition to the 1928 census, similar efforts to collect new categories of exact information for the evolving social, economic, and political order were evident in other investigative and survey operations. In fact, if the 1928 census had been implemented fully according to its original plan, its impact on the people and its implications for the nation-building project could have been even more profound than its late Qing predecessor. As it was, the Nationalist censuses and surveys had an uneven effect in practical terms, even as they introduced a new conceptual framework. In the major urban centers where the 1928 census was carried out intensively, for instance, the desire of the authorities to create a precise picture of the population produced a new collective and saturating temporal and spatial experience for the public. The census coalesced individuals and groups into an aggregate social body, creating an imagined community with a strong sense of simultaneity and shared destiny. At the same time, by identifying particular individuals and groups as backward and lagging behind in the progress of history, the 1928 census and other surveys reinforced statist discourses and practices as survey findings anticipated interventions from the state to act on the these anomalies. In doing so, these censuses and surveys produced and reified the physical apparatus of the state, making the building of the state a natural, and indeed urgent, project. My inquiry in this chapter proceeds on two fronts. First, I offer an analysis of how a new conception of time and space was increasingly embedded in a range of interconnected yet diverse censuses and surveys conducted by Chinese intellectual elites within and outside the Nationalist government. Based in part on European, American, and Russian social scientific practices,


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and built in part on the indigenous scholarship that Chinese social scientists had supposedly rejected, these censuses and surveys nonetheless shared the same discursive space of social and political imagination. Second, I seek to show how a new time-space conception was central in producing not only a new sense of national solidarity, but also a new structure of social difference within the nation-state. Specifically, even though the nation’s citizenry was, in theory, composed of equal individuals, these censuses and surveys routinely assigned groups and places to different stages of civilization and historical progress. These internal differences in turn helped to underscore the important role of the state in civilizing and reforming individuals and groups who were constructed as “backward” by these social scientific practices. Here I borrow Timothy Mitchell’s concept of “state effect” to illustrate how the social scientific construction of the nation as uneven terrain with people and places waiting to be uplifted and civilized did more than just call for a broad range of social engineering programs such as education, public health, and antisuperstition campaigns. These survey narratives actually provided the conditions for the emergence and expansion of modern state power at a time when the content and form of the new Chinese nationstate were yet to be determined. By anticipating and justifying its function and authority, these surveys essentially called the state into existence. My discussion is focused on three types of interconnected investigative modalities. The first is the 1928 census and other attempts by the Nationalist government to produce bureaucratic knowledge for managing the general population. These materials show that the remapping of the population simultaneously produced a homogeneous and coeval community as well as a set of residual categories of heterogeneous and backward others. The next set of materials, produced mostly by the Social Bureau, involved special investigations into the superstitious behavior of certain individuals and groups whose activities were considered a threat to the moral and political order of the modern nation. These investigations were part of the process of converting “superstitious” and “backward” behaviors into progressive elements for the modern secular state—on paper, at least, if not always in practice. The last set of materials demonstrates how Chinese ethnologists and philologists used surveys to produce academic and political knowledge about the ethnic populations of the frontier regions. Even though these researchers envisioned a multiethnic nationhood that was contradictory to the ethnic assimilation policy of the Nationalist regime, they shared with it the same discursive space insofar as they simultaneously recognized and denied the coevalness of certain social groups.


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new census, new state, and a new order Part of the strength of the Qing empire, as illustrated in chapter 2, was its ability to divide and rule its different constituencies by accommodating their respective local power structures, lordships, temporalities, and histories.This was accomplished by the simultaneous deployment of multiple systems of governance and enumerative practices. In contrast, the nation-state strove to render the social field into a replicable, serializable, quantifiable, calculable, and, above all, commensurable order. Consequently, the social facts generated by these censuses and surveys not only created a new condition for political imagination and representation, but they also enabled the authorities to act on the social field as an aggregate object while maintaining the ability to single out social anomalies for further intervention. The national census (1909–11) of the late Qing was the first census designed to serve a modern nation-state. Instead of seeing the Qing population as an assemblage of peoples with their own histories, heritages, and political systems, late Qing officials and intellectuals regarded the entire population as a unified social organism with a shared destiny. Even though the Qing census did not introduce any specific categories of social deviance, the architects of the census often used social Darwinist overtones to highlight that the rationale for conducting a national census, aside from constitutionalism, was the need for an across-the-board reformist agenda that addressed problems of education, public health, opium smoking, and so forth so that the Qing could improve its chance of survival in the constant struggle among nations. In this very basic sense, both the late Qing census and that of 1928 were similar in that they represented urgent attempts to remap the entire population through direct enumeration using a standardized framework at a moment of nation building. But whereas the former was predominantly motivated by the need to preserve and extend the Qing’s sovereignty and territorial domination in the geopolitical context of the time, the national census carried out by the Nationalist regime nearly two decades later was driven by the economic and political imperatives of the new Republic. Although the quality of the late Qing census was superior to the 1928 census because the Qing had a far better functioning bureaucracy and firmer control of much of its territory, the methodology and goals of its census mark it as a nation of an earlier era. Qing reformers, for example, did not recognize a need to enumerate the population in a synchronized manner, or to finish the census within the shortest possible time frame. To prepare for the implementation of the proposed constitutional monarchy, the Qing government required census re-


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turns for both the household registration and individual enumeration phases to be completed in approximately three years.The design of the Qing census demonstrated a notable lack of concern with the principle articulated by Benedict Anderson that the hallmark of the modern census is to ensure that each member of the political community be counted once and only once, with absolutely no fractures or overlaps.3 The 1928 census, in contrast, placed great emphasis on the idea of capturing the state of the population instantaneously, even though such synchronization took place only in local, and especially municipal, contexts due to logistical difficulties. As a result, although there was not a specific national census day, local authorities were supposed to finish the enumeration within a very short time. In the capital city, Nanjing, authorities spent eight weeks planning the process and training census takers. In addition, municipal authorities were fully mobilized to promote public awareness of the importance of the census during this preparation period. The actual census itself was then completed within two or three hours on the last day of that period in October, as more than eight thousand census takers—party cadres, civil servants, teachers, and students—were simultaneously dispatched to collect the census returns through home-to-home canvasses. During that critical juncture, the movement of the people was restricted. Theaters, for instance, were not allowed to open, and all street traffic also came to a complete halt. In short, the underlying idea was to freeze the entire city in order to take a snapshot of the population.4 If the countdown to the actual census date increasingly entered the public consciousness as the shared social time for all residents of the city, the actual census taking itself was certainly the climax of that process, when the entire city was asked to stand still for that long-anticipated photo to be taken. The everyday impact of the 1928 census thus was profound in that it not only produced a sense of simultaneity and togetherness through statistical tabulation of census results, but it also subjugated the entire community, at least in the local context, to a social time fixed by the government. For those who were counted, the disruption of daily routines for the sake of enumerative accuracy and completeness was a compulsory experience in which everyone was compelled to reimagine his or her social and political existence as a member of a larger political community regulated by this new secular time measurable by clock and calendar. In spite of its desire to enumerate the entire population in a synchronized fashion, the Nationalist government had neither the administrative capacity nor the territorial dominance to effectively carry out such an ambitious project nationwide. As a result, the national census was implemented


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by separate local authorities. Few municipalities and provinces, moreover, were able to come close to the level of rigidity and meticulousness specified by the Nanjing model. In Beijing, which also had a relatively sophisticated municipality, the call for a census initially triggered a flurry of paperwork exchanged by various municipal authorities seeking to clarify operational details, from enumerative categories to tabulation methods. Yet, as final preparations of the Nanjing census were underway in October, officials in Beijing became increasingly reluctant to follow the specifics of the Nanjing model. Even Mayor He Qigong, who was impressed by the rigidity of the procedures of the Nanjing census, expressed skepticism about the overall effectiveness of the census process.5 Meanwhile, officials from the Public Security Bureau and Social Bureau also claimed, that unlike in the other provinces, where censuses had never been conducted before, there was no need for Beijing to use extensive propaganda to promote the census since residents of the city had been enumerated several times in the recent past. They also refused to mobilize all party cadres, civil servants, teachers, and students to conduct the census, as the Nanjing government had. By November, without the same level of intense and direct enumeration, the canvassing of information was declared done and the various authorities entered the period of data compilation.6 The experience in Beijing clearly illustrates the tremendous difficulty of implementing the census when the process was not in the hands of officials and experts sent directly by the central government. The situation was even more challenging outside the major metropolitan areas. In fact, there is little evidence that direct enumeration was carried out in any meaningful manner in the vast countryside. The difficulty of such an undertaking can be inferred from similar survey processes. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, as part of the ongoing effort to organize and mobilize the people to fight against both the Communists and the Japanese by reconstituting the old imperial-era baojia system into a modern means of population management, the Nationalists required local authorities to register and survey the population within their jurisdictions. In a series of audits of some of these local censuses in the early 1940s, the sociologist Chen Da, who worked on behalf of the Ministry of Internal Affairs at the time, discovered an extensive range of problems in the enumerative processes. First, he noticed that it was very time-consuming to enumerate the scattered rural population. In a typical example he cited, it took an investigator seven hours to enumerate forty households or 205 individuals, and that did not even include the hours he spent traveling between census sites. After studying such data from a number of investigators, Chen Da concluded that the process was painfully slow


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and inefficient. In another case, in order to speed up the process, an investigator had conducted his so-called direct enumeration by assembling villagers in a designated location rather than visiting each of their homes. Consequently, since most households only sent one representative to the meeting, the quality of the data was severely compromised.7 Chen Da further noted in his observations that it was nearly impossible to find enough qualified investigators given the large number that were needed. In one incident, when he accompanied a team of seven trainees in order to observe their work in the Kunming area, he discovered that, aside from one investigator who was an elementary school teacher, the rest of them—a shoemaker, tailor, farmer, and so forth—had little education. As a result, much of the information they put down on the survey forms was illegible or made little sense.8 Finally, Chen Da recognized the well-known problem of getting the “peasants,” whose stereotypical image had already been popularized in social science textbooks and the popular literature of the time, to provide accurate facts to the census takers. Even if the investigators carried out their work as instructed, he found that those being enumerated were still reluctant or incapable of communicating information to the investigator accurately. Chen Da recorded several examples of this during a field observation that took place in a mountainous region in Sichuan province. In one case a little girl told the investigator that she was eleven years old. An older woman in the same household immediately added, “When it comes to a question about age, half of the time we just randomly come up with a number. So, since she reported she is eleven years old, you should just write down eleven.” In another case directly observed by Chen Da, a man told the investigator that he had married six years ago, when he was twenty-six, and yet he repeatedly insisted that his current age was thirty-eight.9 Although Chen Da’s remarks were related to a process that took place more than a decade later, they shed some light on the general difficulty of carrying out such surveys. Indeed, the lack of resources, preparation, local commitment, and bureaucratic efficiency, as well as the limited authority of the new regime, seriously hampered the quality of the 1928 census. Even though the Qing census, too, had encountered some of these same problems, it, at least, was able to progress with relative speed in most provinces. Ironically, the resentment, fear, and riots triggered by the late Qing census in rural areas serve as clear indications that direct enumeration did occur well beyond the major urban centers. By contrast, the 1928 census failed miserably. Even by 1929 only a few cities and provinces had submitted any data to the central government. Eventually, in 1931, as the census remained


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largely incomplete, the Nationalist government decided to finish it based on estimates. It goes without saying that its findings remained highly controversial even after several updates and adjustments were made in subsequent years.10 At any rate, in spite of the failure of the 1928 census, the Nationalist regime’s preoccupation with turning the population into an object of governance continued. Shortly after the end of World War II, the regime launched an ambitious and fairly coherent system of population management (renkou xingzheng) as it struggled to consolidate control and resume its National Reconstruction project amid a bitter and destructive civil war with the Communists. The development of this management system was exemplified especially by the establishment in 1947 of the Population Bureau (Renkou ju) under the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which took charge of social surveys, household registration, and population policies in a comprehensive manner. Although the new bureau did not yet have any concrete plans for a new national census, its social experts and officials were highly critical of previous census and survey activities. They envisioned an omnipotent and rigid population management system that would be unprecedented in scale and intensity. They emphasized, for instance, the need for direct and accurate enumeration as well as the importance of a standard census time for the entire nation.11 This comprehensive population management system, aside from its function of keeping track of the Communists, was to be linked directly to proposed programs on education, public health, and even eugenics that aimed at improving the quality of the Chinese population for political and economic purposes. Based on population data produced by the coordinated use of vital statistics, censuses, surveys, and specific investigations, a National Identification Certificate system was introduced to keep track of static information as well as the movement of individual citizens. This system was partially in place in several major cities and was under preparation in many provinces by 1947.12 Institutions responsible for population management directly under the supervision of the Population Bureau also were set up in most of the provinces and were in the process of being introduced at the county and village levels. According to a government report, more than 73,000 cadres specializing in population management had already been trained at the provincial, county, and village levels. Meanwhile, academic and training programs officially named “population studies” (renkou xue) were instituted in well over a dozen universities and colleges. Authorities also offered certification examinations at various levels though which candidates could qualify as population management cadres.13


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8. Vital statistics laboratory (ca. 1930s). Vital statistics registration was an important component of the Nationalist regime’s population management program.

surveys and the new time-space paradigm Even if the 1928 census failed to achieve the synchronization, thoroughness, and comprehensiveness to which its designers aspired, its intent and underlying logic were nonetheless significant. Rebecca Nedostup has shown the concerted efforts made by the Nationalists to install a new national calendar and conception of time in a variety of everyday practices.14It goes without saying that this was only part and parcel of the larger attempt to standardize the measurement of time and space associated with the economic and political imperatives of the emerging global order. In his classic study of nationalism, Benedict Anderson argues that the notion of simultaneity across space was crucial for the construction of a new sense of togetherness within the imagined boundaries of the nation. In particular, he borrows Walter Benjamin’s idea of “homogeneous, empty time” and shows how this perspective of time as neutral, as opposed to the idea of time or history as mythical, sacred, or heroic, created a basis for individuals and groups to reimagine themselves as members of a coherent nation.


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But as Moishe Postone lucidly explains in his study of time and labor, Benjamin’s notion of time as empty and homogeneous is also foundational to the new kind of social relationships mediated by wages and labor that began with the rise of industrial capitalism.15 The process of mechanization and the commodification of labor power, Postone argues, entailed the conception of time as a continuous flow of abstract, identical, and quantifiable intervals for the sake of value calculation. In the same way that the production of commodities necessitated the use of clock time or neutral time, the new kinds of politics and social governance that arose from this context would be impossible without a new way of thinking about time and space. Censuses and surveys, in this respect, were the pivotal instruments in creating a new time-space map that not only divided temporality into an infinite sequence of “now-points” in order to make the production and circulation of commodities possible, but also extended at each moment the horizon of a “meanwhile” that brought distant and unrelated events to the same temporal plane for national solidarity. The contrast between this modern conception of time and its predecessor is obvious. Prior to the rise of the modern nation-state and industrial capitalism, time was experienced primarily through the rhythms of nature and local activities such as sunrises, season changes, market days, and temple festivals. However, to the extent that time is a symbolic relationship between the individual and external change, that relationship generally becomes far more abstract with the arrival of modernity. Indeed, instead of referring to a local situation, time in modern societies is like a mathematical symbol that points to an abstract and universal condition. From the display of the mechanical clock in the public space to the introduction of the personal birth certificate, this secular and objective social time permeates the everyday. It not only disrupts the rhythms of the previously decentralized time as manifested in local routines and communal activities, but it also synchronizes the quotidian with the political and historical narrative of the imagined community sanctioned by the state. Precisely for this reason, the practices introduced by the 1928 census, which attempted to create a snapshot of the population, were far more than just a matter of the continuous refinement of census techniques and social science in general. Rather, they were fundamentally related to the changing economic and political realities of the Republican period and the interwar era in Europe in general.16 This invasion of universalized social time into everyday life, as Norbert Elias has noted, was historically the core of the “civilizing process” whereby individuals were increasingly integrated into modern political units.17 Fur-


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thermore, the new social time experienced by the individual was linked to the individual’s new social existence as imagined by the census. Significantly, the subjugation of the entire population to a new temporal and spatial order provided the conceptual platform of another important and new practice that was deeply embedded in the censuses and surveys from this period: namely, how social facts generated by these investigative modalities produced a new social and political map in which individuals and groups were placed in a civilizational hierarchy in the stream of history and progress both within and outside the Chinese nation. A major feature of the 1928 census, not surprisingly, was an interest in tabulating the most basic personal information. In addition to the schoolchildren and able-bodied males that had already been collected in the late Qing census, the Nationalist government introduced new social categories to collect data about people who were unemployed, sick, disabled, or former convicts. It also singled out those who had bound feet and pigtailed hairstyles, which were an indication of lingering loyalty to the former Qing dynasty, as well as non–family members living together, persons with bad moral conduct, and those who just generally appeared suspicious. Religious affiliations were also included. Finally, the census took note of those who were cadres of the Nationalist Party.18 Given that the census data was broken down into the above categories in each municipal district, the government, at least in theory, was able to compile a rather elaborate and highly legible picture of the social world both at the aggregate level and in any specific local district. Likewise, in order to obtain accurate statistics on these categories, the Ministry of Internal Affairs repeatedly emphasized the importance of direct enumeration. It strove to ensure that the people being enumerated were not hiding information or evading the census questions. It also urged officials and census takers not to copy old data from previous census records or to allow local district and village heads to fill in information in lieu of those who were actually being enumerated. Officials and census takers were warned that they would be prosecuted and punished severely if they failed to observe these rules.19 In sum, in the 1928 census, the aspiration for accuracy itself was not really novel, as that had already been emphasized in the late Qing. What constituted a novelty was that the interest in precision was combined with a new hunger for meticulous information about the social habits, body, and life of each individual in relation to the larger population. This census, along with other data-gathering practices such as vital registrations, sociological and ethnographical studies, police reports, and various forms of special investigations, would have profound implications for the National Reconstruction project.


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secularism and the survey of superstition One of the hallmarks of the modern nation is its commitment to the doctrine of secularism. The centrality of empty homogeneous time in politics and economic transactions is an obvious reason why magic, myth, and the sacred must be removed from public life, if not entirely eradicated. In the case of China, according to Mayfair Yang, the earliest antisuperstition sentiments emerged in the self-strengthening and modernizing campaigns of the late Qing.20 Between 1909 and 1910 the intellectual elites’ derogatory characterization of those who rioted against the national census and accused the census takers of stealing souls was certainly a precursor of this antisuperstition view, even though a systematic set of categories to identify such anomalies and threats was still unavailable at the time. By 1928, however, the Nationalist government had devised far more sophisticated bureaucratic practices to keep track of the perceived threats presented by religious activities. Against the backdrop of the temporal and spatial unity of the Chinese nation, the census identified a number of deviant groups that required further attention. Among them, religion appeared as the single most important category of social and political concern in terms of the number of enumerative categories and reporting space it consumed. One third of the tabulations in the census report were devoted to categorizing various types of spiritual activities. These included the five world religions that were sanctioned by the regime (Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism) and other spiritual practices that were regarded as “superstition.”21 Indeed, even though the five major religious categories were recognized in the household registrations in the later imperial era, one of their central functions in the new Nationalist census was as a differentiator to single out popular spiritual activities that were deemed superstitious, dangerous, and illegitimate, such as deity worship, divination, exorcism, shamanism, and spiritual possession. Identifying individuals by their religious associations also represented an effort on the government’s part to render the social world into a legible and manageable order. Most of those who were singled out by the census as engaging in spiritual activities, however, could not easily be placed in any of the recognized religious categories. In a sense, then, instead of bringing clarity, these enumerative categories actually heightened the unease of the new regime. In the city of Beijing, for example, nearly 60 percent of the half million individuals tabulated as having religious beliefs were identified as followers of unrecognized religions.22 This inability to pin down individuals’ religious affiliations and make sense of the activities of such a large seg-


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ment of the population underscored the political, ideological, and bureaucratic urgency of converting incomprehensible aspects of the social world into part of a legible order. That this sense of urgency was already acute was evidenced by events in Beijing in the autumn of 1928. In October, as the census in Beijing was underway, the Committee on Party Affairs of the Nationalists issued an order to the Ministry of Internal Affairs to “suppress forcefully” Beijing-based “superstitious organizations” (mixin jiguan) such as Daoyuan (Society of the Way), Wushanshe (Society of Enlightened Virtue), and Tongshanshe (The Fellowship of Goodness) because they had been “setting up altars for worshippers” and “spreading rumors to confuse the public.”23 The stridency of this request stemmed particularly from the fear that the questionable political loyalty of these groups, compounded with their superstitious practices, could pose a serious threat to the ideology and political order instituted by the new regime. Jiang Zhaozong, the director of Wushanshe, for example, had been an important military commander under the powerful warlord Yuan Shikai. Wushanshe had even moved into Yuan’s presidential palace to take charge of the divination affairs of the president’s office. Upon receiving the order, the Beijing municipal government immediately launched a campaign against the “superstitious” organizations through its Social Bureau and Public Security Bureau. Referring to these organizations as a source of social chaos, the municipal government requested that they be shut down by force should they refuse to comply with the order voluntarily. Privately, the government cautioned officials to carry out the order carefully to avoid any backlash from the group’s many followers.24 When Jiang Zhaozong and his associates received the news they immediately fired back, contending that their organization had long ceased to be devoted to worship. Jiang wrote to the authorities in Beijing and Nanjing simultaneously, maintaining that the purpose of Wushanshe had always been apolitical. According to him, Wushanshe had in fact long ago been renamed The New Religion for World Salvation (Jiushi xinjiao), and its mission involved the preaching of major religious doctrines, not superstitious beliefs. Moreover, Jiang insisted that even though his organization had been involved in altar worship and spiritual studies in the past, those practices had long been abandoned. He further emphasized that his organization, upon witnessing the rise of poverty and refugees in the area due to political changes, had joined forces with Daoist and Buddhist charitable societies to provide public relief. He further declared that the organization was going to change its name once again and would become a branch of the Poverty Relief Society of Beiping.25


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The Beijing municipal government quickly dismissed the name change as nothing but a smoke screen. It instructed the Public Security Bureau to launch a full investigation into the operations of the three organizations in question. In just one week a detailed account of their histories, personnel, financial data, religious activities, and charity work was produced.26 Jiang and his associates appeared to be extremely evasive, investigators charged, even though they were unable to find evidence of any subversive activities other than the group’s superstitious activities known to have taken place in the past. The government nonetheless wanted to terminate Wushanshe and confiscate its properties for public charity. The potential threat posed to the new state by Wushanshe’s two peer organizations, Daoyuan and Tongshanshe, were more readily discerned. Although Daoyuan was indeed heavily involved in philanthropic works through its subsidiary, the Red Swastika Society, it had renounced its so-called “spiritual research” only a few months earlier. Such an abrupt end to its religious activities seemed a sure sign that many of its members must still be practicing in secret. It seemed that Tongshanshe, too, had given up its superstitious activities and now focused only on charity, but the investigators were alarmed by the fact that most of its followers, who practiced meditation, were military personnel of the previous government.27 After making numerous pleas to the Beijing authorities without any success, Jiang Zhaozong decided to step up his countercampaign, bypassing local authorities and appealing to the Nanjing government directly. He reiterated that those altars in the past were merely “playful instruments for the literati” and had been eliminated long ago to “avoid misunderstanding.” Citing the suffering of the poor in Beijing, he contended that the government, instead of shutting down his organization, should issue him a license so his organization could continue its charitable work legitimately. He insisted that Wushanshe was no different from Daoyuan, which had been transformed into a relief organization with government approval.28 Jiang’s persistence, indeed, caused the Nanjing government to become increasingly wary of a political backlash from former warlords and their supporters. After all, not unlike Jiang, many allies and supporters of the Nationalist regime were players of China’s warlord politics in the past. Any inflexibility in handling this case could potentially embarrass and even alienate some of the party’s crucial political allies. The Nationalist regime, realizing the touchiness of the situation, ultimately made a compromise. At the end of November it instructed the authorities in Beijing to reorganize Wushanshe rather than close it permanently. The organization’s cash deposits eventually were used to establish a trust fund


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for hospital projects. A committee was set up to oversee the use of the fund. Some key members of the former Wushanshe were selected for the trustee board. Meanwhile, the organization become part of the Beijing Poverty Relief Society, which moved into the former Wushanshe’s building complex and used it as its new office.29 The outcome of this case was significant not only because it demonstrated how social scientific investigative modalities were used to identify and neutralize perceived threats to the Nationalist regime’s desired order of social conformity and political loyalty. It also revealed that the underlying ideologies of secularism, empiricism, and progress—characters attributed to science and reason—increasingly were the only acceptable way to articulate resistance against the intrusion of the very same epistemological and political order. Jiang and his associates vigorously refuted the government’s characterization of their organization as effectuating social chaos and hindering civic cultivation. While acknowledging the spiritual and religious nature of their previous activities, they depicted such activities as merely scholarly and playful, not backward or superstitious. They refashioned their current activities as progressive forces contributing to public relief and charity. As a result, they essentially reaffirmed the modernist ideology of the state, as well as the legitimacy of the state itself, even though, as many Nationalist officials correctly suspected, the various kinds of spiritual activities practiced by members of these organizations were not going to disappear any time soon. As for the Nationalist regime, in spite of its final position of compromise, its modernist campaign against organizations such as Wushanshe ultimately reaffirmed its role as the arbiter of progress and reason. If nothing else, social investigations and surveys that treated superstition and charity as nothing more than social facts seemed to tell a narrative of the triumph of progress and scientific reason, so that the state was able to neutralize and incorporate such social anomalies into its hegemonic order of modernity. Yet, at the end, even though government bureaucrats were able to transfer Wushanshe from one category of social fact to another by changing of the numbers that appeared in its census and survey reports, what remained illegible and unaccounted for by empirical social science would stay invisible and unintelligible to the gaze of social science. The campaign against Wushanshe was the tip of the iceberg when it came to social investigations and surveys that aimed at identifying and eliminating superstitious practices in the broader social context. During the National Reconstruction as well as the wartime periods, the government carried out numerous similar surveys and investigations. For instance, in 1940, as part


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of a combined antisuperstition and war mobilization campaign, the Ministry of Internal Affairs required that officials in each county of Shanxi province that was still under the Nationalists’ control study and eradicate any superstitious activities within their jurisdictions, as well as raise the patriotic awareness of the local population for the war effort.The province was particularly important for the Nationalists because both the Communists and Japanese were also active in the area. Subsequently, the campaign generated numerous reports written by county heads. Each of these survey reports, which contained narratives rather than statistics, had five sections, each showing changes that took place between the period before the campaign and the period after it. The first was a general description of previous superstitious activities. Examples of superstition often involved stories of “foolish people” setting up altars to worship “wicked religious doctrines” and participating in temple festivals and parades. These reports also briefly documented a great variety of cultural practices, such as fortune-telling and shamanism, which varied from county to county. Another common complaint was that local “foolish people” believed in ghosts and spirits rather than science and medicine. In Shangnan county investigators even discovered an organization that promoted the pigtailed hairstyle, a symbol of submission and loyalty to the previous dynasty.30 In any event, instead of seeking to understand the complexities of these spiritual and cultural practices, the surveys uniformly regarded them as nothing more than empirical evidence of superstitious and backward activities that required correction. The second and third sections of the county survey reports dealt with the processes of investigation and intervention, respectively. In most cases, local authorities attempted to “educate and civilize” the “foolish people,” teaching them about science and medicine through public lectures and demonstrations. On some occasions, however, the authorities were far more forceful, especially if persuasion had failed to work. An example of this was in Tongguan county, where the county head personally led the police force to demolish the temple altars. He also prohibited the local people from further disseminating superstitious beliefs of any kind. Likewise, in Daili county temples were converted into schools and their assets confiscated for funding these school creation projects.31 The fourth and the fifth sections of these narrative reports recorded the postintervention situation as well as personal opinions and reflections by the county heads themselves. As might be expected, many of the county heads used this opportunity to boast of their accomplishments and to claim that all superstitious behaviors had been eradicated, with the result that there was no more hindrance to the war effort. Despite such claims, however, many


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of the county heads continued to express different degrees of anxiety and reported information that was unsettling, if not outright contradictory. Some county heads, for instance, reported that women and people from the lower classes continued to harbor superstitious sentiments. Others reported that temple fairs and parades continued but insisted on characterizing these activities as entertainment rather than superstition. Similarly, other county heads contended that fund-raising activities at local temples were now for charity purposes only.32 At any rate, in spite of their mixed messages and often-dubious conclusions, the five sections of each of these survey reports clearly exhibited an impression of a transformation from the presurvey era to the postsurvey one. Even though none of these reports was statistical, together they conveyed an aggregate image of change that seemed to affirm the importance and effectiveness of the state. Moreover, in their personal reflections, all the county heads uniformly used the secular language of social science to describe local social conditions and show their support of the government’s reformist agenda. They reaffirmed the necessity of state intervention by particularly urging the government to continue its mission of civilizing and educating the masses so that any lingering superstitious and unpatriotic behavior would be completely eradicated.

nationhood and surveys of minorities When Sun Yat-sen reversed his early position on establishing a purely Han nation, his goal became to establish a nation composed of five major ethnic groups united “in a single cultural and political whole.”33 Following on the heels of policies promoting education, intermarriage, and economic development, as well other frontier programs that had been introduced by the Qing in the nineteenth century, the Nationalists’ policy of cultural assimilation involved the contruction of new narratives of inclusiveness, integration, and social cohesion by means of social science. The desire to assimilate minorities was clearly demonstrated in 1939 by a wartime study of minority populations in which linguistic, philological, and ethnographic methods were used to construct a sense of social and political homogeneity. In January of that year the Social Division of the Central Executive Committee of the Nationalist Party received a letter from a publisher complaining about the fact that ethnic minorities in the Chinese borderlands often carried pejorative names that they had been given by Chinese literati in the imperial era.34 The timing and nature of the publisher’s complaint seem to have struck a nerve with the Nationalist regime. Even before the full-scale war with Japan


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broke out, the ethnic diversity of the southwest had been a strategic concern for the Nationalists.35 Local party officials had repeatedly alerted the central government about the importance of cultivating political loyalty among the ethnic groups in the region, writing, “Along the Chinese borders, especially in Yunnan, nationalities are extremely diverse and complicated, and their cultures are extremely backward. As well, imperialist forces are dangerously impending. Under these special circumstances, the work of social mobilization of our party appears to be especially important.”36 In fact, in spite of their assimiliation policy, officials often referred to the ethnic groups in the frontier regions as “frontier nationalities” (bianjiang minzu) rather than ethnic minorities (shaoshu minzu) in order to highlight their geopolitical significance.37 With the need to mobilize the southwestern minority population for the war efforts, however, assimilation quickly took on a new urgency. As most railway lines and coastal cities had fallen into the hands of the Japanese in the early months of fighting, the Nationalists were forced to retreat to Sichuan province to establish their wartime capital. Facing a protracted war with Japan and the prospect of an exhausting civil war with the Communists, the Nationalists were desperate to turn the southwestern region, once an imperial frontier, into a new home front for recuperation. Immediately after receiving the complaint about how the pejorative names could induce discrimination, the Nationalist Party commissioned the Institute of History and Philology (IHP) of the Academia Sinica to investigate and rectify the names in order to prevent “misunderstandings” and the instigation of racial tensions.38 For centuries, the Confucian cosmology had posited a cultural order within which the Han cultural elite represented the highest position in the civilizational hierarchy while other ethnic groups were protrayed as barbaric. Although this sinocentric narrative did not always fit the geopolitical reality, and it was complicated by the multiethnic nature of the Qing empire, it continued to form the basis of mainstream literary discourse and even court memorial writing 39 This sinocentric worldview was evident in the practice of assigning pejorative names to non-Han ethnic groups, especially those along the southwestern borders, that first appeared during the Han dynasty (206 b.c.e.–c.e. 220) and became widespread particularly during the Song (960–1127) and the Yuan (1279–1368).40 The names in question were those whose Chinese characters carried the so-called “insect-beast-signifying radicals,” names with characters that contained insect, dog, dog-and-cattle, dog-and-horse, and sheep radicals as a way to signify barbaric nature and inhuman origins. Needless to say, in the twentieth century this cultural practice of despising the


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ethnic “Other” as exotic and barbaric was neither consistent with the Nationalists’ assimilating policy nor with the general morality of the modern nation-state, which was founded on the principle of equality among citizens rather than of hierarchy between groups. Due to the discriminatory and racist implications of these names, many government officials had already stopped using them. As early as 1933, officials in Guangxi province had begun using the double ren radical, which signified a human in motion, to replace the offending characters in their correspondence. This obviously still fell short of the Nationalists’ policy of deemphasizing the issue of minorities. When the Nationalist regime instructed the IHP to investigate the pejorative names, its sole intention was to establish a national policy to ban minority names altogether. IHP researchers, for their part, wanted to vindicate the moral and ideological position of racial equality and harmony that underpinned the state’s assimilation policy. Given the diversity of social scientific practices during this time, the IHP had been using multiple approaches to the study of the minorities. These methods included physical anthropology, linguistic ethnology, philology, and various types of ethnographic studies of folksongs, popular religion, and customs.41 Among them, linguistics and philology are worthy of special mention, as they would eventually be adopted by social scientists in the Communist era as the dominant approach to unlocking the ethnic question. According to Thomas Mullaney, the Republican ethnologists who laid the groundwork for the ethnic classification project of the 1950s were themselves heavily influenced by a linguistic anthropological study of the Yunnan region by the British military officer Henry Rodolph Davies. The study carried out by Davies between 1894 and 1895, although superficial and amateur, was a simple and efficient approach to conceptualizing the region as a unified system rather than a zone of ethnic wilderness. Following this logic, Chinese taxonomists in the 1950s systematized the diverse ethnic groups in the region by placing them under a single coherent and hence more governable structure.42 Approaches to ethnicity in the Republican period, on the contrary, were almost as diverse as the ethnic landscape itself. Aside from other competing social science approaches such as physical and cultural anthropology, indigenous scholarship also cast a shadow over the newer approaches that were fashioned as modern and scientific. In short, as much as iconoclastic intellectuals of the New Culture and May Fourth movements liked to believe that they had eradicated what they called the “traditional scholarship” of the past, the past followed them unrelentingly. In particular, just as the genealogical roots of European social science in the age of industrial capitalism and im-


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perialism could be located in the travel writings of early modern European colonialism, the development of modern ethnology in China could not be separated easily from the vast body of travel writings, local history, and gazetteers from the imperial era.43 The study of pejorative minority names carried out by the IHP is a case in point. When the total war between China and Japan erupted, the IHP had already been conducting minority surveys in the southwestern provinces for a full decade. Many of the pieces of empirical evidence collected by IHP researchers, such as artifacts, field observations, folksongs, photographs, and even audio data, were generated through methods of archaeology, physical anthropology, ethnography, sociology, history, philology, and linguistics. In order to emphasize the scientific and modern quality of the investigation, the report also listed field observation, government statistics, and ancient and recent historical texts as the sources of its findings, even though the main sources were really ancient historical texts rather than field research or published statistics. In their efforts to clean up the derogatory minority names, researchers particularly had to rely partially upon the collection and compilation of textual material produced in the imperial era, verifying, comparing, and authenticating names by tracking them through historical literature such as gazetteers, classical texts, and travel writings.44 All in all, the study identified the philological origins and evolution of forty derogatory characters with insect, dog, and sheep radicals. Since many of these characters were used to form different compounds to signify different ethnic groups, the first step of this study was to simplify the heterogeneous and chaotic ethnic scene produced by previous imperial writers. Drawing on historical texts and recent survey results, researcher Rui Yifu and his team carefully sorted out the similarities, differences, and variations among these ethnic groups through philological and etymological comparisons. They did so by categorizing these minority groups according to the types of animals signified.They noted that some of these groups were mythical, and some had already ceased to exist. Eventually, they trimmed the list down to sixty-six groups, resulting in a list that, at least for the time being, was considered irreducible.45 Although the report acknowledged that its findings were inconclusive and incomplete, as there were still groups and characters excluded from the study due to a lack of information, the exercise resulted in a tentative ethnic classification table, one that was based on a hybrid method drawing on both old and new research techniques. In a way, this was the first attempt, however ad hoc and rudimentary, to produce a comprehensive picture of China’s ethnic landscape in the twentieth century.


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In the process of identifying and reclassifying the non-Han groups, Rui and his team were particularly anxious to discredit these pejorative names by arguing that they were inconsistent with the moral principle of racial harmony preached by the nation. Although it was relatively easy to discredit the names that were redundant and those that had no real corresponding groups in existence, IHP researchers needed to further discredit the remaining sixty-six pejorative names based on facts, not simply ideology and politics. In order to do so they could simply turn to the obsevations and findings produced by the Chinese social scientists who had conducted minority surveys in the past decade. In fact, even though the Nationalists’ policy was to assimilate rather than preserve China’s ethnic minorities, survey-based studies of minority groups, especially those in the southwestern provinces, mushroomed throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Even in the nineteenth century, the area had been a magnet for ethnological research by foreign and Chinese social scientists alike because of the concentration of ethnic minorities in Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. For many latter-day Chinese social scientists, of course, their interest in surveying minorities was driven, at least to a significant degree, by the Nationalists’ objective of integrating the region firmly into the social body of the Chinese nation. Yang Chengzhi, the IHP researcher who built his career by surveying the region, argued that the collection of social facts about the area would help to forge Chinese nationalism, cultivate ethnic harmony, protect the borderlands, and civilize the ethnic minorities.46 Indeed, the ethnicity question was so inherent in the question of nationhood that Chinese social scientists often found it difficult to avoid. For example, researchers from the Research Institute of Land Economics (RILE), which was established by the Nationalist goverment to discredit the Communist land reform program, often ended up discussing ethnicity issues in the field diaries and reports of their economic and cadastral surveys. Similiarly, even before ethnology was officially incorporated into the IHP’s research agenda in 1934, many of its historical and philological inquiries had revolved around the ethnicity question. Generally speaking, RILE and IHP researchers all made great efforts to depict the ethnic populations of the frontier regions as the brothers and sisters of the Han Chinese people, and they made policy recommendations for reforming and assimilating these minority groups. An excellent example of this is provided by RILE fieldworker Lin Dinggu’s account of the Miao. In his field notes, Lin began his description of the remote southwest by focusing on the gorgeous and majestic landscape. He then quickly turned to the local Miao people, complimenting their “strong and


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healthy bodies.”47 On the surface, this treatment of the Miao people as part of nature was quite similar to the travel writings in early modern Europe and China that routinely rendered indigenous or peripheral peoples as savage or barbaric. Moreover, even though Lin’s survey narrative repeatedly rejected the old order of the past, he frequently cited ancient poems and historical figures in his survey diaries just like the generations of imperial travel writers before him. For the Confucian scholar-official of the imperial era, this cultural practice of participating in a dialogue with the past was a way to place himself in the larger literary tradition and civilization in order to establish his cultural authority and official standing.48 For Lin, similarly, this was a way to reinforce his social identity as an educated modern intellectual commenting on the history and culture of the nation. However, instead of making claims about the superiority of his own civilization vis-à-vis that of the Miao as imperial travelers had routinely done, his engagement with the past actually allowed him to distance himself from his imperial predecessors and construct a narrative of the Chinese nation that included the Miao and other ethnic minorities. Lin, for example, first described the Miao people as “culturally backward,” for they allegedly still retained the ancient customs that resembled those mentioned in the classical text Zhouli (The Ritual of Zhou) from the tenth century b.c.e. 49 At the same time, he was reluctant to equate “backwardness” with “barbarity” as the classical writers would have done. In order to assimilate minority groups into the larger social body of the Chinese nation, he and other Nationalist researchers often challenged and reconfigured the image of the ethnic populations presented in classical literature and imperial travel writings. In this case, Lin went on to praise the historical contribution made by the Miao people, calling them “the pioneers in acculturating the Guizhou province.”50 Rather than being marginalized as the perpetual Other at the edge of or even outside Confucian civilization, as had been the case in the past, the Miao and other frontier minorities instead were upheld in the survey narrative as frontier explorers and vanguards of Chinese civilization. As a result, Lin further debunked the cultural prejudice generated by classical texts: “The Miao people have been discriminated against in historical texts and have been regarded as ‘foreign barbarians’ and ‘Miao barbarians.’ . . . Evil notions like these must be corrected. The principle of racial equality . . . must be used to serve the anti-Japanese war and National Reconstruction.”51 Nevertheless, if Lin seemed to stand in solidarity with the people he was studying by referring to them as pioneers, such solidarity was only conditional and temporary. Within his narrative of sameness and inclusion was


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also the subnarrative of difference and hierarchy. After all, most of his observations focused on the “backwardness” and “primitiveness” of the local culture, as well as on suggestions for how to civilize the Miao minority through education and other social engineering projects. Lin’s treatment of the Miao was typical of the narratives found in virtually all other ethnographic surveys, wherein field researchers repeatedly condemned Han prejudice and injustice against minorities in the southwest, and Lin urged the government to elevate non-Han peoples to the same level of civilization as the Han.52 Paradoxically, although the objective of these surveys seemed to be consistent with the government’s assimilation policy by projecting a narrative of solidarity with nation’s minorities, this sense of sameness and solidarity was constructed according to a narrative of difference and hierarchy. The Chinese nation was conceptualized as a political community that existed in a single homogeneous time and space, and at the same time as multiple zones of uneven development, each occupying a different stage in the trajectory of historical progress.This contradiction, Johannes Fabian argues, is essentially the foundation of anthropological discourse, for modern anthropology needs to produce its ethnographic objects by assigning the people under examination to the past. In this technique of the “denial of coevalness,” the ethnographer is able to be with his or her objects of study in the same space in order to observe them and yet simultaneously keep them at a safe temporal distance so that they are not allowed to talk back to the ethnographer.53 Obviously, this ideological use of time to deny and dominate the Other was not associated only with colonial practices. In Republican China, also, this technique was an important device for imagining, enabling, and building the nation-state. While social scientists and fieldworkers consciously included the non-Han frontier groups in the Chinese social body in order to create a sense of spatial unity, the technique of denying coevalness or contemporaneity allowed intellectual elites to subjugate their objects of study to the civilizing and modernizing initiatives that they expected to be carried out by the agents of the nation-state.54 It was not uncommon for these fieldworkers, after arguing that particular minorities were members of the Chinese nation, to begin to discuss how minority communities were plagued by social problems such as superstition, foot binding, opium addiction, illiteracy, poor hygiene, and poverty, conditions that were also common among the Han Chinese. In other words, once the minority groups of the frontier were domesticated into the larger social body of the population, they, too, were to be subjugated to the same kinds of social surveys and engineering projects as the rest of the nation.55 More importantly, these minority stud-


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ies, like other surveys, helped to create a state effect by anticipating the emergence of new institutions, interventions, and agents that would materialize and normalize the power of the state. Not surprisingly, as much as the Nationalist government hoped to deemphasize the ethnic question as a way to assimilate minority groups into the nation, the ethnicity question did not go away easily. After all, it was the dynamic interplay and reciprocal relationship between the constructed majority and minority, the norm and the anomaly, the modern and its Other, that provided the conditions for the ascendancy of the modernizing state. In September 1940, Rui Yifu and Fu Sinian submitted the IHP’s final report regarding minority names, having concluded that all pejorative names that conveyed subhumanness were based on unsubstantiated myths. Shortly thereafter, the government issued a decree permanently banning the use of these names. The decree also stated that, from now on, these “compatriots” from the border regions must be addressed according to their locales.56 With regard to the findings of the IHP and the new ethnic classification system, the decree specified that use of the rectified minority names was still permissible for historical and scientific research. These names, however, should only be used for the ultimate objective of “eliminating group boundaries and solidifying the entire Chinese race [zhonghua minzu].”57 For his part, Fu Sinian recommended that all the remaining beast and insect radicals should be replaced by a human radical to emphasize the humanity and civility of minority peoples. In addition, sounds were assigned to many of these newly invented characters.58 Much has been written about how the remapping of populations through modern censuses and surveys was part of the standardization of measurements of time and space associated with the capitalist nation-state. Yet, in the context of the politically disintegrated China of the early twentieth century, the idea of nationhood was also inseparable from the idea of statehood as contending political factions relentlessly strived to install themselves as the ultimate governing authority of the nation. The significance of censuses and surveys in the making of the Chinese state is best understood in terms of what Timothy Mitchell calls the creation of the “state effect.” In his critique of how mainstream social scientists normally study the so-called state and society relationship, Mitchell has shown how the state as a conceptual category and a set of practices can only make sense in relation to the category of society. Mitchell thus argues that instead of thinking about “society” and “state” as two opposing ontological entities, we should regard them as mutually constituted concepts with


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material or physical implications. The various kinds of political technologies analyzed by Foucault, Mitchell notes, are precisely the types of practices that have given rise to the illusion of the state as a solid or even natural structure that exists objectively and independently from society.59 Simply put, this state effect, however illusory, is responsible for the construction and maintenance of modern state power that is always elusive and yet real. In the Chinese social survey movement, censuses and surveys were not just means of imagining the nation but were crucial state-building instruments, for they necessitated new institutions, technologies, actors, ideas, and procedures that made up the apparatus of the state. The Chinese nationstate, in other words, was never constructed merely through imagination; rather, it was created through everyday practices carried out and reaffirmed by individuals and groups. The practices of censuses and social surveys, and especially their emphasis on the observer versus the observed, produced a new, heightened, and oppositional state and society relationship in which the abstract structure came to be understood as the state was increasingly seen as an object standing apart from the social world. The social facts generated in the process entailed new methods of social intervention by the state for social amelioration and the production of new national citizens. By constructing certain individuals and groups that were simultaneously members of the coeval society but also the Other of modernity, the Chinese social survey movement did not just write about the social world, but it also wrote the state into existence by creating the very conditions for the rise of the modernizing state.


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China as a Social Laboratory

“No investigation, no right to speak,” Mao Zedong declared in 1941.1 Although this comment was a response to the skeptics within the Communist Party who questioned his fixation on the Chinese peasantry as the driving force for China’s revolution, the statement also revealed the tremendous faith of a generation of Chinese intellectuals and political elites in social survey research as a guide for political action. Behind this sense of confidence and certainty was the presumed unity of social scientific knowledge, the belief that there was only one correct model of science that could accurately unlock the hidden mechanisms of the social world. Indeed, it was precisely this claim of universality and analytical power that led Chinese intellectuals, political actors, and social experts to embrace social science as an objective and all-powerful way of rescuing China from its ongoing chaos.2 Despite their confidence and shared belief in the efficacy of social scientific statecraft, however, contending groups and parties did not really practice a unitary social science. Not only did they embrace different assumptions, methods, theories, and conceptual categories, but the social world they sought to examine was far from a stable and well-defined object. The Chinese social survey movement consequently involved not just intense debates about how social science categories such as class and ethnicity were to be defined, but also contestation over some very foundational questions of the newly conceived Chinese social world. Should Chinese society be understood, for example, in terms of class or of ethnicity? Was China an industrializing society or was it a peasant society? And, how was one to make sense of the social history (shehui shi) of China? Obviously, these questions were about more than just imagining and defining the character of the nation; they also pointed to how the nation and society might be reformed. In this sense, although Mao made his com142


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ment in a very specific context, the comment was an omen of larger problems to come. For, if the objective of the social survey was to garner facts in order to make truth claims about conditions in China and ways to change them, then the right to speak was not just a matter of intellectual discourse. It entailed the question of which vision of truth, which political agenda, and which model of social scientific statecraft would be elevated and implemented while other contending truth claims were delegitimized and suppressed.The battle of social surveys was therefore a battle over China. At stake was more than just what kind of nation China was, but also what state form and political structure should be established, and, above all, who should govern. The Republican period was therefore an unusual moment because such a hegemonic and monolithic vision of knowledge and political order had not yet come into being. Certainly there was no shortage of aggressive social control policies and censorship by the warlord regimes, the Nationalists, and the Communists during this period. Outside these jurisdictions, there were also spheres of influence and treaty ports where contending colonial powers wielded their influence and practiced their own systems of governance. Yet it was the overall political fractures and disunity of China that made the Republican social survey scene remarkably diverse, productive, and innovative. Moreover, diversity also existed within and among each of the contending groups of social science practitioners that made claims about the human world. This was because survey-based social science as a mode of knowledge production was still very novel in China, not to mention that Chinese social scientists, consciously or unconsciously, often drew upon competing ideas and methods of social science from foreign sources as well as indigenous scholarship from the imperial era to construct a social world that would conform to their truth claims and statements about the Chinese nation. In this respect, early twentieth-century China can be regarded as a social laboratory of modernity, an epistemological and geographic site that encouraged and allowed for experiments and innovations.3 In this laboratory process, social science practitioners not only produced social facts and manufactured truth claims, but they also constructed a black box in the process of knowledge production so that their statements about the social world could potentially become durable and less vulnerable to assaults in a highly politically and ideologically charged environment. This chapter examines how American and Chinese practitioners of social survey research used China to test and develop their conceptions of the human world and to generate new social categories for the purposes of governance. Although there were other foreign social scientists working in China in various contexts during this time, American social scientists were


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by far the most predominant and influential, as many Chinese social scientists were trained, either directly or indirectly, by their American colleagues. To be sure, Japanese officials and social scientists also carried out extensive surveys in north China during the 1930s, yet their impact on the development of Chinese social science was very limited. Whereas the previous chapter examined how diverse survey methods were directed toward the objectives of the governmental agencies and academic institutions of the Nationalist regime, this chapter particularly highlights a pivotal conceptual shift that occurred in the social survey movement outside the government, as the backwardness of China constructed by American social scientists and experts was first adopted and later negated by their Chinese colleagues. The concomitant move away from urban-based social surveys introduced by American social scientists to rural-based social surveys ultimately led to the rise of the peasantry as an object of social investigation and intervention. Needless to say, the very concept of the peasantry not only occupied a central place in Mao’s hegemonic discourse, but it continues to be major category of concern in contemporary China’s emerging neoliberal social order.

american social science in china Although Chinese intellectuals conducted sporadic social surveys as early as the 1900s and 1910s, these surveys were all very small in scale and were carried out with few resources and often with limited social scientific knowledge. The most prominent early effort to survey China was the survey of Beijing carried out by Sidney Gamble, along with his colleague John Burgess and their Chinese students from the American mission–funded Yenching University, in the late 1900s and early 1910s.4 Like many reform-minded missionaries of his generation, Gamble had tremendous faith in the power of social science to achieve his evangelical goals, and he believed that science and reason, however understood, would awaken the Chinese people and bestow upon them new lives. If, in other words, the absence of Christian faith was used as an indication that the Chinese needed spiritual help, the alleged absence of facts in China was construed as a sign that China needed social surveys. In addition to being inspired by evangelicalism, the survey of the city of Beijing was prompted by the advent of social survey research in the United States. During the first decade of the twentieth century, American intellectual elites and social reformers came to realize the limitations of the ad hoc and spontaneous nature of existing charity operations. Increasingly, they


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acknowledged the importance of implementing a holistic approach to the social world in order to get to the roots of various social problems. The idea of social surveys, which privileged the study of social conditions through the comprehensive gathering and analysis of facts, therefore emerged as an essential tool for understanding the scope and depth of social questions, as well as providing an empirical basis for social intervention in a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing environment.The first comprehensive citywide surveys conceived for this purpose in the United States were the surveys of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1908–9) and Springfield, Illinois (1914), both of which were inspirations for Gamble’s Beijing survey. Altogether, there were some three thousand surveys of a similar nature produced in the United States in the subsequent two decades, making the Pittsburgh and Springfield surveys the beginning of what has come to be known as the American social survey movement.5 As the first of its kind in Asia, the survey of Beijing was met with great enthusiasm. Such eagerness to collect social facts in a foreign land rested on a profound confidence in the efficacy of the social sciences in rendering the once exotic and incomprehensible Other intelligible and commensurable. As Gamble’s colleague Sherwood Eddy put it, the Beijing survey “clears away much of what has seemed to be inscrutable. It brings surprise not so much by what is strange as by the essentially familiar human lineaments which it discloses. It offers many interesting points for comparison with western ways.”6 He further pointed out that social survey research such as this was nothing but an extension of the religious mission: “May . . . these surveys lead to action, to reform, to social reconstruction, to the building of the City of God in the midst of the poverty, the slums, and the wreckage of manhood and womanhood and childhood in the vast congested population of the cities of the Orient.”7 In other words, although the rise of secular science and empiricism was associated with the attempt to establish a new epistemological foundation to replace the crumbling religious authority in Europe, for missionaries-turned-social-scientists like Gamble and Eddy, religion was not incompatible with the social scientific conception of the human world. In fact, behind their notion of social scientific universalism was a deeper sense of spiritual universalism that endorsed the commonality and perfectibility of the human soul. Social science, in this regard, was simply a secular tool to achieve the divine plan. By the 1920s, however, such explicitly religion-driven social science operations had become increasingly untenable. Social science practitioners began to distance themselves from both the clergy and political radicals of that era by asserting their independence and professional status. They argued


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that in order to offer scientific, as opposed to spiritual or ideological, solutions to social problems, they had to ground their enterprise on secular and professional ethics.8 The replacement of the religious social scientific outlook by professional social science was also evident in the formation of the Rockefeller Foundation. Prior to its formal establishment in 1913, the founding donor John D. Rockefeller had already invested in the mission colleges in China. At one point he and his associates had even contemplated establishing an institute of higher education to assimilate into Chinese culture the “essential spirit” of Christianity in order to “avert the disaster that otherwise awaits the Chinese nation.” The plan, however, was curtailed due to political instability and growing nationalistic sentiments in China, as well as the secularizing trend of many privately endowed universities in the United States.9 In the Rockefeller Foundation’s early years, most of its projects in China and elsewhere were related to public health. Among its pilot programs in China were surveys of mining and industrial sites owned by U.S. companies aimed at health issues such as hookworm, malaria, and yellow fever. It also set up a public health demonstration station and invested in other medical facilities.10 In the 1920s, the foundation also started to make its foray into the social sciences by funding large-scale social science research and social engineering projects. Such devotion to social science research was hardly unusual during this time.The Russell Sage Foundation, sponsor of the Pittsburgh and Springfield surveys, was established in 1907 exclusively to use social science research to cure social ills. The Rockefeller Foundation was not the only American nongovernmental organization invested in the development of the social sciences in China either. In 1926, the China Foundation, which had been established to manage the distribution of the proceeds of the Second Remission of the Boxer Indemnity, established its Social Research Department (Shehui diaocha bu). The organization was later renamed the Institute of Social Research (Shehui diaocha suo). As both Chinese names indicate, the type of inquiry sponsored by the institute was exclusively survey-based social research.11 In the late 1920s, its operation was the largest of its kind outside the government and universities: between 1926 and 1932, the China Foundation’s researchers, most of whom had returned from studying in the United States, completed nearly a dozen social survey projects focusing on the livelihood of China’s growing industrial workforce.12 However, it was the Rockefeller Foundation whose initatives ultimately surpassed other programs and become the driving force behind the development of academic social sciences in China during the 1930s.


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Some historians have characterized the American foundations that appointed themselves the agents of modernity beyond U.S. borders as the “missionaries of science” because of the past evangelical connections of many of their donors.13 It would be a mistake, however, to see these new effort to remake the social world by deploying the latest scientific knowledge as simply an incarnation on a global scale of a belief in evangelical responsibility and the spirit of social activism of the American Progressive era. Instead, many of the social reform programs pursued by foundations and social science research institutions, as exemplified by the domestic and global programs advanced by the Rockefeller Foundation and the China Foundation, were articulated in terms of what the American sociologist Edward Ross (1866–1951) called “social control.” By social control, Ross meant a systematic intervention in the social field at the aggregate level in order to mediate the tension between public order and private desire in the industrial world.14 Such attempts to manage and reform the social field through scientific engineering, itself driven by the profound liberal anxiety to redeem the inevitable problems of industrial capitalism, involved new knowledge and methods that were not covered by traditional missionary activities. Equally novel was that such programs were often products of unprecedented collaboration between the government and the industrial and scientific sectors.15 The global expansion of American influence was certainly a key reason why these American foundations took upon themselves the role of disseminating new technologies of governance. Economically, the rise of transnational corporations such as Rockefeller’s Standard Oil led to the unparalleled expansion of world markets in terms of both production and consumption. Disciplinary and biopolitical intervention in areas such as work, education, public health, and public opinion were therefore no longer just a matter of domestic concern for American intellectual elites. Driven by the notions of Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism, American social scientists believed that the unbiased knowledge of science generated in the New World would trump that of the ideology-imbedded and war-plagued old Europe, and would become universally applicable in all human societies. Accordingly, the Rockefeller Foundation’s self-described global duty was “to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.”16 The American approach to engaging China was well summarized by Edward Ross when he, too, weighed in on the so-called China question. After a brief tour in China during the 1911 Revolution, just before he became


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the president of the American Sociological Society, he debunked the image of China as exotic and inscrutable created by what he called the amateur commentators and travel writers of yesteryear, and he concluded that “the Chinese do not seem very puzzling” for those who engaged in the “comparative study of societies.” Key social issues such as “the acute struggle for existence, ancestor worship, patriarchal authority, the subjection of women, the decline of militancy, and the ascendancy of scholars,” he declared, could easily be understood in the language of social science as soon as one realized that China was simply evolving from a historical stage that was equivalent to that of medieval Europe.17 Although the undergirding logic of the American modernizing project as revealed in Ross’s comment was similar to that of the civilizing mission of European colonialism, American policy thinkers and social experts did not seek to wield their influence over the native society through a formal structure of colonial governance. Rather, they emphasized their collaboration with native social scientists through training and funding. In fact, almost all survey projects funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Institute of Social Research after the mid-1920s were carried out by Chinese social scientists themselves. This desire to integrate China into the global system through native collaboration was illustrated by the participation of the Institute of Social Research in the 1933 International Exposition called “A Century of Progress” in Chicago. In an exhibition brochure the institute triumphantly announced to the world that China and its social scientists had finally mastered the ability to converse in the purportedly universal language of social science. It showcased how Chinese social scientists had successfully surveyed the changing social and economic conditions caused by “the development of world communication and the invasion of the new industrial culture which embodies the strength and prowess of modern power.”18 The author of the brochure did not seem to recognize the irony that the very modern power that had been transforming China was indeed the same force that elevated social science into a “universal” language over other modes of knowledge production. Meanwhile, closely related to the assertion that China had to be understood using universal social scientific categories was the assumption that social scientific knowledge generated by social facts collected in China could become applicable to other countries and even the United States itself. Officials from the Rockefeller Foundation indeed often exhibited this profound sense of internationalism by referring to China as nothing more than a “social laboratory,” emphasizing repeatedly that their interest was not really China but humanity in general.19


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the indigenization of social survey research A major consequence of the arrival of Western, mostly American, social science in China was the emergence of a whole class of Chinese students who were trained in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. They were joined by students trained by the mission colleges and, later, Chinese universities, which had well-developed social science curricula that were assisted and funded by American foundations. Together they formed an army of liberal social scientists ready to remap and remake China by constructing a liberal order. Like their American colleagues, these Chinese liberal social scientists and reformers started out with an acknowledgment of the inherent contradictions of capitalist modernity. That is to say, while they regarded science and technology as a means to alleviate the pain inflicted upon the individual, they also acknowledged that such pain was the inevitable outcome of industrialization and progress. The purpose of the social sciences, therefore, was not to pursue the impossible mission of eradicating human pain and suffering, but to contain those afflictions and manage them to minimize the risk of social disruption. In 1923, for instance, two years after Sidney Gamble’s survey of Beijing was published, the sociologist Chen Da and his students at Qinghua University surveyed the livelihoods of more than 150 families from two communities in Beijing and Anhui province.20 Having just returned to China with a doctoral degree from Columbia University, Chen was among the first actively to strive to disseminate the novel techniques of social survey research and test their feasibility on Chinese soil. When Chen Da published his meticulous survey findings on numerous aspects of the everyday life of the industrial worker in his China’s Labor Problems a few years later, he instantly established himself as a foremost expert in the field.21 Chen’s research into the livelihood question, like survey projects by other liberal social scientists, took place against the backdrop of China’s early industrialization. The labor movement in China was germinating in the 1920s. This was not only the result of increased industrialization and urbanization, but also because the iconoclastic May Fourth Movement of 1919 not only introduced a new intellectual agenda but also gave rise to new social and political awareness, as well as the idea of deploying social pressure to achieve political ends. As a result, organized labor movements became a spontaneous but prominent force against the intrusion of capitalism and imperialism. The Seamen’s Strikes in Hong Kong in 1922 and the Great Strike of Beijing-Hankou Railway Workers in 1923 were early examples of such growing political agitation. The emerging social discontent as a result


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of industrialization was further exacerbated by the May Thirtieth Incident in 1925, during which labor disputes at a Japanese factory in Shanghai escalated into a series of bloody confrontations between the local Chinese population and the Japanese and Western colonial powers.22 Although the newly founded Chinese Communist Party played only a marginal role in these protests, these events presented the Communists a much-needed opportunity to expand their influence. The inclination of cultural and political elites who were unsympathetic to radical social movements was to improve the living and working conditions of Chinese laborers. Many among the elite, for example, called for new legislation and a more assertive role by the government in mediating labor disputes and addressing social problems. Operating in the same vein, liberal social scientists and reformers, too, sought to use social survey research to identify the roots of these problems in order to tame the threats posed by surging radical politics. These proposals, of course, were virtually meaningless since the dysfunctional Chinese government could scarcely project its authority over numerous contending warlords and the colonial powers that occupied the treaty ports. Still, because liberal social scientists saw a fundamental difference between their surveys and those conducted by poorly trained government bureaucrats and amateur researchers from the political left, they regarded their social survey research as itself a form of political critique: they believed that they were the only ones who had the expertise to produce unbiased facts about Chinese society. Echoing the same sentiment, the prominent political liberal Hu Shi once made fun of the political left for trying to advocate socialism even though they knew nothing about the livelihood of the rickshaw puller.23 In the same fashion, in his work on labor problems, Chen Da made clear to his readers that proper social research must employ “empirical observation” guided by science rather than “abstract speculation” driven by ideology and politics.24 According to him, survey-based social science required: 1) the collection of facts through observation; 2) the precise recording and statistical measurement of facts; 3) the classification of facts based on their similarities and differences; 4) the generation of conclusions or, when it was impossible to reach a conclusion, hypotheses based on facts; and 5) the verification of each step before moving to the next. Nonetheless, as much as he emphasized the importance of professionalism, objectivity, and methods, there was little question that his research was geared toward the concerns of liberal governance. Pointing to the miserable living conditions of Chinese industrial workers, Chen emphasized the necessity of improving the livelihood of the workers and their “social happiness” (shehui xingfu) through an analysis of the cost of living


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(shenghuofei) in order to maintain a stable society. “If we systematically study the cost of living, then perhaps there would be hope for a perfect solution to problems such as labor disputes, strikes, riots, and social instability,” he wrote.25 A sense of urgency to understand and improve the livelihood of the people in the rapidly urbanizing world as a way to redeem the injustices of industrialism was shared by other liberal social scientists as well. Just a year after Chen Da returned to China, Li Jinghan, discussed in chapter 1 in a different context, also began to collaborate with other sociologists in order to survey the living conditions of rickshaw pullers in Beijing. Other surveys on the cost of living and livelihood soon followed. Tao Menghe, trained at London University but nevertheless a close collaborator with American social scientists and American-trained Chinese social scientists as the director of the Institute of Social Research, also documented the livelihood of workers of some forty-eight handicraft workshops in Beijing over a period of six months. He even compared his findings to those of similar studies conducted in Japan and India.26 Meanwhile, a score of similar surveys, many of which were also funded by the Institute of Social Research, took place in Shanghai, Nanjing,Tianjin, Kunming, Chengdu, Guangzhou, and other major metropolitan centers.27 In addition to these cost-of-living surveys for industrial workers in major cities, there were also many local cost-of-living surveys focusing on specific industrial sites. Most of these smaller surveys were exercises for emerging social scientists to hone their skills. Others were carried out for demonstration or teaching purposes.28 In spite of these early, faithful reproductions of American concerns and research methods, it did not take long for Chinese intellectual elites to realize the limitations of the American model. After all, although the imperatives of imperialism compelled Chinese social scientists to adopt the rhetoric of science and reason to reconceptualize China, they never felt comfortable with the image of China depicted by the Euro-American colonial gaze. For example, although Li Jinghan was invited by Sydney Gamble to return to China to become his collaborator in 1924, Li quickly became the director in his own right of a number of important surveys in north China and established himself as an authority on the subject without being overshadowed by his American colleagues. He even served briefly as the director of the Institute of Social Research while also teaching at Peking University.29 During that time he often lashed out against Euro-American racism and contended that most Western social scientists did not really understand China at all. When he encouraged his students to carry out surveys of China themselves, he particularly underscored, in almost a jingois-


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tic tone, the importance of Chinese studying the essence of Chinese culture and society: When those excessively arrogant Westerners were still . . . living their barbaric lives, China had already had a long tradition of culture and sophisticated learning. . . . Chinese culture and spirit, of course, are significantly different from those of other countries. I believe we must study . . . the special character of the Chinese national spirit, the old moral beliefs, and the special social structure systemically and scientifically in order to recover the true face of China. We should begin our survey from the perspective of history on the one hand and from the perspective of society, especially rural society, on the other in order to identify the original face of China.30

Li’s anti-imperialist and nationalist sentiments were echoed by others. Other sociologists such as Liu Yuren and Feng Rui similarly emphasized the virtue and strength of the Chinese “national character,” contending that the making of new citizens must begin with a scientific understanding of the rural population.Yan Xinzhe, another prominent social investigator, further challenged the common assertion made by his American colleagues that Chinese society was stagnant and argued that the country was constantly changing and evolving.31 In 1927, after conducting a few mostly urban-oriented surveys, Li mobilized his students at Yenching University to investigate more than 160 families in a village outside Beijing. Using approximately a hundred different questionnaires, this study covered not just living conditions but also ethnographic data such as familial structure and local customs that were specific to China.32 Realizing that the overwhelming majority of the Chinese population still lived in rural areas and that the culture of the rural populace needed to be studied, an increasing number of Chinese social scientists began to move away from the problems of cities and their industrial workforces.While some social scientists studied the impact of industrialization in rural areas, many others began to focus their research exclusively on rural issues, essentially launching an indigenization movement that sought to discover and remake what they regarded as the authentic Chinese social world. Significantly, this shift from mostly American-inspired urban surveys to rural surveys also marked the beginning of the high point of the Chinese social survey movement. According to one statistic, in 1927, nearly 69 percent of surveys were urban studies, 25 percent were provincewide surveys, and only about 6.5 percent were exclusively rural surveys. By 1935, however, nearly 38 percent of the surveys focused on rural populations only, and only about 24 percent were focused on urban populations. In the nine years from 1927 to


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1935, 9,027 surveys were carried out in China, most of them conducted by Chinese social scientists themselves.33 This indigenization of social survey research coincided with the era of the Nationalist government’s broad range of social engineering projects under the National Reconstruction program. Chinese social scientists thus were provided with extraordinary opportunities to render service to the new regime by experimenting with their ideas of how to construct a new society. Since the Nationalists were mostly an urban-based regime, social survey research with an urban focus was particularly in demand. In addition to the research institutes within the Academia Sinica and the Research Institute of Land Economics, both of which were run directly by the regime, nongovernment organizations such as the Institute of Social Research and the Institute of Economics at Nankai University also carried out surveybased social and economic research for the government’s bureaucratic needs. Provincial and municipal governmental agencies such as the Social Bureau (Shehui ju) and the Police Bureau likewise conducted their own social surveys based on their specific agendas. In fact, in 1934 redundancy in academic social surveys became such a problem that the Institute of Social Research ceased to be an independent organization and was folded into the Institute of the Social Sciences of the Academia Sinica.34

going to the field While the ascendancy of the Nationalist regime and its National Reconstruction project created a positive political atmosphere for social survey research in China, many Chinese liberals considered the expansion and consolidation of the Nationalists a bittersweet affair. On the one hand, they welcomed the return of a far more legitimate national government that was keen to defend its sovereignty against the encroachment of the industrial powers, especially Japan. On the other hand, they were highly uncomfortable with the neoconservative, industrial-oriented, and increasingly authoritarian oneparty system under the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. Many of them also felt that this mostly urban-based regime was utterly out of touch with China’s vast agrarian countryside. These political developments, together with growing reservations about the usefulness of the types of research and reform projects that pertained only to industrialization, encouraged many social scientists to look for alternative ways to remake China. Both as an affirmation of their belief in the need to further indigenize social survey research and as form of protest


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against the Nationalists, many of social scientists began to leave behind their earlier works. One of them was Li Jinghan. In a public lecture at Qinghua University in 1935, Li discussed how he had become part of the independent rural reconstruction movement amid the intellectual and political anxieties caused by the success of the Nationalists. He said that the shift in his career “occurred precisely at a time when the Northern Expedition had triumphed. On the one hand, the slogan of ‘going to the people’ [dao mingjian qu] was exploding; one the other hand, many people who felt alienated [by the government] were all declaring their intent of ‘going to the field’ [xiaye].”35 He noted that although surveying rickshaw pullers, artisans, shopkeepers, beggars, and the like in the city for a period of four years had enabled him to experiment with and improve his survey techniques and skills, he soon came to believe that the “real world of the masses” (zhenzheng de minjian) was actually in the rural areas where most of the people lived and the old culture was still being preserved. Apart from the fact that China was still an agrarian society, this indigenization of social survey research was motivated by a profound sense of nationalism. In his writings Li Jinghan often faulted Western social scientists for their lack of understanding of the real conditions of China, and he criticized those Chinese colleagues who tried to copy wholesale from the West. According to him, social survey research was significant not because it would facilitate Westernization, but because it could offer a way for “national self-salvation” (minzu zijiu).36 Rhetoric aside, it is important to note that the project of “going to the field” was never simply about establishing political solidarity with the masses. Li and his research team, for instance, routinely characterized the peasants who were unwilling to work with their interlocutors as ignorant, passive, superstitious, selfish, irrational, and conservative. In other words, by asserting that the peasants were subjected to their own backward belief system, Chinese social scientists and modernizing elites essentially reaffirmed their self-appointed role as the agents of civilization and historical change, and they effectively distanced themselves from the rural population they sought to examine and reform. Therefore, while these Republican field researchers, as participant observers of the peasant social world, were politically more sympathetic to the suffering of the rural masses, their epistemological position was similar to that of the late Qing intellectual elites who mocked the “foolish” villagers who refused to cooperate with the state. In a nutshell, as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, the peasant as a conceptual category continues to stand for everything that modernity is not.37 In 1928, upon an invitation from the rural reformer James Yen (1890–


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1990), Li left the Institute of Social Research and became the head of the Social Survey Division (Shehui diaocha bu) in Yen’s experimental Ding county (Dingxian) in Hebei province. Despite his earlier conduct of a survey in a village in the suburbs of Beijing, this represented a drastic shift in his career. According to him, this was a move from conducting social surveys for the sake of pure knowledge to conducting them for social betterment. Meanwhile, Sidney Gamble, too, ended up in Ding county, offering advice to Li and other researchers. The contrast between the Chinese, enthused to be “going to the people,” and his own relocation was quite obvious. As Gamble later recalled, although the Ding county experience turned out to be very rewarding for him, he had been reluctant to leave Beijing at the time. He finally did so only because the city was occupied by a warlord, making it impossible for him to conduct further research.38 Like those who joined his rural reconstruction project, Yen also harbored ambivalent feelings toward the Nationalists. But his revelation about the significance of rebuilding a society from the bottom up started even earlier. As a Christian devotee and a believer in the Wilsonian ideals of liberty and democracy, he first came to realize the importance of educating the illiterate masses when, after graduating from Yale and Princeton, he was sent to France to work with Chinese laborers there during the First World War. In 1926, with support from the YMCA and other American philanthropies,Yen returned to China and began his innovative experiments in mass education and his rural reconstruction projects in Ding county. Before long, his vision became a magnet for other rural-bound intellectuals while also drawing critics from both ends of the political spectrum. Meanwhile, inspired by his work, other liberal reformers who were not affiliated with the government also started their own rural reconstruction projects. By the early 1930s, these spontaneous local projects had coalesced into a massive, albeit still loosely connected, nationwide movement. While the Ding county projects directed by Yen and the Zouping county projects in Shandong province directed by Liang Shuming remained the most celebrated successes, there were altogether more than seventy such experimental districts by the onset of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937.39 Fu Sinian, the prominent historian and social scientist who directed the Institute of History and Philology, once admitted that there were in fact two unconnected social reconstruction projects, one focused on rural society and the other on urban society.40 Although these rural reformers generally benefited from the rise of the Nationalists, who provided them with greater military protection and political endorsement, their sharp disagreement with the Nationalists and their urban-oriented modernizing projects did not abate. Rural reconstruction-


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ists particularly believed that the reconstruction of rural society should be given the highest priority. Yen, for instance, argued that the fundamental social problems of China were rooted in the “ignorance, poverty, physical weakness, and selfishness” of the rural masses.41 Yen’s characterization of the rural population was nonetheless still indebted to the enduring image of the so-called Chinese national character that constantly circulated in Western and Chinese social science literature.Yen, for instance, was obsessed with the Chinese people’s alleged inability to think in exact terms, and he frequently wrote about the supposed character traits of the Chinese. He even ridiculed the routine use of the expression “cha bu duo” (almost or about) by the rural masses.42 That expression, which was invented by the famous writer and positivist philosopher Hu Shi, was also the name of a character who supposedly represented all Chinese people. Part of Yen’s mission, then, was to find ways for the rural masses to overcome their alleged factual deficiencies. Indeed, although he was not a social scientist himself, Yen was a believer in the efficacy of science in transforming the human world. In carrying out his Ding county experimental project, he particularly emphasized the role of social science, and he pointed out that any action must be preceded by an accurate and thorough survey of social conditions.43 For Li Jinghan and other social survey researchers, stepping away from the ivory tower and studying the rural people turned out to be rather challenging. Initially Li had hoped to complete the entire survey of Ding county within a year using what he referred to as the “systematic methods of science.” But the scientific methods he had learned from textbooks seemed to fall apart just two weeks after he arrived in the field, as he realized, as other social scientists would soon discover, that it was nearly impossible to solicit accurate facts in rural society.44 Li eventually abandoned much of his textbook knowledge and devised new methods and categories that not only examined socioeconomic phenomena but also delved deeper into the culture and customs of China’s rural society. After eight years of hardship and meticulous research, which involved numerous case studies and various forms of sampling, Li Jinghan and his colleagues completed a comprehensive survey of the entire county. When the report was published as a book in 1933, it was nothing short of extraordinary in both scope and detail. Moreover, the purpose of the book was not only to provide a total picture of the experimental district, but also to be an example of how social surveys should be done. As a result, in addition to the numerous charts, tabulations, and statistics, the final report also contained all the sample questionnaires.45 This epic study of Ding county covered its history, geography, governmental and local institutions, population, education, public health, cost of living, enter-


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tainment, customs, popular beliefs, taxation, agriculture, commerce, industries, finances, natural disasters, weather, and so forth. Indeed, because of its scope and encyclopedic nature, this study was unlike most other social surveys, which generally focused on only a particular set of sociological concerns. This survey report instead read like a local gazetteer from the imperial era, but with the latest social scientific methods and categories. In his preface to the book, James Yen underlined the indigenous nature of the Ding county survey by referring it as an exemplar of how to deploy methods and techniques designed especially for the Chinese situation.46 Interestingly enough, a decade later, when the anthropologist Fei Xiaotong began his surveys of China’s ethnic minorities after studying with Bronisław Malinowski in the United Kingdom, he severely criticized Li Jinghan and other American-trained social investigators, calling their social surveys merely collections of facts without prior hypotheses and arguments.47 However, Fei, who is regarded by historians as responsible for laying the foundation for anthropological and sociological studies in the People’s Republic, seemed to have misunderstood the nature of these surveys by accepting at face value the positivist claims made by these Americantrained social scientists that their surveys were mere facts without arguments and agenda. Not unlike other surveys carried out by other Americantrained liberal social scientists, the Ding county survey was never just an exercise in collecting and displaying facts. From the beginning, Li had already contradicted his own assertion that social surveys were nothing but a collection of facts and stated that his objective was to identify the “bad habits and shortcomings of the Chinese people,” including their “ignorance, weakness, and selfishness.”48 His findings on the low literacy, poverty, superstition, and poor public hygiene of the rural masses were nothing but confirmation of what had already been assumed about the rural world by James Yen and other liberal intellectuals. As an integral part of rural reconstruction, these findings had direct political and social engineering implications, especially in terms of uplifting and civilizing the people. The complaint made by turn-of-the-century Chinese intellectuals such as Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen, and Lu Xun about the lack of political awareness among its people that made China nothing but a nation without citizens was echoed by Li, who argued that China was “a nation without citizens” because its vast rural population was utterly ignorant of their social and political condition.49 Now, to James Yen’s project of improving literary, Li sought to add social scientific literacy. By displaying social facts to the public through lectures and meetings using statistical charts, tabulations, and so forth, Li hoped to educate the masses, show-


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ing them the strengths and weaknesses of their locale and of the nation. He noted that the masses, once imbued with a sense of pride and shame, would understand their social and political existence and attain a new level of political consciousness.

american social science goes native For many American social scientists and experts, the rise of the Nationalists at first glance seemed to be an inviting development. “China has become plastic after centuries of rigid conventionalism,” declared the vice-president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Selskar Gunn, after his short trip to China in 1931.50 Like many other American social scientists of the time, he believed that the previously immobile China had suddenly become malleable, susceptible to outside intervention. Having until recently been the foundation’s director of European social science programs, Gunn was not only interested in reforming China per se. In his mind, the plasticity of China meant that it could potentially become “a vast laboratory in the social sciences, with implications that would be international in scope.”51 Despite the fact that Gunn and his American colleagues were upbeat about the rise of the Nationalists, they generally wanted to steer clear of China’s internal politics. In part this was due to their conviction that empirical social science must work to improve human conditions through scientific rather than political means, but it also was due to the surge of nationalist and anti-imperialist sentiments among China’s cultural and political elites. Chinese political leaders, especially, were often suspicious about the motivations of foreign social scientists and experts. Also, American observers often regarded the political leaders of the Nationalist government as amateurs and therefore questioned their competency.52 Mindful of being dragged into Chinese partisan and factional politics, American foundations were reluctant to invest in the National Reconstruction project directly. At the same time, however, Gunn was energized by the discovery of what he regarded as the real China, namely, China’s rural society.53 He was especially impressed by the commitment and enthusiasm of the Chinese reformers who worked outside the government and sought to remake China from the bottom up. After several visits to Ding county, for example, he was particularly persuaded by James Yen’s rural reconstruction program, believing that it was a model not just for the rest of China but also for other agrarian societies. For him, the rural reconstruction program was a stark contrast to the type of social survey research that had been funded by Amer-


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ican foundations up to that point. Agreeing with his Chinese colleagues who called for indigenization, Gunn lamented that although China actually had no shortage of Western-returned social scientists teaching at its universities, most of those researchers focused almost exclusively on urban problems and were therefore irrelevant to China’s real needs. Furthermore, Gunn appreciated the fact that while the spirit of the rural reconstruction movement was consistent with that of the larger project of National Reconstruction, it remained independent from the government. A direct involvement in this project, he therefore believed, would allow the foundation to cast a vote on China’s future while still staying aloof from the nation’s confusing and bitter political struggles. Equally appealing was the holistic nature of rural reconstruction, which would allow the foundation to fuse its agricultural, medical, sanitary, and social expertise into a single interdisciplinary project, something that it had never done before.54 The belief that China represented an opportunity to shape the future world due to its sheer size and its value as a social laboratory ultimately convinced Gunn to persuade the Rockefeller Foundation to deepen its involvement in China by investing in social science programs geared toward rural China. Gunn forcefully argued that since empirical social science entailed the study of local particularities, it would represent a far more direct and effective approach to engaging China than the comparatively uniform medical approach.55 Gunn’s vision, needless to say, constituted a marked challenge to the existing practice of the foundation, which had so far prioritized medical science and public health over other forms of social intervention in its philanthropic projects worldwide. Although Gunn was given permission to divert the foundation’s support from traditional university-based social science projects in China to the rural reconstruction program in 1933, his idea was met with repeated skepticism among his co-workers. Between his return from his first China visit, in 1931, and 1934 Gunn and his colleagues engaged in a sustained debate on the merits of his proposal, the purpose of the foundation’s involvement in China, and even the foundation’s methods and goals in general. For some, Gunn’s recommendation, however appealing, was inconsistent with the foundation’s existing practice. It was believed that Gunn’s ideas might even undermine the foundation’s supposedly universal approach of using medical science and public health to remake human societies across the globe. An internal evaluation of Gunn’s recommendation suggested that many of his colleagues were deeply troubled by the implications of employing “two techniques” in China while there was only one—namely, public health—for the rest of the world.56 In other words, was China really so significant or


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unique that the foundation needed to deviate from its supposedly universal formula of scientific intervention? Equally unsettling was the fact that the foundation’s investment in China had far exceeded the money it had spent in all other countries except the United States. “Is there no other sector of the world where we can hope to obtain as large a return in human happiness and welfare as we can in China,” Gunn’s co-workers pondered aloud.57 After much deliberation, the conclusion reached was that neither the foundation nor the world could afford to ignore the enormity of the China problem, and that if the foundation was to play a prominent role in fostering a universal civilization, it must not miss such an opportunity. Gunn also insisted that this renewed commitment to China was still consistent with the foundation’s long-term goal of scaling back its support for mission colleges and instead investing in Chinese institutions.58 Nevertheless, despite the approval of Gunn’s proposal, some of his colleagues continued to raise questions about the foundation’s disproportionate commitment and unique approach to China. In short, as much as it was the foundation’s dream to change China, China had somehow made the foundation change its existing practices. Still, with official support from the foundation, Gunn was able to move forward his proposal to provide substantial funding to Chinese universities to promote social survey research. After observing Li Jinghan’s research and James Yen’s Ding county project, he concluded that the foundation’s new program to retool its social scientific expertise for the remaking of rural China should start with social survey research.59 He made his argument by reciting a familiar script about the lack of social facts in China: “It is obvious that any program for reconstruction, if it is to be effective and vital, must be based upon actual facts. . . . We do not even know the population of China. . . . Even the population of a village is a matter for speculation to the inhabitants. ‘One or two hundred families’ is a common reply to the question, or ‘Too many people!’ ”60 Gunn and his American colleagues were particularly interested in using social facts to produce democratic subjects in order to foster a liberal order in China. In the same way that some American social scientists argued about the importance of herding the public opinion of the masses at home, officers from the Rockefeller Foundation repeatedly mentioned the need to shape Chinese public opinion in order to tame the nationalistic as well as the revolutionary impulses of the Chinese and to make them more sympathetic to liberal democracy.61 But even if Chinese and American social experts converged on the point about the role of social surveys as technologies of social propaganda, Chinese social scientists were more interested in the produc-


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tion and dissemination of social facts that could help to produce patriotic subjects for the nation.62

the making of the peasantry One major conceptual development that came out of the Ding county survey was the emergence of the peasant (nongmin) as an object of investigation. Prior to this, the rural population was referred to by Chinese intellectuals primarily as “the people,” “commoners,” or “villagers.” During the final years of the Qing dynasty, for example, government officials and cultural elites referred to those who rioted against the implementation of the new census as “foolish people” (yumin) or “foolish villagers” (cunyu). In the early 1920s, when James Yen and his associates first set up their mass education campaigns to improve the literacy and political awareness of the rural population, they simply referred to the people as pingmin, or commoners. Even the idea of rural reconstruction was advanced under the slogan of “going to the people” (dao minjian qu). When Li Jinghan’s survey of the village in the suburb of Beijing was published in 1929, he referred to the local residents as “villagers” (cunmin). Similarly, the majority, if not all, of the social scientists referred to the rural areas as “villages” (xiangcun).63 However, when the survey report of Ding county was published in 1933, Li referred to the local residents as “peasants,” or nongmin. In his preface to the report, Yen, too, began to use nongmin to refer to the local population. This term also became increasingly popular in other publications. In 1935, for example, a newsletter named Nongmin, self-described as a “must-read” for all the Chinese peasants, was published in Ding county.64 The replacement of the various terms used previously with nongmin was more than a mere matter of standardization. The idea of the peasant, imported from the Soviet Union by left-leaning intellectuals, came with a set of sociocultural and economic assumptions, as well as new research methods, sensitivities, and policy implications.65 In a textbook called The Principles and Methods of Social Surveys, published in the same year that his final report of the Ding county survey was published, Li provided a detailed inventory explaining why a peasant would refuse to cooperate with an investigator. Without repeating each of his specific points, his comments can be grouped into several themes. First, peasants were ignorant, as evidenced by the fact that they often confused surveys with taxation, conscription, and other forms of exploitation by officials and local bullies. Second, peasants were politically passive and worried


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about inviting trouble simply by speaking with the investigators. Third, although there were occasions when peasants were eager to participate in surveys, they did so only because of their selfishness, believing that their cooperation would lead to benefits such as charity, free health care, and new agricultural techniques. Finally, Li also acknowledged that, after years of suffering as a result of exploitation by corrupt local officials, overtaxation, and forced conscription, the last thing the peasants wanted was to be interrogated by strangers whom they regarded as government officials.66 These local suspicions and grievances caused by surveys and censuses described by Li were certainly not surprising, as they were already evident during the 1909 census conducted by the Qing government. In fact, in spite of the changes of political regimes, enumerative categories, and survey methods, the meanings of surveys made no sense to the rural populace, for they did not partake in the epistemological assumptions of social science. Records of such mutual misunderstanding and distrust were repeatedly documented by census takers and field investigators. In 1934, for example, in a village somewhere in Zhejiang province, when an old woman knitting in front of her home was approached by the village head and several investigators, she immediately responded, “My son is dead. So is my grandson. All I have left is my old skeleton. What else do you want from me?” The village head replied. “Because you are poor, the government sent us to survey you, hoping to save people like you.” The old lady replied, “If that is the case, then don’t bring these policemen to scare me. I don’t want any benefit.”67 But instead of empathizing with these rather understandable and rational reactions from the rural population, researchers almost always used such examples to reinforce the stereotypical character traits of the peasant as imagined by scores of Chinese and Western writers. In fact, given their interest in modern health care and in new agricultural techniques, the people of Ding county did not seem to be foolish or backward at all. Also, by the time Yen started his mass education program in Ding county, the area was hardly a backwater, as it had already been subjected to countless social engineering projects imposed by reformers in the past, including even the highly intrusive modernizing projects instituted by Yuan Shikai’s warlord regime in the early 1910s.68 At the end, Li simply recycled the same script about the peasants’ inability to communicate in facts. He warned his students that even if the peasants were willing to talk, their answers would likely be, “There are several hundred households in the village,” “There are almost one to two hundred persons,” or “I have roughly ten acres of land.”69 Li recommended that his students “peasantize” (nongmin hua) themselves in order to gain the trust and respect of the peasants and encourage


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their cooperation.This meant that the investigators had to befriend the peasants by eating and living with them. Specifically, according to Li, investigators had to get used to the peasants’ smell, their disgusting food, and their unhygienic condition. As I argued in chapter 4, the endurance of suffering and the retelling of that experience were essential components of social scientific knowledge production during this period. There was no exception for Li and his team members who participated in rural reconstruction projects. Like other Republican fieldworkers, they had to give up the comforts of an urban lifestyle and transform themselves into credible and keen observers of truth by eating bitterness. Indeed, Li warned students of social survey research that, although it was painful to endure bad weather or to be bitten by dogs, it was no less painful to encounter ignorant and uncooperative responses from those who were being studied.70 Nevertheless, Li and his fellow researchers departed from their predecessors in that the concept of the peasant, as opposed the vague Qing-era notion of “foolish people,” enabled the researchers to theorize the social and economic conditions that gave rise to the backward behavior and worldview of the peasant. And, once the root causes of so-called peasant problems became far more tangible, social engineering projects also became more possible. Although the Ding county survey seemed to resemble a gazetteer from the imperial era because of its encyclopedic nature, it also involved a range of interdisciplinary methods from sociology, anthropology, and economics in order to approach the peasant problem in a holistic manner. More specifically, in addition to the standard social and economic data, the survey produced extensive ethnographic knowledge of the so-called peasant culture and peasant consciousness by examining issues such as popular entertainment, religion, belief systems, psychology, and folk songs. The survey report even included the entire script of a play.71 The rural reconstructionists and their American patrons were not the only ones who regarded the rural world as the key to China’s future. When Western-trained social scientists began to shift their focus from the urban centers to rural areas in the mid-1920s, Marxist scholars were also debating both the historical and contemporary character of Chinese society. Was Chinese society capitalistic or feudalistic in nature? What was the class structure of contemporary Chinese society? If China had not yet passed its feudal stage, could a social revolution occur without China passing through the capitalism stage? The stakes of these questions were certainly high, as they entailed a comprehensive strategy of how, where, and when to engineer a social revolution that would lead to a new China. Naturally, Chinese Marxist intellectuals at this time were particularly


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inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. They also were supported by the Moscow-based Communist International, or Comintern, which sought to export the Russian revolutionary experience to the rest of the world. The outlook for launching a social revolution similar to the one in Russia, however, seemed to be quite gloomy. Despite the growing incidence of labor disputes and even strikes by the industrial workforces in the coastal cities, most workers, intellectuals, and politicians were interested in reform rather than revolution. More importantly, it was highly questionable whether the tiny Chinese industrial working class could really constitute a critical mass to challenge both the Nationalist regime and the colonial powers together. In fact, up to this point at least, the Nationalists seemed to be able to neutralize the Communist movement quite effectively by directing the energy of labor unrest toward the colonial powers on the one hand, and quelling the Communist activists through brutal suppression on the other. By the late 1920s, as the Nationalist regime returned to the national stage as a result of its Northern Expedition campaign, the survival space of the Communist Party was rapidly shrinking in the urban centers. The party, moreover, suffered a great loss as many of its most talented leaders were arrested and executed by the Nationalist government. As the setbacks suffered by the early Communist movement forced the surviving members to return to the drawing board, it also opened the door for alternative visions. Among those who benefited from this opportunity was Mao Zedong (1893–1976), a native of Hunan province in central China, who had previously been overshadowed by the highly educated, cosmopolitan, and urban-based Marxist intellectuals. In 1927, after a month-long investigation into peasant life in his home province, he compiled the now famous Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan, a work that received little attention outside the Communist circle at the time but would soon become the defining document of the Chinese Communist movement. In this report, Mao made his prophetic remark about China’s peasants and rural society in general: “In a short time, in China’s central, southern, and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a tornado or tempest, a force so extraordinarily swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to suppress it.They will break all trammels that now bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation.They will send all imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local bullies, and bad gentry to their graves.”72 For Mao, unleashing the peasantry was the key to an opportunity to remake China and turn it into a Communist utopia. While the idea of an imminent revolution was radical, the assertion that the countryside and the peasants represented the future of China was quite


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similar to that of the rural reconstructionists. A critical difference, of course, lay in what that future would be and what role the peasantry was to play in it. This was an issue for Communists, as well, whose general view was that peasants were landless agricultural workers who subsisted by offering their labor, which was exploited by the landlord class in a supposedly feudalistic social structure. And, since peasants were at the mercy of the caprices of nature, they must also be superstitious and skeptical of radical political change. Given their presumed backward mentality and resistance to change, the Comintern concluded that the peasantry could never be the agents of a social revolution. Mao, in contrast, insisted that the peasants would become sympathetic to the revolution if they were made aware of the reality of their social and economic condition. Once that happened, the peasantry could be substituted for the industrial workforce as the proletariat in the revolution. As the title of his report indicates, Mao was not interested in providing an ethnographic study of peasant culture. He did not study folklore and the popular beliefs of the peasants, as liberal social scientists and reformers often sought to do, for he was interested in the question of peasant consciousness only insofar as it had positive implications for revolution. In another piece entitled “An Analysis of the Various Classes among the Chinese Peasantry and Their Attitudes toward the Revolution,” Mao further estimated that, based on the assumption that China had a population of 400 million, 80 percent, or 320 million, were peasants of some sort.73 In order to prove his point, he used Soviet peasant categories to organize the Chinese rural population according to a typology, dividing them into eight subclasses: big landlords, small landlords, owner-peasants, semiowner-peasants, sharecroppers, poor peasants, farm laborers and rural artisans, and vagrants. His next step was to emphasize the proletarian nature of many of these groups and predict their potential attitudes toward revolution. He accomplished this by analyzing their relationship to the mode of production, and particularly the level of exploitation that he estimated that they experienced.74 Among these peasant types, the categories of owner-peasant and semiowner-peasant were most important to him. This was especially the case since many observers within the Communist Party argued that the ownerpeasants not only constituted the largest subclass, but their numbers indeed were greater than the total of those deprived of owning any means of production. A revolution relying on this peasant subclass, in short, would be hopeless. By introducing the notion of the semiowner, however, Mao completely reversed this conclusion. He argued that truly “well-to-do” ownerpeasants were only a tiny minority—about 10 percent, or 12 million—of the entire population. Most of the so-called owner-peasants, in his formu-


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lation, were actually semiowner-peasants who experienced hardship and exploitation to some degree. Moreover, according to Mao, the majority of these semiowner-peasants detested their enemies, such as landlords, local bullies, warlords, and the imperialist powers. In his estimation, most of this group of 60 million would be enlistable on the side of revolution. Altogether, he projected that between 150 million and 170 million peasants, or about half of the total, would join the revolution if the conditions were right.75 In short, by segregating the large body of the so-called semiowner-peasants from the category of owner-peasants and “proletarianizing” them, Mao instantly changed the outlook for revolution. To support his claims, Mao offered a detailed analysis of the story of Zhang, an average peasant. Mao, however, never explained how he established Zhang’s representativeness, and, indeed, Zhang seems more like an ideal peasant or even a romantic hero of Mao’s invention than an actual typical peasant.76 First we are told that Zhang is strong, hardworking, and intelligent, in stark contrast to the images of sickness, indolence, and ignorance often depicted by other reformers. Mao supplies painstaking statistical details in the story of his hero, including all his income and expenditures, even including hypothetical contingent expenses such as costs incurred by Zhang and his family in the event of illness and natural calamity. The survey narrative unfolds as a simple accounting sheet that points to the inevitable suffering and demise of Zhang and his family due to the harsh exploitation inflicted on them. Ultimately, the narrative of exploitation ends with a precise number, namely, an annual deficit of 19.6455 yuan for the family even under the best circumstances.77 Mao concludes that peasants like Zhang, once made aware of their situation, would become revolutionary subjects and rise up against those who hindered the progress of history. In spite of his exposure to some basic social science ideas from the Soviet Union, Mao had never received formal social science training of any sort. Much of what he called social investigation was essentially derived from the old literary genre of the travelogue (youxue), a common genre of Confucian literati who wrote about their observations as they traveled. Some scholars have also noted that, although examples are commonly used in anthropological studies, the use of exemplars as a mode of reasoning has always occupied a particular place in Chinese culture.78 In a sense, if there were any methodological precedent to Mao’s work, it was the long tradition of Chinese medical discourse, in which diagnoses were accomplished through thinking about typical cases.79 Mao’s peasant studies were just the sort of improvised social surveys long dismissed by professional social scientists as simplistic and unscientific.80


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But the Russian idea of the peasant, so central to Mao’s surveys, had otherwise managed to find its way into the mainstream social science lexicon. To a significant degree, this was due to a few highly visible and large-scale survey-based social research projects directed by left-leaning and Marxist researchers such as Chen Hansheng and Feng Hefa. In the case of Chen, his early career trajectory, unlike Mao’s, was similar to those of his liberal colleagues and friends before he became committed to the Communist movement.81 He received his undergraduate training at the University of Chicago, and then his doctoral degree at Berlin University in 1924. After a brief tenure at Peking University at the invitation of its president, Cai Yuanpei, his interest in Marxism brought him to the Institute for the Study of International Peasant Movements in Russia. His academic qualifications as well as his broad experience with various traditions of social scientific thinking earned him great respect among some of the leading intellectuals in China. In 1928 he returned to China and took charge of the sociology section of the Institute of Social Science at the state-sponsored Academia Sinica.82 In the summer of 1929, Chen dispatched a team of forty-five investigators to examine the conditions of rural society in Gansu province. The team covered fifty-five villages. Their surveys included detailed studies of more than a thousand families from nearly two dozen of these villages, as well as an investigation of the industrial and commercial activities in eight rural townships. Among its findings, Chen’s team discovered that a tiny portion of the landlord class ( 3.7 percent) possessed more than 40 percent of the land, whereas the poor peasants and tenant peasants owned less than 20 percent of it. Chen’s survey campaigns continued until 1934, covering many areas in the northern, southern, and southeast regions of the country. Chen’s surveys, of course, were far more systematic and comprehensive than Mao’s peasant studies. Chen’s findings nonetheless produced the same miserable picture of the Chinese peasant class, and he similarly concluded that rural China was essentially feudal or semifeudal in nature. Whether liberal social scientists shared Chen’s political convictions or not, they were at least on the same page in critiquing the urban- and industrial-oriented National Reconstruction project pursued by the Nationalists. Interestingly, one of Chen’s large-scale surveys in Hebei province was done in Baoding county, right next to Ding county, the home of James Yen’s rural reconstruction project and where Li Jinghan was conducting his rural surveys. Chen selected Baoding in particular because it was the location where the British American Tobacco Company grew its tobacco. Therefore, among other things, this location allowed Chen to investigate the impact of colonialism and industrial capitalism on China’s rural communities.83 But


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there is no question that the county also became a staging ground for Chen to showcase his alternative social scientific worldview. Still, despite their substantial political and ideological differences, the two men, who studied in the United States at almost the same time, shared a mutual admiration. Li even invited Chen to be one of the contributors to the preface of his Ding county survey report.84 Chen also graciously praised Li’s accomplishment of the survey of Ding county, which, as previously noted, became a model of social survey research among mainstream social scientists and introduced the term nongmin (peasantry) as interchangeable with such terms as “villagers,” “commoners,” and “rural population.” In this respect, although Chen was eventually forced to quit the Academia Sinica because of his ideological inclinations, the category of the peasant that had been embraced by him and other left-leaning intellectuals prevailed. The rising popularity of the idea of the peasant is also visible in a popular book on Chinese peasantry by Feng Hefa. When the book was first published, in 1931, it was called A Study of the Chinese Peasant Society. In 1934, however, after it had been reprinted several times, a revised edition was renamed Principles of Peasant Studies, reflecting, according to the author, the growing importance of the emerging field of peasant studies.85 Scholars of the history of European colonialism have noted that native resistance, a lack of firm control, and other local circumstances often forced colonial officials to develop and innovate new governing techniques. In early twentieth-century China, practitioners of social scientific statecraft operated in an even more contentious and unstable environment. In this environment, with its political fractures, ideological dissonance, domestic unrest, and foreign incursions, the readymade social scientific frameworks and governing techniques developed in the European metropoles and their colonies could not easily be applied without significant modifications. For American social scientists and policy experts who sought to distance themselves from the Old World, China was an important social laboratory for their global project of modernity. For Chinese social scientists and reformers from contending political camps, China similarly was their laboratory of modernity in which social experiments were carried out not only for the sake of acquiring new social scientific knowledge but also to engineer new citizens and social conditions so that the nation they strove to represent and govern could become a reality. Among the Chinese intellectual elites, therefore, the stakes associated with the social survey movement and their internal civilizing project were remarkably high and the potential reward tremendous. The indigenizing turn of the Chinese social survey movement in the 1930s


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by those who worked outside government particularly exemplified the increasingly diverse ways of approaching the Chinese social world. This, of course, is not to suggest that social surveys conducted by the Nationalist government and their social scientists were not indigenized or localized to a significant degree.86 However, the self-conscious and explicit call for indigenization made by liberal and Marxist intellectuals accompanied a profound shift in the types of social surveys, from those focusing on urban problems (favored by the Nationalist government) to those focusing on rural areas. In short, when the social survey movement reached its height in the 1930s, not only had the social fact become the source of truth and the social survey become a universal mode of the production of social knowledge, but Chinese intellectual elites from a broad range of political spectrums also increasingly used the conceptual category of the rural and ultimately the peasant to reconceptualize China’s existing social conditions and political outlooks. On the one hand, they viewed the rural world as backward and anachronistic. As modernity’s Other, the rural population was represented as lacking political consciousness and therefore in need of being civilized and transformed into new political subjects. On the other hand, unlike in the formal colonies, where the colonial authorities depicted the peasantry as a source of danger and political instability, Chinese intellectual elites regarded the rural world as a site of opportunity where a new and strong China would emerge.87 Furthermore, for Marxist intellectuals, at least at this moment, the project of converting the peasants into class subjects pointed to a cosmopolitan worldview in which they saw China’s struggle against the imperialist powers as part of a larger global movement. For those liberal social scientists who viewed the peasantry as the embodiment of an authentic Chinese culture and insisted that this unique culture should be examined and understood by the Chinese themselves, the rural world was a site for them to construct a politically and morally exclusive “deep nation,” even though they still needed to articulate the particularities of Chinese culture in the universal terms of social science.88 Still, one way or another, the peasantry became the central target of Chinese elites’ internal civilizing and nation-building project. Needless to say, the success of the Communists under the leadership of Mao Zedong ultimately elevated Mao’s peasant surveys to a far more prominent position than surveys conducted by other left-leaning social scientists. Moreover, the long-term effect of the idea of the peasant as an object of investigation and intervention was significant even beyond China. Regardless of what Mao’s contemporaries thought of his peasant surveys, the Chinese Communist revolution, along with parallel developments elsewhere, inspired generations of historians and social scientists from Eric Hobsbawm


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to Barrington Moore to formulate studies about the role of the peasantry in modern politics.89 As well, the category of the peasant has been further reified with the rise of the subfield known as peasant studies. Likewise, when Mao contended that those who had not done survey research (diaocha yanjiu) did not have the right to speak, his immediate purpose was to silence his political opponents within the party. The spirit of this comment, however, soon came to represent a new pattern of political and intellectual hegemony after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Although the culture of fact prevailed in the height of the Communist era, the field of social survey research, which had been diverse in the Republican period, was replaced by a narrowly defined mode of social surveys derived from the doctrine known as Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought. Attempts to pursue any other form of social scientific inquiry were castigated as political disloyalty. Sociology, for instance, was deemed a “bourgeois” academic discipline, and sociology departments were shut down.90 Meanwhile, the particular type of social survey endorsed by the party began to play a critical role in creating a class-based society with new identities and social relationships with enduring consequences. Still, the legacy of those social science and engineering projects from the Republican period continued. During the 1950s, after the defeat of the Nationalists by the Communists, James Yen relocated his mass education movement to Malaysia, leaving an everlasting impact both locally and globally. The Rockefeller Foundation’s involvement in Chinese rural reconstruction programs became an inspiration for American- and UN-sponsored modernization projects around the world.91 In the late 1970s, when China began to embrace a different kind of economic development that involved a mixture of market and state planning, the type of social science and social survey research associated with the liberal order was again called into service. In addition to the reinstatement of sociology as a legitimate academic discipline, academies of social science were formed around the country to promote and coordinate the development of the social sciences for socialist modernization projects.The lack of any social survey research other than the type authorized by the government during the Communist era compelled Chinese social scientists to revisit the Republican era for inspiration. In the 1980s, several of Li Jinghan’s surveys, including his acclaimed study of Ding county, were even republished and received widespread attention.92 And, as China now charges ahead with renewed economic and political ambitions in a new era, the nation once again becomes a vast laboratory of modernity where new social experiments and social science research are carried out.


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Epilogue

In 1978, when Deng Xiaoping announced his “Four Modernizations” project, launching China into a period of unprecedented economic growth, he stated that the party and the people must follow the principle of “emancipating the mind, seeking truth from facts” (jiefang sixiang, shishi quishi) to further develop the nation.1 At the same time, new social science academies designed to serve the so-called socialist modernization project sprang up all around the country. Academic disciplines such as sociology, once condemned as “bourgeois pseudoscience,” were allowed to be taught and practiced again. When Li Jinghan’s Ding county survey was reissued in 1986, as part of the effort to use Republican surveys to compensate for the limited research permitted since the foundation of the People’s Republic, it instantly became a must-read classic for the new generation of social scientists and surveyors, for it was arguably the most comprehensive survey ever produced on a single Chinese county up to that point.2 Not unlike surveys of the early twentieth century, contemporary Chinese social surveys are not just a matter of academic activity. In recent years, social surveys have saturated all aspects of Chinese life in a way that was once unimaginable. One prominent and startling development is the rise of public opinion surveys. On a daily basis, China’s political and cultural landscapes are flooded with social facts generated by a variety of mechanisms and media formats: amateur online blogs, professional public relations and consulting firms hired by corporations, and media outlets, as well as state authorities. What seems most striking about these polling activities is their consumptive nature. That is to say, as consumers, Chinese middle-class citizens are constantly being invited to express their opinions and vote on a broad range of issues, from seemingly apolitical topics such as the hottest travel destinations and most popular designer products to more serious is171


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sues such as international affairs and the effectiveness of the government. The “choices” associated with these surveys are then made public in a way that reveals the nation to itself. In doing so, the process transforms information such as “who we are” and “what we want” into public knowledge for further dissemination. Yet, unlike at the beginning of the twentieth century, when social facts assumed the civilizing function of awakening the masses, facts generated by today’s surveys are often information spectacles focusing on sensational topics. Instead of calling for a critical reflection on China’s contemporary problems, these information spectacles neglect and even seek to mask the distressing social and political relationship of China’s neoliberal order.3 Since the organization of knowledge is central to governing, one could argue that a silent revolution is taking place in China, even though this phenomenon has yet to be adequately explored by the Western media and scholars. One aspect of this revolution is that, more than ever before, social knowledge produced by surveys is not simply for the government to craft its policies, but also for public consumption in order to forge a sense of political transparency and legitimacy. Even for politically sensitive issues such as high-profile corruption scandals, ethnic unrest, and xenophobic demonstrations, the government increasingly resorts to the technique of public opinion polls to turn potentially perilous political issues into information commodities and to manage public sentiments. Significantly, the prevalence of social facts in everyday life is far more profound than these obvious phenomena of surveys and polling. Since the 1990s, the rise and deepening of the state-driven market economy has also been developing hand in hand with the ascendency of the idea of “human quality” (suzhi) that is measurable and calculable by empirical facts in public discourse. This conception of human quality is directly linked to population quality (renkou suzhi) at the national level. Much like those intellectual elites who lamented the lack of enlighted citizens to constitute a strong and healthy social body at the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese elites today warn against the dangers of a society made of low-quality citizens.4 The improvement of human quality has indeed become a national obsession in China, simultaneously visible in political doctrines, business practices, and popular culture. Not only do the government and businesses design curricula and training programs to improve the quality of their citizens and employees, respectively, parents, too, seek to improve the suzhi of their children with carefully curated dietary practices and extracurricular activities. Likewise, practically without exception, Chinese citizens, from migrant workers to urban elites, routinely seek to evaluate and improve their


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suzhi, and thus their competitiveness in the marketplace, through meticulous management of their lifestyle, manner, and sense of self-worth. This process of self-fashioning, which is often achieved through conspicuous consumption, is carried out in technoscientific terms such as the control of bodily shape, the use of nutriution supplements, the quantitative measurement of human conduct in the school and workplace, and the accumulation of wealth. Suzhi, in other words, has become the site where the national desire for engineering a healthy collective social body meshes with the individual desire for a good life and success. Furthermore, as a manifestation of the latest phase of the Chinese civilizing project, suzhi has sunk deeply into the heart of all Chinese citizens, making them not just docile, passive workers but also active political and consumer subjects who constantly reaffirm the emerging neoliberal order. This book has demonstrated that the contemporary Chinese fetishism for facticity, which emphasizes the latest developments in the “surveyscape” and the discourse of human quality in everyday life, is not completely novel. Its beginnings can be traced back more than a century to the rise of technoscientific reasoning in general and social scientific investigative modalities in particular. Like their predecessors, today’s Chinese surveys, by turning the people into the objects, participants, and audience, are technologies of subjectivization, mass mobilization, and collective self-fashioning of the nation-state. In other words, in both past and present, these surveys are not innocent accumulations of facts. Rather than merely describing the human world, these surveys are prescriptions of the social and political order that they construct. In early twentieth-century China, surveys were preoccupied primarily with the question of social and national solidarity in the context of territorial integrity, the political awakening of the masses, revolution, anti-imperialism, and nation building. At the beginning of the new millennium, although social and national cohesiveness remain a major concern in China, the discourse of national strength is articulated primarily as an imperative of the Chinese version of neoliberalism that emphasizes productivity, efficiency, consumption, social harmony, and political stability. Moreover, the role of the social survey as an instrument for forging selfgoverning political subjects seems to be more successful and prominent than ever. In this respect, it would not be too provocative to say that as the Chinese state has slowly retreated from public life it has actually penetrated deeper into the soul of the people by compelling them to govern themselves in ways that are compatible with and sanctioned by the state.5 Although social surveys are often presented as the facts speaking for themselves, they are actually major forces that create the self-conscious-


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ness of a nation and indeed the nation itself. Moreover, social facts are neither neutral nor transparent, and they do not always facilitate public reason. After all, it is through social facts that ideological assumptions and political doctrines, however controversial and problematic, potentially become durable statements and credible truths. As well, social facts help to constitute the apparatus of the state and the implied boundaries between state and society. Indeed, during the last century generations of Chinese were shaped by and embedded in social, economic, and political structures produced and maintained by the empirical facts and truth claims created and normalized by surveys. As new facts and truth claims are now being manufactured to recalibrate and facilitate China’s unmitigated drive toward the future in a new phase of global capitalism, it is crucial to take a closer look at the transformative power as well as the limitations of these survey-generated facts. It goes without saying that it is particularly important to acknowledge that these empirical facts and truth claims do not exist outside of ideology and power. And, by inquiring into the emotionally charged context in which the Chinese social survey movement unfolded a century ago during a moment of epistemological crisis, social upheaval, and national emergency, I hope I have not merely produced more facts.


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Notes

introduction 1. Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 2. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 5. 3. Indeed, during this time writers, journalists, and artists also made references to the idea of the social survey and experimented with new modes of literary and artistic expression such as fiction, news reportage, and photography to conceptualize the social world, though these works are not the focus of this study. A Peking University social science thesis from the 1930s, for instance, considered political surveys and economic surveys as subcategories of social surveys. See Liu Yuren, “Zhongguo shehui diaocha yundong” [The Chinese Social Survey Movement], M.A. thesis, Department of Sociology and Social Work, Yenching University, Beijing, 1936, 41. 4. Although the expression existed centuries before Mao Zedong, many people have mistakenly believed that Mao was responsible for inventing the motto “seeking truth from facts.” For how evidential research was one of the two competing epistemologies in the Chinese intellectual scene prior to the nineteenth century, see Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984). 5. Although this early modern intellectual paradigm was not a rejection of the moral authority of the sages and the established truth, it was a profound intellectual movement that accentuated as the new method for truth seeking the importance of textual evidence and empirical proof as opposed to the hermeneutic and reflective speculation that characterized the philosophical inquiry of the earlier periods.This shift from philosophy to philology, as Benjamin Elman has argued, would establish evidential research, along with the existing classi-

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Notes to Pages 3–5

cism, as two major contending approaches to knowledge in much of late imperial China. Ibid. 6. Social investigator Li Jinghan was among the first to use the phrase “social survey movement,” in 1927. Yan Xinzhe, another social investigator, also used this expression frequently. As well, the 1936 M.A. thesis by Liu Yuren, a Yenching University student, was actually called “Chinese Social Survey Movement.” Today, historians from mainland China continue to use this phrase to refer to social survey activities that took place between the 1920s and 1940s. When I use the term, however, I refer to activities that spanned the entire first half of the twentieth century. See Li Jinghan, “Zhongguo shehui diaocha yundong” [The Chinese Social Survey Movement], Shehuixue jie [The Sociological Discipline], no. 1 (1927); Xu Shilian, “Xuxu” [A Preface by Xu Shilian], in Yan Xinzhe, Shehui diaocha dagang [General Guidelines for Social Survey Research] (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1933), 1; and Liu, “Zhongguo shehui diaocha yundong.” 7. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed. Arnold Davidson (New York: Picador, 2003), 28–30. 8. The idea of the social survey as a “social movement” came from one of Park’s syllabi from the late 1910s. Quoted by Martin Bulmer in The Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, Diversity, and the Rise of Sociological Research, The Heritage of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 69. On the question of public opinion in the United States during the same period, see Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Liveright, 1928); and Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922). 9. This comparison is not entirely fair, as these two statistics probably used rather different standards to define a social survey. In the case of the United States, the majority of social surveys were sociological in nature. Nonetheless, these figures indisputably show the extent of the survey phenomenon in both countries Similarly, according an estimate by Liu Yuren, there were 7,288 surveys conducted in China during this period. Chen Yingfang, “Zhongguo chengshi xiaceng yanjiu de jingwei keti” [On Research of Chinese Urban Lower Strata], Journal of Jiangsu Administration Institute, no. 15 (2004): 63; Liu Yuren, “Zhongguo Shehui Diaocha Yundong,” 47; Martin Bulmer, Kevin Bales, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Michael Gordon, “The Social Survey Movement and Sociology in the United States,” Social Problems 21, no. 3 (1973); Maurine Weiner Greenwald and Margo J. Anderson, Pittsburgh Surveyed: Social Science and Social Reform in the Early Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996). 10. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Shapiro, A Culture of Fact; Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);


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Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003); Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 11. Takashi Fujitani, “Right to Kill, Right to Make Live: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans During WWII,” Representations no. 99 (Summer 2007); Yao Jen-to, “The Japanese Colonial State and Its Form of Knowledge in Taiwan,” in Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule 1895–1945: History, Culture, and Memory, ed. Liao Ping-hui and David Der-wei Wang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Sarah Elizabeth Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 12. R. David Arkush, Fei Xiaotong and Sociology in Revolutionary China, Harvard East Asian Monographs 98 (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1981); Chung-hsing Sun, “The Development of the Social Science in China before 1949” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1987); Siu-lun Wong, Sociology and Socialism in Contemporary China, International Library of Sociology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). 13. Yung-chen Chiang, Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China, 1919–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Chiang Yung-chen, “Xiandaihua, Meiguo jijinhui yu 1930 niandai de shehuikexue” [Modernization, American Foundations, and the Social Sciences in the 1930s], in Zhongguo xiandaihua lunweji [Symposium on the Modernization in China, 1860–1949] (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 1991). 14. Xin Liu, The Mirage of China: Anti-Humanism, Narcissism, and Corporeality of the Contemporary World, Culture and Politics / Politics and Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009). 15. Thomas Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 16. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, Science and Its Conceptual Foundations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Shapiro, A Culture of Fact. 17. Shapin, A Social History of Truth; Stoler, Along the Archival Grain. See also Ian Hacking, “The Disunities of the Sciences,” in The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power, ed. Peter Galison and David J. Stump, Writing Science (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 44–45; Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Karin Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures:


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How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 18. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (New York: Pocket Books, 1964), 23. 19. Justus Doolittle, Vocabulary and Handbook of the Chinese Language, vol. 1 (Foochow [Fuzhou]: Rozario, Marcal and Company, 1872), 449. As historian Chen Baoliang has noted, there has been a long history of using she, hui, huishe, and shehui in classical literature. Generally, she referred to people with shared interests and beliefs, and hui often meant “gathering.” Over time, these two concepts became more or less synonymous and were used to refer to the social organizations such academies and merchant groups, as well as ritualistic gatherings such as temple fairs and communal festivals. Chen Baoliang, Zhongguo de she yu hui [“She” and “Hui” in China] (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin chubanshe, 1996). 20. “Shehui congregates the strength, reputations, skills, and voices of a group of people in order for them to express their intentions,” he explained before he listed several types of modern political parties and study societies as examples. Huang Zunxian, Riben guozhi [Japan Treatise], Wan Qing dongyou riji huibian [Compilations on Late Qing Journeys to the East] (Shanghai: Shanghai guzi shudian, 2001), 393. As the Qing’s first envoy to Japan, Huang arrived there in 1880. His History of Japan was written during his stay in Japan but was not published or circulated widely until 1887, when there was a sudden surge of interest in Japan in the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War. 21. Eiji Yutani, “Nihon no kasa shakai of Gennosuke Yokoyama, Translated and with an Introduction” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, 1985). 22. These included Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and Herbert Spencer’s The Study of Sociology. See Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). 23. Yan was certainly aware of the Japanese terms shakai (society) and shakaigaku (sociology). He even used the term shehui (the Chinese equivalent of shakai) on some occasions. Yet, for him, society remained just one type of grouping. As for qunxue, it literally means “the study of grouping.” See James Reeve Pusey, Lu Xun and Evolution (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998), 64. 24. Chen Xulu, “Wuxu shiqi weixinpai de shehui fuan—qunxue” [The Reformist Conception of Society during the 1898 Reforms], in Jindai Zhongguo yu jindai wenhua [Modern China and Modern Culture], ed. Shuduo Gong (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1988), 388. 25. Ke Xuan, “Guochi pian” [On National Shame], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany] 1, no. 10 (1904:): 221–25; Chong You, “Lun Zhongguo minqi zhi keyong” [On the Usefulness of the Energy of the Chinese People], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany] 1, no. 1 (1904): 7–8. For a general discussion of this topic, see Wang Fan-sen, “Evolving Prescriptions for Social Life in the Late Qing and Early Republic: From Qunxue to Society,” in Imagining the People:


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Chinese Intellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship, 1890–1920, ed. Joshua A. Fogel and Peter G. Zarrow (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997). Unlike Wang, however, I maintain that the original connotation of group strength remained even after the term qun was replaced by shehui. On Sun Yat-sen’s expression, see David Strand, “Community, Society, and History in Sun Yat-Sen’s Sanmin Zhuyi,” in Culture and State in Chinese History: Conventions, Accommodations, and Critiques, ed. Theodore Huters, R. Bin Wong, and Pauline Yu (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 331. 26. Tao Luugong, “Shehui” [Society], Xin qingnian 3, no. 2 (1917): 2–3; Wang, “Evolving Prescriptions for Social Life.” 27. The first point, of course, has been discussed in works by Foucault and many Foucault-inspired projects. See Colin Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). The second point about the organic social body, however, has often been neglected or regarded as no longer relevant in any significant way in many of these Foucault-inspired studies. It is my contention here that the desire to create an organic social body was equally, if not more, important, at least in the Chinese context. 28. This simultaneous preoccupation with the gathering of social facts and the desire to construct an ideal and even utopian social order was not unique to China, however. Just a few decades prior to this, when Émile Durkheim (1858– 1917), who is widely considered a founder of modern sociology, argued that there was something called “the social” that existed independently from biology and psychology and deserved to be studied scientifically, he too was concerned with the question of political instability and social disintegration in the aftermath of the collapse of the French Second Empire (1852–70). See Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method, ed. Steven Lukes, trans.W. D. Halls, ed. Steven Lukes (New York: Free Press, 1982), 40. 29. See David G. Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formations, 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); George Steinmetz, Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 30. Philip C. C. Huang, “ ‘Public Sphere’/‘Civil Society’ in China? The Third Realm between State and Society,” Modern China 19, no. 2 (1993); William T. Rowe, “The Problem of ‘Civil Society’ in Late Imperial China,” Modern China 19, no. 2 (1993); Timothy Brook and B. Michael Frolic, Civil Society in China, Studies on Contemporary China (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997).


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31. For social historians who reflect critically on the epistemology of social history, see Geoff Eley, “Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later,” in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terrence J. McDonald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996);William Sewell Jr., “The Political Unconscious of Social and Cultural History, or, Confessions of a Former Quantitative Historian,” in The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others, ed. George Steinmetz, Politics, History, and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). In the field of China studies, recent work by Michael Tsin represents a marked effort not to take “society” simply as a given reality. Instead, he examines how “society” was used as an intellectual device and political preoccupation constantly being contested, reified, and deployed by Chinese historical actors who sought to advance their nation-building projects. See Michael Tsin, “Imagining ‘Society’ in Early Twentieth-Century China,” in Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship, 1890–1920, ed. Joshua A. Fogel and Peter G. Zarrow, Studies on Modern China (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997); Michael Tsin, Nation, Governance, and Modernity in China: Canton, 1900–1927 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 32. Igo, The Averaged American. 33. See Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Philip Kuhn’s work on soulstealing (Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990]) and Benjamin Elman’s early work on Chinese empiricism (From Philosophy to Philology) are examples of this approach in social history and the history of science, respectively. 34. This silent reference to European history, as Dipesh Chakrabarty reminds us, continues to dictate what is considered modern and civilized and what is not. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 35. Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton Economic History of the Western World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 36. Shumei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937, Berkeley Series in Interdisciplinary Studies of China 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). There have been many ways of using the term “deterritorialization” since it was introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Following James Hevia, I use both “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization” to refer to the ways in which territories and populations were being reconceptualized, redefined, and governed as a consequence of global capitalism and colonialism. James L. Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).


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37. Tani Barlow, “Introduction: On ‘Colonial Modernity,’ ” in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, ed. Tani Barlow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 15–16. 38. As I will briefly discuss in chapter 6, American social engineers and scientists were very keen about the notion that China was a “social laboratory” in the sense that knowledge being generated in China was meant to be imported back to the United States and then reexported to the third world. This process, however, is still vastly understudied. See David Ekbladh, “To Reconstruct the Medieval: Rural Reconstruction in Interwar China and the Rise of an American Style of Modernization, 1921–1961,” Journal of American East Asian Relations 9, no. 3 (2000). 39. Frederick Cooper, “Postcolonial Studies and the Study of History,” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 403, 16. 40. Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in TreatyPort China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 11–12. 41. In the same way that China was not a real colony but was still subjugated to the forces of colonialism and colonial conditions, it is perhaps more fruitful to examine the hypercolonial conditions of China in general instead of specific treaty ports as territorially confined hypercolonies. 42. I am making this comment with full knowledge that even in the formal colonies, the introduction of the modern regime of governance was never a matter of imposing a body of ready-made scientific knowledge onto the colonies in a simple and straightforward fashion, as colonial authorities often had to negotiate with the local elites and conditions, and make significant adjustments to its practices. After all, that observation is one of the major insights made by those who have been working under the rubric of colonial modernity. For example, as Gyan Prakash has illustrated, even if the British colonial administration needed to impose science on the Indian population, they had to repackage it, making it sufficiently “native” in order to achieve that end. Gyan Prakash, “Science ‘Gone Native’ In Colonial India,” Representations, no. 40 (1992). George Steinmetz also shows that although some general patterns did exist among different German colonies, the German colonial state behaved rather differently in different colonies. George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 43. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 44. See Prasenjit Duara on the overlapping territories of nationalism and imperialism. Prasenjit Duara, “Transnationalism and the Predicament of Sovereignty: China, 1900–1945,” The American Historical Review 102, no. 4 (October 1997). 45. This, of course, is the also basic starting point of subaltern studies.


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Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 1–23; Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 46. John Fitzgerald, “The Nationless State: The Search for a Nation in Modern Chinese Nationalism,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 33 (1995): 76–77. 47. For a discussion of colonies as laboratories of modernity, see Prakash, Another Reason, 13; Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 15–16. 48. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life.

1. the rise of the fact and the reimagining of china The chapter epigraph is from Mao Zedong, “Reform Our Study,” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), 22–23 1. S. W. Williams, The Middle Kingdom: A Survey of the Geography, Government, Literature, Social Life, Arts, and History (New York: John Wiley, 1848), 258. 2. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 18–39. 3. Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton Economic History of the Western World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 4. Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 5. For an illustration of innovations in statecraft techniques, see John Robert Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). 6. Talal Asad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986);Talal Asad, “Ethnographic Representation, Statistics, and Modern Power,” Social Research 61, no. 1 (1994): 78–79. 7. Richard E. Strassberg, “Introduction,” in Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001). 8. Charlotte Furth, “Introduction: Thinking with Cases,” in Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History, ed. Charlotte Furth, Judith T. Zeitlin, and Ping-chen Hsiung (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007); Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Modern Science in China,


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New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984). 9. Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines, ed. James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 243–46, 258–63. 10. Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 11. According to Shapiro, it was with the help of travel writings and news reportage that the idea of the fact proliferated into other forms of cultural practices. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact. 12. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 23. 13. “Introduction” and table of contents of the Journal of the Statistical Society of London (1838), 2–3. 14. Needless to say, this observation was made famous particularly by Foucault in many of his writings and lectures. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality—Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990); Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage Publications, 1999), 177–97; Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance, Ideas in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Stephen M. Stigler, The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 15. Steinmetz, Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 55–58. 16. William Farr, “Inaugural Address,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 35 (1872): 417. 17. While Foucault’s argument about the emergence of disciplinary power in the seventeenth century onward is strictly based on European history, various forms of disciplinary power seemed to exist in other societies as well. The Neo-Confucian social order arguably relied heavily on disciplinary technologies, including over the body, as part of a broader structure of social maintenance. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed. Arnold Davidson (New York: Picador, 2003), 246–47. 18. Asad, “Ethnographic Representation, Statistics, and Modern Power,” 78–79. 19. “Introduction” to the Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 1–2. 20. Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 6; Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 2–3.


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21. Farr, “Inaugural Address,” 424. See also the discussion of “scientific imperialism” by Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 4. 22. Statistical compilation, for example, became part of the function of the Qing new police system. See Tong Lam, “Policing the Imperial Nation: Sovereignty, International Law, and the Civilizing Mission in Late Qing China,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, no. 4 (2010): 21. 23. As John Kelly and Martha Kaplan argue, the U.S. preference for a decolonizing global order was eventually implemented by the establishment of the United Nations in 1945. However, the conceptual underpinning of this global arrangement was already quite evident in Woodrow Wilson’s principle of selfdetermination after the Great War. John Kelly and Martha Kaplan, Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 1–4. 24. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, Ideas in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Mark C. Smith, Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate over Objectivity and Purpose, 1918–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). 25. Barry D. Karl and Stanley N. Katz, “Foundations and Ruling Class Elites,” Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 116, no. 1 (1987); James Allen Smith, The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite (New York: Free Press, 1991), xiii–xv; Marcos Cueto, “Visions of Science and Development:The Rockefeller Foundation’s Latin American Surveys of the 1920s,” in Missionaries of Science: The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin America, ed. Marcos Cueto, Philanthropic Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Frank Ninkovich, “The Rockefeller Foundation, China, and Cultural Change,” Journal of American History 70, no. 4 (1984). 26. John B. Grant, “Suggestions in Regard to Teaching Personal Hygiene in the Schools of China,” Folder 349, box 55, series 2, RG 5 (North Tarrytown, NY: Rockefeller Foundation Archives, 1918). 27. Kelly and Kaplan, Represented Communities, 1–4. 28. The notion that China provided an “opportunity” appeared repeatedly in the Rockefeller Foundation’s internal discussion. For examples, see John B. Grant, “John Grant to Victor Heiser,” RF Folder 136, box 13, series 601, RG 1.1 (North Tarrytown, NY: Rockefeller Foundation Archives, 1928), 10–11; and Selskar M. Gunn, “Selskar Gunn to Max Mason,” Folder 125, box 12, series 601, RG 1.1 (North Tarrytown, NY: Rockefeller Foundation Archives, 1933), 6, 8. 29. Charles Hayford, “Chinese and American Characteristics: Arthur H. Smith and His China Book,” in Christianity in China: Early Protestant Missionary Writings, ed. Suzanne Wilson Barnett and John King Fairbank (Cambridge, MA: Committee on American–East Asian Policy Studies of the Dept. of History in collaboration with the Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1985). 30. Williams, The Middle Kingdom, xiv–xv. The latter comment appeared in the fifth edition of his book, which was published in 1895. S. W. Williams,


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The Middle Kingdom: A Survey of the Geography, Government, Literature, Social Life, Arts, and History, rev. ed., vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1895), x. 31. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 106; Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity, 1900–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 45–76. 32. Arthur H. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, enlarged and rev. ed. (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1894), 26, 9. 33. Ibid., 49, 52. Smith’s observations often simply repeated what had already been written by other missionaries. It is possible that Smith was also inspired by Samuel Wells Williams, who also made many similar comments. See Williams, The Middle Kingdom, 271. 34. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 54. 35. Ibid., 49. 36. During the nineteenth century the expansion and deepening of the European colonial enterprises had compelled European thinkers and colonial administrators to use more specific and supposedly scientific categories such as “race” and “culture” rather than “national character” to govern the colonial populations. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 104–6. 37. John W. Foster, American Diplomacy in the Orient (Boston: Houghton, 1903), 434. This line of reasoning subsequently played an important role in the ways in which the Rockefeller Foundation sought to engage China. K. William McKibben, “William K. Mckibben to Andrew Macleish,” Folder 1, box 1, series 600, RG 1.1 (North Tarrytown, NY: Rockefeller Foundation Archives, 1906), 3. Among the various estimates, Williams regarded 404 million and 380 million, made by a Russian observer and the Qing’s customs office, respectively, as the most accurate contemporary estimates. Williams, The Middle Kingdom (1895 ed.), 263–70. 38. Almost a foreshadowing of our contemporary fantasy about the Chinese market, Crow’s mission was to rebut his clients’ “statistical extravagance” of believing that they could sell an apple a day to each Chinese person. Instead, he tried to determine exactly how many of the four hundred million Chinese would in fact one day become customers of Western products. Carl Crow, Four Hundred Million Customers: The Experiences—Some Happy, Some Sad of an American in China, and What They Taught Him (New York: Halcyon House, 1937), 12, 216, 314–15. 39. Zou Rong, The Revolutionary Army:A Chinese Nationalist Tract of 1903 (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), 146–47. 40. Peter Zarrow, “Historical Trauma: Anti-Manchuism and Memories of Atrocity in Late Qing China,” History and Trauma 16, no. 2 (2004): 90. 41. “Baqi xianzhenghu shang qizhi chushu” [On the Banner System and Constitution], Shibao, September 2, 1910. 42. Yigang Qiao and Kun Liu, “The Emerging of ‘Female Citizen’: The Subject Identity of Modern Chinese Women through Literary Practices,” Frontiers


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of History in China 4, no. 1 (2009): 109–12; Charlotte Beahan, “Feminism and Nationalism in the Chinese Women’s Press, 1902–1911,” Modern China 1, no. 4 (1975): 383, 392, and 397. 43. Sun Wen [Yat-sen], Zongli quanji [Complete Works by Premier Sun Yat-sen], vol. 1, ed. Hu Hanmin (Shanghai: Minzhi shuju, 1930), 1. For more elaboration on Sun Yat-sen’s use of this phrase, see Strand, “Community, Society, and History in Sun Yat-Sen’s Sanmin zhuyi,” in Culture and State in Chinese History: Conventions, Accommodations, and Critiques, ed. Theodore Huters, R. Bin Wong, and Pauline Yu (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 327–32; “Xinnian zhuci” [New Year’s Wishes], Shenbao, January 1, 1912. 44. For further discussion of the meaning of tianxia, see Conrad Schirokauer and Robert P. Hymes, “Introduction,” in Ordering the World: Approaches to State and Society in Sung Dynasty China, ed. Robert P. Hymes and Conrad Schirokauer, Studies on China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 7. 45. Li Jinghan, Shidi shehui diaocha fangfa [Fieldwork Methods in Social Survey Research] (Beijing: Xingyun shudian, 1933), 3. 46. Ibid. Apparently, Li’s comment made its way into the minds of many American social scientists. For example, just a year later, after visiting the site where Li was conducting social surveys, officials from the Rockefeller Foundation complained that the Chinese population was “said to be four hundred million a generation ago, it is still said to be four hundred million today.” “Chinese Mass Education Movement: A Summary, 1934,” Folder 78, box 8, series 601, RG 1.1 (North Tarrytown, NY: Rockefeller Foundation Archives, 1934), 3. 47. Li Jinghan, Shidi shehui diaocha fangfa, 2–3, 7–8, 31–32. 48. Jing Tsu, Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 49. Hu Shi, “Chabuduo xiansheng zhuan” [The Tales of Mr. Chabuduo], in Hu Shi zuopin jing xuan [Selected Works of Hu Shi], ed. Qin Lixia and Zhou Gang, Xiandai wenxue mingjia Zuopin Jingxuan [Selected Works of Famous Writers in Modern Literature] (Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 2005). This story remains a must-read for Chinese schoolchildren today. Recently there was also a Chinese pop song from Taiwan called “Mr. Chabuduo,” although the song seems to celebrate laziness and political apathy with no satirical intention. 50. James Yen, “Foreword,” in Ting-Hsien [Ding Xian]: A North China Rural Community, ed. Sidney D. Gamble (New York: International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1954), v. It is worth noting that the circulation of the discourse of China’s factual deficiencies did not travel in one direction. Years later, in 1944, an American social scientist, apparently citing Li’s comment, mentioned, “It has been said that the various estimates of the number of people in China differ by almost as much as the population of the United States.” Eugene Staley, “Eugene Staley to Joseph Willitts,” Folder 442, box 53, series 601S, RG 1.1 (North Tarrytown, NY: Rockefeller Foundation Archives, 1944). 51. Li Jinghan, Shidi shehui diaocha fangfa, 9. 52. Ibid., 10. 53. Guangzhou shi diaocha renkou weiyuanhui, “Guangzhou shi nian yi


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nian renkou diaocha baogao” [Report on the 1931 Census in Guangzhou] (Tianjin: Nankai University Library Archives, 1932), 2. 54. Takeuchi Yoshimi, Lu Xun’s Japanese translator and critic, indicated that this event was probably an invention of Lu Xun himself. See Yoshimi Takeuchi, Ro Jin (Lu Xun) (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1961). 55. Lu Xun, The Complete Stories of Lu Xun, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), v–x. 56. Whereas Foucault defines “epistemic violence” as the complete redefinition of sanity at the end of the eighteenth century, Gayatri Spivak extends this analysis to the history of colonialism and uses the phrase to describe how the European epistemology was violently projected onto the rest of the world. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 49. 57. Ruth Leys, Trauma:A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 23. 58. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 14–15. 59. Cathy Caruth, “An Introduction to ‘Trauma, Memory, and Testimony,’ ” Reading On:A Journal of Theory and Criticism 1, no. 1 (2006). Available at http:// readingon.library.emory.edu/issue1/iss1toc.htm (accessed August 15, 2010). See also Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 91–112. 60. Li Jinghan, Shidi shehui diaocha fangfa, 7–8. 61. Ibid., 6. 62. Described in Elman, A Cultural History of Modern Science in China. 63. Chen Changheng, Zhongguo renkou lun [A Treatise on Chinese Population], rev. ed. (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1928), 18. 64. Cai expressed his criticism of classical Chinese language in six ideograms: bi (vulgar), lian (disordered), fu (superficial ), xi (fearful ), zhi (discouraging), and qi (deceptive). 65. Other leading May Fourth intellectuals such as Hu Shi and Fu Sinian echoed the same sentiment, that science should be elevated at the expense of textual knowledge. Wang Fan-sen, Fu Ssu-Nien: A Life in Chinese History and Politics, Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature and Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 98. 66. Cai Yuanpei, “Introduction” to Chen, Zhongguo renkou lun, 18. 67. Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” in Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 27; Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (1986). 68. It is worth noting that Chen was hardly the first to introduce modern statistical representation to China. The semantic compound tongji, the literal Chinese rendition of “statistics,” was one of the many Japanese neologisms that were reintroduced into China around the turn of the twentieth century. There-


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fore, in addition to the aforementioned long tradition of numerical reasoning in imperial statecraft, modern statistical tabulations were widely used in the various surveys and censuses conducted in the final years of the Qing. 69. Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 6–7. 70. Cai Yucong, Shehui diaocha zhi yuanli ji fangfa [Principles and Methods of Social Survey Research] (Shanghai: Beixin shuju, 1927), 195. 71. Ibid., 197. 72. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 173. 73. Jonathan Crary maintains that the modern visual experience, which regards the camera’s eye as the model of objective truth, is itself a disciplinary technique in which modern subjecthood is forged. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 24. 74. Liu Yuren, “Zhongguo shehui diaocha yundong” [The Chinese Social Survey Movement], M.A. thesis, Department of Sociology and Social Work, Yenching University, Beijing, 1936, 6; Li Jinghan, Shidi shehui diaocha fangfa, 8.

2. from divide and rule to combine and count 1. During the early modern period, many European writers acknowledged the superiority of the Chinese bureaucracy. For an example, see J. B. Du Halde, The General History of China (London: printed by and for John Watts, 1736). 2. Pamela Kyle Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 36– 37; Mark C. Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 4–5; James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 30–35. 3. Although recent scholarship tends to agree that the Qing was not a Chinese empire, there is no clear consensus as to how to characterize it. For instance, Peter Perdue characterizes the Qing as a “Central Eurasian” empire, while James Millward and Ruth Dunnel refer it as “Inner Asian.” Mark Elliott simply calls it “pan Manjurica.” These discrepancies are due in part to different emphases and analytical approaches. They are also caused by the cultural and territorial indeterminacy and unboundedness of the Qing empire. See Elliott, The Manchu Way, 5–6; James A. Millward and Ruth W. Dunnell, “Introduction,” in New Qing Imperial History:The Making of the Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde, ed. James A. Millward et al. (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 2–3; Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 20. 4. The careful separation of Inner and Outer Mongolia by the Manchu regime was a perfect example of this. S. C. M. Paine, Imperial Rivals: China, Russia, and Their Disputed Frontier (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 278. 5. The census of the imperial lineage is beyond the scope of this book. For


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an introduction to the topic, see Li Zhongqing and Guo Songyi, Qingdai huangzu renkou xingwei yu shehui huanjing [The Behavior and Social Background of the Qing Imperial Lineage] (Beijing: Beijing daxue, 1994). 6. On the complexity of the banner system, see Mark Elliott, “Ethnicity in the Qing Eight Banners,” in Empire at the Margins, ed. Pamela Crossley, Helen Siu, and Donald Sutton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 7. Lin Tianwei, Fangzhi xue yu difang shi yanjiu [The Studies of Gazettes and Local History] (Taipei: Nantian shuju, 1995), 59–61; Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 8. Mark C. Elliott, “The Limits of Tartary: Manchuria in Imperial and National Geographies,” Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 3 (2000). 9. Sun Ji, Kang Yong Qian shiqi yu tuhui ji yu xiangyu xingcheng yanjiu [Cartography and Territory in the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong Periods], Qingdai jiangyu xingcheng yanjiu [Research on Territorial Formation During the Qing Dynasty] (Beijing: Zhonggong renmin daxue chubanxue, 2003), 250–71. 10. Hou Deren, Qing dai xibei bianjiang shidixue [Historical and Geographical Studies of the Northwest During the Qing Dynasty] (Beijing: Qunyan chubanshe 2006), 92–96; Sun, Kang Yong Qian shiqi yu tuhui ji yu xiangyu xingcheng yanjiu, 250–71. 11. Although pictorial depictions of non-Han minorities had existed centuries before, the ways in which these ethnographic techniques were related to the imperial expansion during the Qing were unprecedented. This, no doubt, was also influenced by the advance of evidential scholarship during this time. As Laura Hostetler has showed, Qianlong Emperor himself increasingly accentuated the need for personal experience and direct observation in making these images and accompanying textual narratives. The emperor also began to see the importance of categorizing these diverse peoples in a standardized format for administrative purposes. Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise, 41–46. 12. Indeed, even though trade, exploration, and colonial conquests had been regarded as the uniquely European qualities without which capitalist modernity would be impossible, recent scholarship has shown that the Chinese dynastic empires were no less commercially motivated, adventurous, and expansive. Most noticeably, the voyages to Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, and the east coast of Africa under the auspices of the Ming Empire at the beginning of the fifteenth century had demonstrated a level of technological sophistication, imperial ambitions, and bureaucratic efficiency that remained largely unmatched by the similar Portuguese and Spanish endeavors that respectively led to the “discoveries” of Asia and America more than a century later. 13. As James Hevia has shown, the encounter between the Qianlong Emperor and Lord Macartney in 1793 represented a clash between two arrogant colonial empires seeking to sustain their “universal pretensions and complex metaphysical systems.” Given their still more or less equivalent imperial strengths at the time, it was no surprise that neither the Qing nor the British


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were able to impose their own claim upon the other. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, 25. 14. It was unclear how widely these textual and pictorial depictions of lands and peoples were distributed within the bureaucracy for governing purposes, but being a polycentric empire composed of multiple ethnicities, the Qing regime would not need to convert these diverse bodies of knowledge into a totalizing administrative and bureaucratic framework. At most, these knowledge projects were similar to what Mary Louise Pratt has come to call “primitive accumulation,” whereby information is accumulated before it is ready to be deployed for future imperial undertakings. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 36. 15. Zhao Erxun, Qing shi gao [A Draft History of the Qing Dynasty], vol. 13 (Beijing: Zhonghua shu ju, 1976), 3480–86. Qing officials also negotiated and accommodated the cultural and political differences in Yunnan province. See C. Patterson Giersch, Asian Borderlands:The Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 209. 16. Peter Buck similarly observes that populations were “political creations” by the sovereign authority in early modern England. Peter Buck, “People Who Counted: Political Arithmetic in the Eighteenth Century,” ISIS 73, no. 266 (1982): 28. 17. Of course, many of the state businesses were conducted in the summer capital of Chengde, outside Beijing and out of sight of the Chinese officials. Pamela Crossley, Helen Siu, and Donald Sutton, “Introduction,” in Empire at the Margins, ed. Pamela Crossley, Helen Siu, and Donald Sutton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 7–9; James A. Millward et al., New Qing Imperial History: The Making of the Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). 18. Originally published in 1744, this work includes 1,114 surname clans and 2,240 biographies of principle bannermen plus their subordinates and dependents. See Baqi Manzhou shizu tongpu [Genealogies of the Eight Banners] (Shenyang: Liaoning sheng tushuguan gujibu, 1989). 19. “Baqi Zhengji Jiapu” [Genealogies of Banner Households], Baqi 544– 23–2, Folder 380 (Beijing: First Historical Archives of China), ca. 1800. 20. Evelyn Sakakida Rawski, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 73. 21. See the discussion and examples in An Shuangcheng, “Qingchu bianxuan Baqi nanding Manwen dangan shuangyi” [Selected Translation of the Reports on the Banner Able-Bodied Males from the Early Qing], Lishi dangan 29, no. 1 (1988); Zhi Yunting, ed., Baqi zhidu yu Manzu wenhua [The Banner System and Manchu Culture], Shenyang gugong xueshu luncong (Shenyang: Liaoning minzu chubanshe, 2002). 22. For instance, in 1655 alone more than thirty thousand banner troops escaped from the system. In some cases, escapees would further take advantage of the system and illegally transfer their stipend benefits to unaffiliated civilians. In other cases the superiors of the escapees would simply take possession


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of all the stipends without reporting the exodus. Another common misdemeanor was to establish fraudulent banner status (qiji) by adopting male heirs from outside the banner system. See Li Xinghua, “Yi Yongzheng chao di ‘Baqi shengji’ ” [The Livelihood of the Banner People during the Yongzheng Reign], in Baqi zhidu yu manzu wenhua [The Banner System and Manchu Culture], ed. Zhi Yunting, Shenyang gugong xueshu luncong (Shenyang: Liaoning minzu chubanshe, 2002), 284; Liu Xiaomeng, Baqi zidi [Descendants of the Banner People] (Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1996), 28–33. 23. Li Qiao, “Baqi shengji wenti shu lue” [A Brief Discussion of the Livelihood Problems of the Banner People], Lishi dangan, no. 1 (1985); Li, “Yi Yongzheng chao di ‘Baqi shengji’ .” 24. Specifically, the investigation was unable to authenticate the existence of the current household head’s grandfather, who supposedly first registered the household to the banner system after comparing the various sets of census records. “Yang Tianpei hukou shijian” [On the Household Status of Yang Tianpei], Baqi 544–23–2, Folder 1 (Beijing: First Historical Archives of China, 1734). 25. During the imperial era, women who were identified as virtuous were given special stipends. In other cases, old age was another reason for extra benefits. “Yijian wei mabing Wang Mingfeng hukou shi” [The Case on the Household Record of Wang Mingfeng], Baqi 544–23–2, Folder 1 (Beijing: First Historical Archives of China, 1734). 26. “Wei chai zou zai jing ning ji dangan hukou shi” [Investigations on Establishing New Households in the Capital], Baqi 544–23–2, Folder 1 (Beijing: First Historical Archives of China, 1740). This folder contains a large number of such cases. Most of these cases were discovered as a result of confessions made by the offending parties. 27. “Baqi baoyangmin zhi mao ru baqiji an” [Cases on Illegal Banner Registration Associating with Adoptee], Baqi 544–23–2, Folder 2 (Beijing: First Historical Archives of China, 1820). 28. “Baqi baoyangmin zhi mao ru baqiji an.” These cases from the early years of the Daoguang reign are mentioned in a similar investigation in 1895. “Daoguang chunian qingcha chu guanbing yi minren er mao qiji” [Cases on Forging Banner Status Discovered during the Early Years of the Daoguang Reign], Baqi 544–23–2, Folder 2 (Beijing: First Historical Archives of China, 1895). 29. According to Edward Rhoads, although the military capacity of the banner troops and the Qing army in general was in rapid decline throughout the nineteenth century, the bannermen remained central. As a result, there was no major change in the function of the banner census parallel to that of the general census during the fiscal reforms of the eighteenth century. Edward J. M. Rhoads, Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861–1928, Studies on Ethnic Groups in China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 18. For an example, see “Hubu cha baqi xiansan yiju Shuangchengbu” [Household Department Investigations on the Relocation to Shuangchengbu by the Banner Population], Baqi 544–23–2, Folder 1 (Beijing: First Historical Archives of China, 1825). For other cases from


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the Daoguang to Guangxu reigns (1820s to 1900s), see “Manzhou zhenghuangqi wujia shiheng zuoling xia konce” [The Household Registration of Commander Shiheng and His Subordinates], Baqi 544–23–2, Folder 5 (Beijing: First Historical Archives of China, ca. 1869). 30. Ge Jianxiong, Yi zhao si min: Zhongguo renkou shi zai ren shi (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 1989), 37; Wang Weihai, Zhongguo huji zhidu—lishi yu zhengzhi de fanxi [The Registration System of China: A Historical and Political Analysis], Xin wenhuaxue cong [New Cultural Studies Series] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 2005), 183. 31. These household certificates would then be compiled into a registration book known as the yellow register (huangce), which was named after the color of its cover. Wei Qingyuan, Mingdai huangce zhidu [Yellow Register System of the Ming Dynasty] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961), 106; Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953, Harvard East Asian Studies 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 3–11. 32. The imperial warehouse was built on an island in the Houku Lake so that it was insulated from fire and easily defended. The remaining three copies of each census were deposited with the county, prefectural, and provincial governments. Wei, Mingdai huangce zhidu, 88–89, 91–92. 33. The lijia system was first established under the Ming. However, numerous changes and updates were made to the baojia system over the centuries. Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 7; Wang, Zhongguo huji zhidu, 185–89, 213; Wei, Mingdai huangce zhidu, 46–47, 72–79. 34. As Joseph Esherick and Mary Rankin have shown, the backgrounds of these local elites, who attained their social status based on a wide range of symbolic and economic resources, were extremely diverse. As the go-betweens between the state and the general population, they adopted very flexible and dynamic strategies to advance their positions according to specific local circumstances. Joseph W. Esherick and Mary Backus Rankin, “Introduction,” in Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance, ed. Joseph W. Esherick and Mary Backus Rankin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 35. Ge Jianxiong, Yi zhao si min, 40. Also, according to Ping-ti Ho, over the course of the dynasty the male-to-female ratio derived from later census records in many locales became increasingly imbalanced, with a reported surplus of male population that seems impossible. In Shanghai county, for example, the adult male-to-female ratio was close to 1:1 in 1391, but it was reported as more than 4.6:1 in 1572. Meanwhile, the number of persons per household dropped from 4.66 to 1.69 during the same period. Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 24–34. 36. Luo Yi, “Qingchao renkou shuzi de zai guji” [A Reestimation of the Qing Population], Jingji kexue, no. 6 (1998): 121. For the failure of the Ming dynasty to carry out such a household registration in Yunnan, see Wei, Mingdai huangce zhidu, 29. 37. The exact definition of an enlistable male, however, varied over time. Zhao, Qing shi gao, 3480.


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38. Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 7. 39. Luo, “Qingchao renkou shuzi de zai guji,” 121–22. 40. According to economic historian Luo Yi, the Ming dynasty deployed at least half of dozen methods of calculating ding numbers. Local variations were also widespread. The Qing dynasty simply inherited many of these different methods. Ibid., 121. 41. Gao Wangling, “Ming Qing shiqi di zhongguo renkou” [The Population of China during the Ming and Qing Dynasties], Qingshi yanjiu, no. 3 (1994); Alexander Woodside, “The Statecraft Thinkers of Late Imperial China in World History,” in Tradition and Metamorphosis in Modern Chinese History: Essays in Honor of Professor Kwang-Ching Liu’s Seventy-Fifth Birthday, ed.Yen-p’ing Hao and Hsin-mei Wei (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 1998). 42. Zhao, Qing shi gao, 3479. 43. Wang, Zhongguo huji zhidu, 209–10. In a rapidly expanding economy the fixed tax quotas worked like an ever-increasing tax cut, so the Qing, especially under the Yongzheng Emperor, ended up imposing other forms of tax burden upon the population. See Madeleine Zelin, The Magistrate’s Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth-Century Ch’ing China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 44. The attempt to obtain a more accurate enumeration of the population, however, was not effective. Wang, Zhongguo huji zhidu, 209–10, 215. 45. The numbers given here represent the ideal scenario only. In reality, adjustments were often made based on actual situations such as village size and household location. Zhao, Qing shi gao, 3481; For a general discussion of the Qing baojia system, see Liu-hung Huang, A Complete Book Concerning Happiness and Benevolence: A Manual for Local Magistrates in Seventeenth-Century China, trans. Djang Chu (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984). 46. Some China scholars, such as William Skinner and Linda Cooke Johnson, suggest that the Qing census in the late eighteenth century aimed at counting actual persons. While it is true that a more accurate enumeration of households and its members resulted in a more accurate number of total persons, it is important to point out that the household, rather than the individual, was the basic unit of enumeration during this period. William G. Skinner, “Sichuan’s Population in the Nineteenth Century: Lessons from Disaggregated Data,” Late Imperial China 8, no. 1 (1987): 69; Linda Cooke Johnson, Shanghai: From Market Town to Treaty Port, 1074–1858 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 120. In reality, unless the imperial state had direct control of a frontier region, which was commonly not the case, it had neither the ability nor the pressing need to extend the census and baojia system into the area. Wang, Zhongguo huji zhidu, 187. 47. Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 4–7. 48. At a time when the census was mainly an instrument for assessing and levying taxes, hu, like ding, was often a tax-related category, as local officials sometimes established a household’s numbers based on the size of its land-


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holding and the number of able-bodied males. Luo, “Qingchao renkou shuzi de zai guji,” 121. 49. The statecraft scholarship by Hong Liangji (1746–1809) represents a case in point. Chen Jinling, Hong Liangji pingchuan [On Hong Liangji], Qing Shi yanjiu congshu [A Series on Qing Historical Studies] (Beijing: Zhonggong renmin daxue chubanxue, 1995). Overall, the significance of late imperial Chinese statecraft is still an understudied area. For some recent works, see Ge Rongjin and Luu Yuancong, Qingdai shehui yu shixue [Society and Practical Learning in the Qing Dynasty] (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2000); Peng Ming-hui, Wan Qing de jingshi shixue [A History of Statecraft in the Late Qing], ed. Lu Jianrong, Lishi yu wenhua congshu 18 (Taipei: Maitian chuban, 2002); John Robert Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993);Woodside, “The Statecraft Thinkers of Late Imperial China in World History.” 50. Lam, “Policing the Imperial Nation: Sovereignty, International Law, and the Civilizing Mission in Late Qing China,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, no. 4 (2010): 19. 51. “Minzhengbu zou xiding benbu ji neiwai cheng xunjing ting quanxian jiangcheng zhe” [On the Guidelines for the Police Authorities by the Ministry of Civil Affairs], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany], no. 7 (1907). 52. “Qinding neige guanzhi zhangcheng bing banshi zanxing zhangcheng” [A Decree on Cabinet Structure and Temporary Guidelines on Official Business] (Beijing: Quanguo tushuguan wenxian suowei fuzhi zhongxin, 1907). 53. Reporting directly to the grand secretariat of the emperor, the Bureau for Constitutional Preparation was established in 1907. Many of its activities overlapped with those of the Ministry of Civil Affairs. After much debate and preparation, the bureau officially called for the establishment of the constitutional government in 1908. The decree on the new census was made on July 23, 1908. See Da Qing Guangxu xin fa ling [Statutes of the Qing], vol. 1 (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1909), 26. 54. “Qingcha jingshi hukou xiaoyu jumin gaoshi gao” [A Public Notice on the Household Surveys in Beijing], Xunjingbu 1501.282 (Beijing: First Historical Archives of China, 1906). For a discussion of the significance of this notice, see Lam, “Policing the Imperial Nation,” 21. 55. “Minzhengbu ju zou diaocha hukou zhangcheng zhe dan” [A Memorial on the Household Survey Guidelines], in Minzhengbu hukou diaocha ji ge jia guji [The Minzhengbu Census of 1909–1911: A New Study Based on Recently Discovered Documents], ed. Wang Shih-ta [Wang Shida] (Beijing: Shehui diaocha suo, 1933), 129. 56. “Xianzheng Biancha Guan zou zhunian choubei shiyi dan” [Year-byYear Itemized Plans of the Bureau of Constitution Preparation], in Minzhengbu zouzhe huicun, ed. Jiang Yasha, Guojia Tushuguan cang lishi dangan wenxian congkan [Archival Materials of the National Library] (Beijing: Quanguo tushuguan wenxian suowei fuzhi zhongxin, 2004). 57. “Minzhengbu ju zou diaocha hukou zhangcheng zhe dan,” 130–33;


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“Qinding neige guanzhi zhangcheng bing banshi zanxing zhangcheng.” A copy of the census guidelines can also be found in “Minzhengbu zou diaocha hukou zhangcheng zhe” [Census Guidelines of the Ministry of Civil Affairs], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany], no. 1 (1909). 58. “Minzhengbu ju zou diaocha hukou zhangcheng zhe dan,” 129. 59. Leo A. Orleans, “The 1953 Chinese Census in Perspective,” Journal of Asian Studies 16, no. 4 (1957): 566. 60. The relationship between the main household and its subordinate households remained unexplored, however, since census takers were not instructed to identify the actual social and economic relationships within each household. According to the census rule, the household that first occupied a residence was considered the primary household. If multiple households arrived at the same time, the largest one would be the primary one. “Minzhengbu zou zun zhang bianding hujifa shandan ju chen qing zhi chi jia xianzheng biancha guan cha fu zhe fu hujifa” [The Household Registration Codes Prepared by the Ministry of Civil Affairs for the Bureau for Constitution Preparation], in Minzhengbu hukou diaocha ji ge jia guji [The Minzhengbu Census of 1909–1911: A New Study Based on Recently Discovered Documents], ed. Wang Shih-ta [Wang Shida] (Beijing: Shehui diaocha suo, 1933), 131. 61. Ibid., 175. 62. Peter Zarrow, “The Reform Movement, the Monarchy, and Political Modernity,” in Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China, ed. Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow, Harvard East Asian Monographs 214 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002). 63. “Minzhengbu zou zun zhang bianding hujifa shandan ju chen qing zhi chi jia xianzheng biancha guan cha fu zhe fu hujifa,” 175. 64. “Minzhengbu ju zou diaocha hukou zhangcheng zhe dan,” 128–29; “Qinding neige guanzhi zhangcheng bing banshi zanxing zhangcheng.” In practice, the pace at which the census taking and local elections followed was rather uneven. In some areas representatives were elected even before the census took place. As a result, the ministry often pressured the local authorities to complete the census without further delay. Meng Xin, “Xianzheng pian” [On Constitution and Policy], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany], no. 3 (1909). 65. “Qinding neige guanzhi zhangcheng bing banshi zanxing zhangcheng.” 66. For the local self-government movement in the late Qing, see John H. Fincher, Chinese Democracy: The Self-Government Movement in Local, Provincial and National Politics, 1905–1914 (London: Croom Helm; Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1981), chapters 3 and 4. Regarding the tradition of local self-government, see Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988);Woodside, “The Statecraft Thinkers of Late Imperial China in World History.” For how the idea of local self-government was being implemented in late Qing, see Roger Thompson, China’s Local Councils in the Age of Constitutional Reform, 1898–1911 (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1995).


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67. Thompson, China’s Local Councils in the Age of Constitutional Reform; Roger Thompson, “Statecraft and Self-Government: Competing Visions of Community and State in Late Imperial China,” Modern China 14, no. 2 (1988). 68. “Minzhengbu zou zun zhang bianding hujifa shandan ju chen qing zhi chi jia xianzheng biancha guan cha fu zhe fu hujifa,” 133. 69. Meng Xin, “Xianzheng pian,” 123. 70. Ibid. 71. Obviously, the overwhelming majority of Chinese intellectuals from the May Fourth generation rejected outright or neglected what they considered the “backward” and “traditional” late Qing census and other New Policy reforms. However, a few more careful and less politically motivated social scientists, such as Wang Shida of the Institute of Social Research, acknowledged the high accuracy of the late Qing census. He also mentioned similar observations made by the foreign community. Wang Shih-ta [Wang Shida], Minzhengbu hukou diaocha ji ge jia guji [The Minchengpu Census of 1909–1911: A New Study Based on Recently Discovered Documents] (Beijing: Shehui diaochasuo, 1933). 72. The use of troops to carry out household registration at the beginning of the Ming dynasty in many ways represented an unusual practice. In most cases it was the local gentry who were responsible for collecting census information in a semiofficial capacity. 73. Abram Jaffe, an official from the U.S. Census Bureau, wrote in 1947 that the late Qing census was far from completion when the dynasty abdicated in 1912 as only a few provinces had filed their reports to the central government. Yet, according to the Republican social scientists Wang Shih-ta, whose wideranging study of the Qing national census is cited in various places in this chapter, the census in question was relatively complete. Abram J. Jaffe, “A Review of the Censuses and Demographic Statistics of China,” Population Studies 1, no. 3 (1949). See also Orleans, “The 1953 Chinese Census in Perspective.” 74. “Minzhengbu ju zou zun zhang diaocha diercir renhu zongshu zhe dan” [A Memorial on the Second Census Reporting], in Minzhengbu hukou diaocha ji ge jia guji [The Minzhengbu Census of 1909–1911: A New Study Based on Recently Discovered Documents], ed.Wang Shih-ta [Wang Shida] (Beijing: Shehui diaocha suo, 1933), 132. 75. Ibid., 130–31. 76. Zuo Shaozuo, “Lianzhou shijian riji zhailu” [Selected Diary Entries Regarding the Events in Lianzhou], Jindaishi ziliao 7, no. 4 (1955): 74. 77. “Minzhengbu ju zou diaocha hukou zhangcheng zhe dan,” 132. 78. “Minzhengbu ju zou zun zhang diaocha dierci renhu zongshu zhe dan,” 132. 79. Ibid., 131. 80. It is important to note that censuses, local maps, and even household doorplates were not novel inventions but existed in different administrative and historical contexts prior to this point. In the older baojia system, the “doorplate,” or menpai, was a piece of paper. Although the older form of doorplate contained more detailed information about each household than the new doorplate, they


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were difficult to display publicly and were certainly less legible from the viewpoint of the modern bureaucratic state. Likewise, census data, although often inaccurate, were compiled periodically for tax and local defense purposes in the past, and household plates were used under the baojia system. Similarly, local maps were available, but they were often part of local histories compiled by local scholars. What distinguished the new census and its related activities from its predecessors was not just their meticulous detail and accuracy, but also the strong conviction that the exactitude of these data, when properly juxtaposed to one another by a centralized bureaucracy, could be an important political instrument. 81. “Minzhengbu zi xing ge sheng zending diaocha hukou zhangcheng na xuetong zhangding niansui wen” [On Defining the Ages of the Student and the Able-Bodied Male in the Census], in Minzhengbu hukou diaocha ji ge jia guji [The Minzhengbu Census of 1909–1911: A New Study Based on Recently Discovered Documents], ed. Wang Shih-ta [Wang Shida] (Beijing: Shehui diaocha suo, 1933). 82. “Xianzheng biancha guan zou zhunian choubei shiyi dan,” 117, 23–24; “Zunyi benbu zhunian choubei weijin shiyi zhe” [A Year-by-Year Plan on the Implementation of the Outstanding Projects], in Minzhengbu zouzhe huicun, ed. Jiang Yasha, Guojia tushuguan cang lishi dangan we xian congkan [Archival Materials of the National Library] (Beijing: Quanguo tushuguan wenxian suowei fuzhi zhongxin, 2004). 83. This argument is succinctly summarized in a 1918 M.A. thesis by Ruth Prosser, a University of Chicago philosophy student. Ruth Waring Prosser, “The Social Survey as an Agency of Intelligent Democracy,” M.A. thesis, University of Chicago, 1918, 28–30. In the case of China, as I will discuss in chapter 4, surveys clearly became a process of subject formation for surveyors and field researchers. 84. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State, Yale Agrarian Studies Series (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 2.

3. foolish people versus soulstealers 1. The sequence of events reconstructed here is based on “Anhui Nanningxian xiangmin zishi oushang diaochayuan” [Villagers Attack Investigator in Nanning County of Anhui], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany], no. 5 (1910); and “Anhui Nanningxian xiangmin zishi yu wen” [More on the Riots in Nanning County of Anhui], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany], no. 6 (1910). 2. “Anhui Nanningxian xiangmin zishi oushang diaochayuan”; “Anhui Nanningxian xiangmin zishi yu wen”; “Xiangshan diaochao fengchao xiangzhi” [A Detailed Account of the Anticensus Riots in Xiangshan], Shibao, April 16, 1910. The unit of measurement here is Chinese foot. 3. “Anhui Nanningxian xiangmin zishi yu wen”; “Anhui Nanningxian xiangmin zishi oushang diaochayuan.”


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4. “Shandong guanbing yu Laiyang xianmin jaozhan shasi xianmin shubai ren” [Hundreds Killed in the Confrontation between Soldiers and Villagers in Laiyang, Shandong], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany], no. 7 (1910). 5. I refer to the new census as a “reform” in accordance with the phrases “New Policies” and “New Policy reforms,” which are widely used by historians. However, as I show in this chapter, one can easily call initiatives of the New Policies “revolutionary” rather than “reformist.” Douglas Reynolds has argued that these initiatives indeed constituted a “revolution.” Douglas R. Reynolds, China, 1898–1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan, Harvard East Asian Monographs 162 (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1993). There is also a parallel debate regarding the restorative versus the revolutionary nature of the Meiji ishin that is normally insufficiently known as the “Meiji Restoration.” 6. Wang Shih-ta [Wang Shida], Minzhengbu hukou diaocha ji ge jia guji [The Minchengpu Census of 1909–1911: A New Study Based on Recently Discovered Documents] (Beijing: Shehui diaochasuo, 1933), 78, 35. 7. “Ji Jiangxi diaocha ukou zhi fengchao” [Census Incidents in Jiangxi Province], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany], no. 8 (1909); “Sanji Jiangxi diaocha hukou zhi fengchao” [Three Census Incidents in Jiangxi Province], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany], no. 10 (1909); “Xu Jiangxi diaocha hukou zhi fengchao” [More Census Riots in Jiangxi Province], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany], no. 9 (1909); Zhang Zhenhe and Ding Yuanying, “Qingmo minbian nianbiao II” [Riots in the Late Qing II], Jindaishi ziliao 50, no. 4 (1983): 80–85. 8. “Ji Jiangxi diaocha hukou zhi fengchao”; “Sanji Jiangxi diaocha hukou zhi fengchao.” 9. “Ji Jiangxi diaocha hukou zhi fengchao,” 222–23. 10. Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 11. In Loding county, Guangdong, during a riot of several thousand villagers, an official and several local elites were severely beaten and nearly killed. “Ji Guangdong lieshen kang hukou zhi fengchao” [The Anticensus Activities by the Bad Local Gentry in Guangdong], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany], no. 7 (1910). In this particular incident, the payment was made in the more desirable foreign coins (yangqian), which were widely circulated in the lower Yangtze region to the extent that even “spirit money” offered to the souls of the dead had adopted the designs of these coins. It is unclear whether the method of payment had further aroused suspicions. For the widespread circulation of foreign coins, see Richard von Glahn, “Foreign Silver Coins in the Market Culture of Nineteenth Century China,” International Journal of Asian Studies 4, no. 1 (2007). 12. “Zhejiang Changxing xiangmin zishi huijie xuetang ji jiaotang” [The Looting and Destruction of Academy and Church in Shandong Province], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany], no. 8 (1910); “Jiangsu Rugaoxian xiangmin zishi” [Villagers Riot in Rugao of Shandong Province], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany], no. 8 (1910).


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13. Made with metal, as specified by the ministry, the oval-shaped plate was painted in white with contrasting red numbers, characters, and graphic design (see figure 5 in the previous chapter). The census guidelines also specified that all the plates should be manufactured using “foreign metal” (yangtie). “Minzhengbu ju zou diaocha hukou zhangcheng zhe dan” [A Memorial on the Household Survey Guidelines], in Minzhengbu hukou diaocha ji ge jia guji [The Minzhengbu Census of 1909–1911: A New Study Based on Recently Discovered Documents], ed. Wang Shih-ta [Wang Shida] (Beijing: Shehui diaocha suo, 1933), 135. 14. “Guangdong Chaozhou daipu xian xiangmin zishi yuwen” [More on the Daipu County Riot in Chaozhou of Guangdong Province], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany], no. 9 (1910); “Guangdong Lianzhou xiangmin zishi fenhui xuetang” [Villagers Burn Down Academy in Lianzhou of Guangdong], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany], no. 10 (1910). 15. “Buji Guangdong Xinanxian funuu kang ding menpai shi” [Women from Xinan Village of Guangdong Resist the Installation of Household Plates], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany], no. 8 (1910). 16. For an example, see “Shandong guanbing yu laiyang xianmin jiaozhan shasi xianmin shubai ren”; “Lun minzhi bu jin zhi ke you” [On the Inertia of the Intelligence of the People], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany] 1, no. 9 (1904). This is a reprint of an editorial printed in Lindong ribao on July 26, 1904. 17. This notion of being “prepolitical” was introduced by Eric Hobsbawm in his influential Primitive Rebels (1959) as a means of understanding the “archaic” peasant uprisings against colonial authorities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The concept has been adopted for peasant studies in many other parts of the world. Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others have since criticized this argument as an indication of the limitations of the Marxist historiography and modernist thinking in general. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 11. 18. Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa, Studies on the History of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 5, 56. 19. “Minzhengbu zi xing ge sheng zending diaocha hukou zhangcheng na xuetong zhangding niansui wen” [On Defining the Ages of the Student and the Able-Bodied Male in the Census], in Minzhengbu hukou diaocha ji ge jia guji [The Minzhengbu Census of 1909–1911: A New Study Based on Recently Discovered Documents], ed. Wang Shih-ta [Wang Shida] (Beijing: Shehui diaocha suo, 1933). 20. For an example of extortion, see “Guangdong Lianzhou xiangmin zishi fenhui xuetang”; “Minzhengbu ju zou diaocha hukou zhangcheng zhe dan,” 133. 21. Although Zuo harbored the same condescending view of the peasants as many other elites, his candid and cynical view of the entire affair provided an unusual glimpse into the complexity of local politics. Through his diary we also learn that the peasants were not stupid at all. For example, Zuo was sur-


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prised at the effective resistance put up by the rioters, while he himself was actually having difficulty massing sufficient troops in nearby districts to suppress the rebellion. Zuo Shaozuo, “Lianzhou shijian riji zhailu” [Selected Diary Entries Regarding the Events in Lianzhou], Jindaishi ziliao 7, no. 4 (1955). For details of the Lianzhou riots, see “Guangdong Lianzhou xiangmin zishi fenhui xuetang”; “Lianzhou kanding menpai dai fengchao” [The Anticensus Riots in Lianzhou], Shibao, October 4, 1910. 22. According to the official guidelines, local governments were expected to pick up all expenses. “Minzhengbu ju zou diaocha hukou zhangcheng zhe dan,” 133. 23. “Yunnan Zhaotongfu luanshi xu ji” [More on the Disturbances in Zhaotung Government of Yunnan], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany], no. 5 (1910); “Guangxi minbian jin wen er ze” [Two Incidents of Riots in Guangxi], Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany], no. 8 (1910). 24. Zuo, “Lianzhou shijian riji zhailu,” 72. 25. For instance, official reports characterized the violent confrontation between women and the authorities, such as the one in Xin’an County, Guangdong, as “rare” or “incomprehensible.” “Buji Guangdong Xinanxian funuu kang ding menpai shi,” 225. It ignored the fact that the ritual of burning incense and worshipping deities in order to seek spiritual protection was a common practice of popular Daoism. As well, it also failed to acknowledge that these local women were essentially challenging the patriarchal social order as a whole by taking the matter into their own hands. 26. White, Speaking with Vampires, 36. 27. Reynolds, China, 1898–1912. 28. Mary Backus Rankin, “Nationalistic Contestation and Mobilization Politics: Practice and Rhetoric of Railway-Rights Recovery at the End of the Qing,” Modern China 28 (2002): 326–27. 29. Many Chinese, for instance, regarded Westerners as yangguizi (foreign devils). Red wine–drinking Westerners were often believed to be bloodsuckers. In numerous other cases missionaries were particularly suspected of participating in devilish activities, including soulstealing. Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860–1870, Harvard East Asian Series 11 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 230; Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 99. 30. Zuo, “Lianzhou shijian riji zhailu,” 72. 31. Kuhn, Soulstealers, 107–14. 32. Zuo, “Lianzhou shijian riji zhailu,” 74. 33. “Yili Jiangjun wei suoshu Heilao deng bu Kasake hukou zhongduo qing tianshe qianbai huchang” [On Adding New Kazakh Households in the Heilao Areas Submitted by the General of Yili], Lifanbu 519 (Beijing: First Historical Archives of China, ca. 1908); “Yili Jiangjun wei zouchen ancha Kasake renhu


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shiyi” [A Report on the Adding of Kazakh Households Submitted by the General of Yili], Lifanbu 518 (Beijing: First Historical Archives of China, ca. 1901). 34. “Yili Kasake hukou biao” [The Kazakh Household Register of Yili], Lifanbu 523 (Beijing: First Historical Archives of China, ca. 1910). 35. Ibid.; “Cuicha Huimin ling zao qingce fenbao benbu” [On Registering and Reporting the Muslim Population], Lifanbu 523 (Beijing: First Historical Archives of China, 1910). 36. The ministry had only a rough estimate of the total population for Outer Mongolia based on the old census data. 37. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 191; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 16, Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992), 116.

4. the nationalization of facts and the affective state 1. The Anyang survey was one of the earliest projects carried out by the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica after its establishment in 1928. Documents of this case are filed at the institute’s archives. Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica, “Cheng fu Anyang Xu Shan deng cheng su Li zhuren yian diaocha shishi ji niyi banfa” [A Report on the Investigated Facts and Resolution of the Lawsuit against Director Li from Xu, Shan, and Others of Anyang County] (Taipei: Institute of History and Philology Archives, Academia Sinica, 1932). 2. Xia, Shang, and Zhou are sometimes known as the three dynasties of ancient China. The Zhou is the only one whose existence has been confirmed by written records. Prior to the Anyang survey, any knowledge of the Shang dynasty was based on the written court records of the Zhou. Today, the status of the legendary Xia remains a subject of intense debate as Chinese archaeologists struggle to find “evidence” to confirm its existence. For a journalistic account of the last point, see Bruce Gilley, “Chinese Nationalism: Digging into the Future,” Far Eastern Economic Review, July 20, 2000. 3. Even for the newly founded secular state, which frequently sponsored antisuperstition campaigns, this was still a serious offense. The Republican law, for example, stated that any person who committed unlawful tomb excavations could be sent to jail for up to five years. Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica, “Cheng fu Anyang Xu Shan deng cheng su Li zhuren yian diaocha shishi ji niyi banfa.” 4. Ibid. 5. Although the institute appealed to the Nationalist government for help during the standoff, the Henan government refused to give in since it did not recognize the authority of the Nationalists. Only after the regional landlord was defeated by the Nationalists was the institute able to carry out its excavation


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without inference. Wang, Fu Ssu-Nien: A Life in Chinese History and Politics, Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature and Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 85–86. 6. The institute, for instance, established several Historic Sites Study Clubs in the region to promote public awareness. Shi Zhangru, “Li Ji xiansheng yu Zhongguo kaoguxue” [Li Chi (Li Ji) and Chinese Archaeology], in Xin xueshu zhi lu [Along New Pathways of Research: Essays in Honor of the Seventieth Anniversary of the Institute of History and Philology] (Taipei: Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, 1998), 142–44. 7. Li Ji himself described the arrival of the legal definition of “national property” as the primary foundation of the new academic research. Li Ji, “Nanyang Dong Zuobin xiansheng yu jindai kaoguxue” [Dong Zuobin of Nanyang and Modern Archaeology], in Xin xueshu zhi lu [Along New Pathways of Research: Essays in Honor of the Seventieth Anniversary of the Institute of History and Philology] (Taipei: Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, 1998), 267–68. 8. The National Learning movement was among the related intellectual movements triggered in the 1920s. See Tse-tsung Chow, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China, Harvard East Asian Studies 6 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 314–33. 9. Although the recurrent theme was the use of science to reevaluate Chinese heritage, the exact structure of this proposed scheme was constantly in dispute. In some later versions, for instance, the discipline of classics was eliminated altogether. Still, as Chen Yiai argues, the advocates of National Studies were in many ways inspired by their traditional predecessors. Chen Yiai, Zhongguo xiandai xueshu yanjiu jigou de xingqi—yi Beijing daixue guoxuemen wei zhongxin de tantao (1922–1927) [The Rise of Modern Chinese Academic Research Institutes: A Case Study of the School of National Studies at Peking University, 1922–1927], Zhengzhi daixue shixue congshu 3 [National Cheng-Chi University Historical Studies Series 3] (Taipei: Guoli zhengzhi daixue lishi xuexi, 1999). 10. Shidi xuebao, “Bianji yaoze” [Primary Editorial Principles], Shidi xuebao [Journal of the Historical and Geographical Society] 1, no. 3 (1922). 11. Ibid. 12. Claims about being the “first” or “last” are always problematic. In a sense, the establishment of the Imperial University of Peking and the gradual decline of the traditional examination system around the turn of the twentieth century was part of the process of the modernization of the Chinese education curricula. Renville Lund, “The Imperial University of Peking,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 1956. Shortly after the Republican Revolution of 1911, which ended the Qing dynasty, the Imperial University of Peking was renamed the National University of Peking. Nonetheless, by the time the School of National Studies was established, many of the curricula at the university remained quite traditional. Thus, for my purposes, I follow Chen Yiai’s argument that the School of National Studies was the first Westernized research institute because of its radical departure from the existing institutional forms. Chen,


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Zhongguo xiandai xueshu yanjiu jigou de xingqi; Timothy B. Weston, “Beijing University and Chinese Political Culture, 1898–1920,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1995. 13. Chen, Zhongguo xiandai xueshu yanjiu jigou de xingqi, 135–39. 14. Q. Edward Wang, Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography, SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001). 15. Fu Sinian, “Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo gongzuo zhi zhiqu” [The Purpose of Historical and Philological Research], Guoli zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan [Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica] 1, no. 1 (1928): 8. 16. At the time, Fu Sinian was the director of the Institute of Philology and History at Zhongshan University in Canton, Guangdong province. The institute was modeled after the School of National Studies at the National University of Peking. Chen, Zhongguo xiandai xueshu yanjiu jigou de xingqi, 360–76. Also, while at the time Canton was the strong constituency of the Nationalists, the success of the Nationalists’ military campaign in the north meant the capital of the Republic would be reestablished in Nanjing, giving him a reason to move north. 17. Li Ji, “Fu Mengzhen [Fu Sinian] xiansheng lingdao de lishi yuyan yanjiusuo” [The Institute of History and Philology under the Leadership of Fu Sinian], in Guoli Zhongyang yanjiuyuan Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo Fu suochang jinian tekan [Special Publication of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica: In Memory of Director Fu Ssu-Nien] (Taipei: Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, 1951), 12. 18. Wang Fan-sen points out that despite Fu’s Western educational background, he acknowledged that history and philology were the two most important fields of traditional Chinese scholarship. Wang, Fu Ssu-Nien. 19. Fu Sinian, “Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo gongzuo zhi zhiqu,” 8. 20. Li was paraphrasing Fu’s sentiments during the Anyang survey. Li, “Fu Mengzhen [Fu Sinian] xiansheng lingdao de lishi yuyan yanjiusuo,” 12. 21. Fu, “Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo gongzuo zhi zhiqu,” 7. 22. Li, “Fu Mengzhen [Fu Sinian] xiansheng lingdao de lishi yuyan yanjiusuo,” 12. 23. Ibid. 24. Fu Sinian, “Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo gongzuo zhi zhiqu,” 9. 25. Ibid. 26. The meanings of these terms depended mainly upon the geopolitical context at the time. Xiyang, for instance, was originally used to refer to the body of water west of India. Its meaning was reconfigured, however, and later came to represent the West as Europe loomed larger in the minds of the Chinese. For the Japanese use of shina and zhina, see Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 27. Fu, “Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo gongzuo zhi zhiqu,” 8. 28. Fu often used “evidential research” as a code word for what he consid-


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ered to be “traditional scholarship,” regardless of whether actual evidential research was involved. See Fu Sinian, “Fu Sinian zhi Li Guangming” [Fu Sinian to Li Guangming], Yuan 115–20–10 (Taipei: Institute of History and Philology Archives, Academia Sinica, 1929), 3. 29. Ibid. 30. For an example of the discussion of the logistics, funding, procurement of special equipment, and general planning that took place prior to a survey, see Zhao Yuanren, “Zhao Yuanren zhi Fu Sinian” [Zhao Yuanren to Fu Sinian],Yuan 2–2 (Taipei: Institute of History and Philology Archives, Academia Sinica, 1928). 31. Li Guangming (c), “Li Guangming zhi Fu Sinian” [Li Guangming to Fu Sinian], Yuan 115–20–12 (Taipei: Institute of History and Philology Archives, Academia Sinica, 1929), 4. 32. Most fieldworkers were sent to Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. In the case of Yunnan, for instance, the IHP sent at least four investigators. Wang Fansen, “Shenme keyi chengwei lishi zhengju—jindai Zhongguo xinjiu shiliao guandian de chongtu” [What Can Become Historical Evidence: The Conflict between the New and Old Historical Views], Xin shi xue [New History] 8, no. 2 (1997): 102; Yang Chengzhi, “Dan qi diaocha xinan minzu shu lue” [The Tale of a Solo Investigation of the Southwestern Minorities], Guoli Zhongshan daxue yuyan lishi xue yanjiusuo zhoukan [Weekly Journal of The Institute of Philological and Historical Studies] 10, no. 118 (1930): 14. 33. Li’s attempt to adopt some of Fu’s suggestions, such as the use of photos, can be found in the final survey report. Li Guangming and Wang Guanghui, “Chuankang minsu diaocha baogao” [Report on the Folklore Survey of Sichuan and Xikang Provinces], Yuan 163–1a (Taipei: Institute of History and Philology Archives, Academia Sinica, 1929). 34. Li Guangming (e), “Li Guangming zhi Fu Sinian” [Li Guangming to Fu Sinian], Yuan 115–20–20 (Taipei: Institute of History and Philology Archives, Academia Sinica, 1929), 4. 35. Fu, “Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo gongzuo zhi zhiqu.” 36. Even though history and philology were the two main fields of research for the IHP before ethnology was officially added in 1934, researchers at the institute were not interested in the kinds of historical and philological inquiries associated with Neo-Confucian evidential scholars. In the eyes of their skeptics, however, these mostly court records were particularly useless since they believed these materials could not be used to establish anything beyond the already wellknown and self-evident political history of China’s dynastic past. Li, “Fu Mengzhen [Fu Sinian] xiansheng lingdao de lishi yuyan yanjiusuo,” 16; Wang Fan-sen, “Shenme keyi chengwei lishi zhengju,” 102–4, 106. 37. Zhao, “Zhao Yuanren zhi Fu Sinian,” 4. 38. Fu, “Fu Sinian zhi Li Guangming.” 39. Ibid., 1–2; Li Guangming (b), “Li Guangming zhi Fu Sinian” [Li Guangming to Fu Sinian], Yuan 115–20–11 (Taipei: Institute of History and Philology Archives, Academia Sinica, 1929); Li Guangming (d), “Li Guangming zhi Fu Sinian” [Li Guangming to Fu Sinian],” Yuan 115–20–21 (Taipei: Institute


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of History and Philology Archives, Academia Sinica, 1929), 4; Li Guangming (c), “Li Guangming Zhi Fu Sinian,” 2; Li Guangming (a), “Li Guangming zhi Fu Sinian” [Li Guangming to Fu Sinian], Yuan 115–20–8 (Taipei: Institute of History and Philology Archives, Academia Sinica, 1929). 40. Li Guangming (e), “Li Guangming zhi Fu Sinian,” 5. 41. Li Guangming (d), “Li Guangming zhi Fu Sinian,” 4. 42. Yang, “Dan qi diaocha xinan minzu shu lue”; Yang Chengzhi (a), “Yang Chengzhi zhi Fu Sinian” [Yang Chengzhi to Fu Sinian], Yuan 64–3 (Taipei: Institute of History and Philology Archives, Academia Sinica, 1930), 15–16. 43. Yang Chengzhi (b), “Yang Chengzhi zhi Fu Sinian” [Yuan Chengzhi to Fu Sinian], Yuan 64–2 (Taipei: Institute of History and Philology Archives, Academia Sinica, 1928), 1; Yang Chengzhi (c), “Yang Chengzhi zhi Fu Sinian” [Yang Chengzhi to Fu Sinian],Yuan 64–1 (Taipei: Institute of History and Philology Archives, Academia Sinica, 1928). 44. Yang, “Dan qi diaocha xinan minzu shu lue,” 15–16. 45. Yang Chengzhi (b), “Yang Chengzhi zhi Fu Sinian,” 1; Yang Chengzhi (c), “Yang Chengzhi zhi Fu Sinian,” 4. 46. Xiao Zheng, indeed, remained the most prominent figure in land and rural economics management within the Nationalist government. See Xiao Zheng, Tudi gaige wushi nian: Xiao Zheng huiyilu [Fifty Years of Land Reform in the Republic of China: Memoirs of Dr. Tseng Hsiao (Xiao Zheng)] (Taipei: Zhongguo dizheng yanjiusuo, 1980). 47. Li Kuoqing, Minguo ershiniandai Zhongguo dalu tudi wenti ziliao— Ganzu sheng xian diaocha shixi riji [Documents on Land Problems in Mainland China during the 1930s: Fieldwork Diary in Ganzu Province and Ganzu County], Zhongguo dizheng yanjiusuo congkan [China Research Institute of Land Economics Series] (Taipei: Chengwen chuban youxian gongsi, 1977), 93405. 48. Cai Yucong, Shehui Diaocha Zhi Yuanli Ji Fangfa [Principles and Methods of Social Survey Research], 109. More examples of how this played out in practice can be found in the autobiographies written by student trainees. Without exception, they all discuss their willingness to endure hardship for the state. “Xuesheng zichuan” [Student Autobiographies], folder 237–107 (Nanjing: Second Historical Archives of China, 1940–41). 49. Li Jinghan, Shidi shehui diaocha fangfa [Fieldwork Methods in Social Survey Research] (Beijing: Xingyun shudian, 1933), 53–54. 50. Ann Anagnost, National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China, Body, Commodity, Text: Studies of Objectifying Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 140–41; Hairong Yan, “Self-Development of Migrant Women and the Production of Suzhi [Quality] as Surplus Value,” in Everyday Modernity in China, ed. Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua L. Goldstein, Studies in Modernity and National Identity (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 240–42; David E. Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Re-


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public (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994);William Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Vintage Books, 1966). 51. According to Foucault, “Technologies of the self permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and ways of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.” Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1994 (New York: New Press, 1997), 225; Yang, “Dan qi diaocha xinan minzu shu lue,” 16. 52. “Xuesheng zichuan.” 53. David Nivison, “Communist Ethics and Chinese Tradition,” Journal of Asian Studies 16, no. 1 (1956). 54. Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 13, 201–4. 55. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

5. time, space, and state effect 1. He Qigong, “Beiping tebieshi zhengfu miling di qishixi hao” [Beiping Special Municipal Government Decree No. 74], August 2, 1928, J2–7, Beijing Municipal Archives; He Qigong, “Beiping tebieshi zhengfu miling di san er jiu hao” [Beiping Special Municipal Government Decree No. 329], August 31, 1928, J2–7, Beijing Municipal Archives. 2. According to Abram Jaffe, the censuses of 1910, 1912, and 1928 were the most important Chinese censuses in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet, like many of his contemporary Chinese and Western observers, he offered very little evidence about the 1912 census. Given what we have seen about the logistics entailed by a serious census, it is safe to assume that whatever took place in 1912 was not a meaningful census. Given the political turmoil immediately after the revolution, the 1912 census was most likely to a significant degree a recompilation of the previous Qing census data. Abram J. Jaffe, “A Review of the Censuses and Demographic Statistics of China,” Population Studies 1, no. 3 (1947). 3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 166. 4. He Qigong, “Beiping tebieshi zhengfu miling di liu jiu san hao” [Beiping Special Municipal Government Decree No. 693], October 17, 1928, J2–7, Beijing Municipal Archives. 5. He, “Beiping tebieshi zhengfu miling di qishixi hao”; He Qigong, “Beiping tebieshi zhengfu miling di san jiu wu hao” [Beiping Special Municipal Government Decree No. 395], September 10, 1928, J2–7, Beijing Municipal Archives; He Qigong, “Beiping tebieshi zhengfu miling di liu jiu san hao” [Beiping Special Municipal Government Decree No. 693], October 17, 1928, J2–7, Beijing Municipal Archives.


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6. He Qigong, “Beiping tebieshi zhengfu miling di jiu wu yi hao” [Beiping Special Municipal Government Decree No. 951], November 5, 1928, J2–7, Beijing Municipal Archives. 7. Chen Da, Langji shi nian [Ten Years of Wandering] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1946), 400. 8. Ibid., 416–17. 9. Ibid., 399. 10. Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953, Harvard East Asian Studies 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 80–83. 11. The Population Bureau was a reorganization of the Household Administrative Bureau, which had been established in 1942, also under the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in order to facilitate military conscription, local governance, and population registration. Xinzheng yuan xinwen ju, “Renkou xingzheng” [Population Management], Xinzheng yuan xinwen ju, 1947, 4, 9. 12. The plan was to implement the system among civil servants and state workers before extending it to the general public. Ibid., 28, 42–43. For more proposed procedures on household administration, see Zhou Zhongyi, Xianxing Huji Xingzheng Zhidu [The Current System of Household Administration] (Nanjing: Neizhengbu, ca. 1946). 13. The specific breakdowns are: 669 cadres at the provincial level; 8,517 (125 percent of the total needed) at the county level; 74,134 (67 percent of the total needed) at the village level. In addition, there were another 232,514 trained for baojia-level operations, although this was only about 35 percent of what would be needed. The government projected that the number of population management cadres, including those assigned to the baojia system, would easily exceed half a million. Ibid., 4–7. Although the development of the social sciences as academic disciplines was significantly disrupted by the war and was later limited by the Communist regime, the bureaucratization and governmentalization of the state in which investigative modalities were an integral part was hardly interrupted. As well, even though the Nationalists were defeated by the Communists before these programs were fully implemented and became effective, many of these programs were introduced in Taiwan after the Nationalists retreated there in 1949, becoming the foundation of population management and social control for the authoritarian regime under the Nationalists in the subsequent decades. 14. Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity, Harvard East Asian Monographs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), 227–40. See also Henrietta Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911–1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 93–97. 15. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination:A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 211. 16. Margherita Zanasi, Saving the Nation: Economic Modernity in Republican China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 17. Norbert Elias, Time: An Essay, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 133.


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18. He Qigong, “Beiping tebieshi zhengfu miling di san yi ba hao” [Beiping Special Municipal Government Secret Decree No. 318], October 17, 1928, J2–7, Beijing Municipal Archives. 19. He Qigong, “Beiping tebieshi zhengfu miling di san er jiu hao.” 20. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, “Introduction,” in Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation, ed. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, Global, Area, and International Archive (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 16; Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1–2. 21. Beiping tebieshi Gonganju and Beiping tebieshi Shehuiju, “Beiping tebieshi Shehuiju Gongan ju zhi zhengfu de chengwen” [A Report Submitted by the Public Security Bureau and the Social Bureau to the Beiping Special Municipality], November 30, 1928, J2–7, Beijing Municipal Archives. 22. Ibid. 23. This set of documents was issued by various government agencies in Beijing, Nanjing, and Shanghai between October 1928 and January 1929. They are deposited in the Beijing Municipal Archives. The files involved here are J2–62, J181–20–872, J181–20–873, and J181–20–878. 24. He Qigong, “Beiping tebieshi zhengfu miling di ba yi ling hao” [Beiping Special Municipal Government Secret Decree No. 810], October 22, 1928, J2–6, Beijing Municipal Archives. 25. Jiang Chaozong, “Jiang Chaozong deng wei genggai she ming zhi Shehuiju han” [Jiang Chaozong and Others to the Social Bureau on Changing the Name of Their Organization], October 26, 1928, J181, Beijing Municipal Archives. 26. Beiping tebieshi Gonganju, “Gonganju baogao diaocha Wushanshe deng chu qingxing” [An Investigative Report on the Society of Enlightened Virtue Submitted by the Public Security Bureau], Beijing Municipal Archives, 1928; Beiping tebieshi Shehuiju, “Shehuiju wei xi paiyuan xiezhu diaocha zhi Gonganju Han” [Social Bureau Requesting Assistance from Investigators of Public Security Bureau], October 27, 1928, J181, Beijing Municipal Archives. 27. Beiping tebieshi Gonganju, “Gonganju baogao diaocha Wushanshe deng chu qingxing.” 28. Jiang Chaozong, “Jiang Chaozong deng zhi Xingzhengyuan Neizhengbu dian” [Telegraphy from Jiang Chaozong and Others to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Administrative Yuan], November 23, 1928, J181, Beijing Municipal Archives. 29. He Qigong, “Beiping tebieshi zhengfu miling di xiliu hao” [Beiping Special Municipal Government Decree No. 46], January 8, 1929, J181, Beijing Municipal Archives; Neizhengbu, “Neizhengbu fudian” [A Telegram from the Ministry of Internal Affairs], November 30, 1928, J181, Beijing Municipal Archives; Neizhengbu, “Neizhengbu piwen” [A Directive from the Ministry of Internal Affairs], December 10, 1928, J181, Beijing Municipal Archives; Beiping tebieshi Gonganju and Beiping tebieshi Shehuiju, “Gongan Shehui liang ju cheng fucha


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jin Wushanshe banli jieguo shi” [The Result of the Case on the Society of Enlightened Virtue Submitted by the Public Security Bureau and the Social Bureau], January 12, 1929, J181, Beijing Municipal Archives. 30. Neizhengbu, “Chajin shehui qunzhong shenquan mixin gongzuo baogaobiao” [Investigation and Prohibition of Superstitious Behavior Reports], in Institute of Modern History Archives, Academia Sinica, 128.1586, Taipei, 1940. Ibid., case 1453. 31. Ibid., case 1417. 32. Ibid., cases 1454 and 1442. 33. Sun Yat-sen, Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary: A Program of National Reconstruction for China: (Taipei: China Cultural Service, 1953), 180. The cultural assimilation policy of the Nationalists was in stark contrast to the Communist policy, which considered class the foundational category for politics and was therefore inclined to emphasize the protection and preservation of minority cultures. 34. Rui Yifu, “Xinan shaoshu minzu chong shou pianpang mingming gai lue” [On the Origins and Correction of the Tribal Names in Southwestern China with Insect and Beast Radical Characters], Renleixue jikan 2 (1941): 125. 35. Yunnan sheng dangwu zhidao weiyuanhui, “Kaihua ge minzu huachu zhenyu yi zi tuanjie er gu guo be nan” [On Civilizing Ethnic Minorities and Erasing Differences for the Purposes of Forging National Solidarity], 5.1/6. 85–5 (Taipei: Kuomintang Archives, 1935). 36. Yunnan sheng dangwu zhidao weiyuanhui, “Qing zhen biandi teshu qingxing queding minyun jingfei” [Evaluating the Borderland and Determining the Cost for Social Mobilization] (Taipei: Kuomintang Archives, 1935). 37. The notion of shaoshu minzu was in many ways a hybrid of Soviet and Japanese influences. The term minzu was derived from the Japanese term minzoku, or “folk.” Yet conceptually the minority policy of the Nationalists, and later the Communists, was heavily influenced by the nationality policy of the Soviets. Today ethnic minorities are officially known as “nationalities” in China. A.Tom Grunfeld, “In Search of Equality: Relations between China’s Ethnic Minorities and the Majority Han,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 17, no. 1 (1985). 38. Yunnan sheng dangwu zhidao weiyuanhui, “Qing zhen Biandi teshu qingxing queding minyun jingfei.” 39. Pamela Crossley, Helen Siu, and Donald Sutton, “Introduction,” in Empire at the Margins, ed. Pamela Crossley, Helen Siu, and Donald Sutton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 40. The Chinese dynastic empire was not, by definition, racially exclusive. The Confucian state presented itselt as a universalizing and civilizing project since the non-Han who lived on the peripheries were regarded as prospective participants in Chinese civilization. Stevan Harrell, Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers, ed. Studies on Ethnic Groups in China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995). During the Qing, although the Manchu ruling elites made major adjustments to the sinocentric cosmological structure by


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inserting themselves and their allies at the top of the imperial hierarchy in the multiethnic empire, the longstanding Confucian cultural imagination remained largely intact as a cultural self-assurance for the Han elites. Crossley, Siu, and Sutton, “Introduction.” 41. Tu Cheng-sheng, “Wuzhongshengyou de zhi ye: Fu Sinian de shixue geming yu Shiyusuo de chuangli” [Inventing a New Career: The Historiographical Revolution of Fu Sinian and the Establishment of the Institute of History and Philology], in Xin xeshu zhi lu [Along New Pathways of Research: Essays in Honor of the Seventieth Anniversary of the Institute of History and Philology] (Taipei: Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, 1998); Wang Tao-huan [Wang Daohuan], “Shiyusuo de tizhi renlei xuejia: Li Ji, S. M. Shirokogoroff, Wu Dingliang, Yang Ximei, Yu Jinquan” [The Physical Anthropologists of the Institute of History and Philology: Li Ji, S. M. Shirokogoroff, Wu Dingliang, Yang Ximei, and Yu Jingquan], in Xin xueshu zhi lu [Along New Pathways of Research: Essays in Honor of the Seventieth Anniversary of the Institute of History and Philology] (Taipei: Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, 1998). 42. Thomas Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010). 43. For the relationship between travel writing and colonialism in early modern Europe and China, respectively, see Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 44. Ibid., 149–50. 45. Ibid. 46. Yang Chengzhi (a), “Yang Chengzhi zhi Fu Sinian” [Yang Chengzhi to Fu Sinian], Yuan 64–3 (Taipei: Institute of History and Philology Archives, Academia Sinica, 1930). 47. Lin Dinggu, Minguo ershi niandai Zhongguo dalu tudi wenti ziliao— Dian sheng diaocha shixi riji [Documents on Land Problems in Mainland China during the 1930s: Fieldwork Diary of Surveys in Yunnan Province], Zhongguo dizheng yanjiusuo congkan [China Research Institute of Land Economics Series] (Taipei: Chengwen chuban youxian gongsi, 1977), 91893. 48. Richard E. Strassberg, “Introduction,” in Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 49. Lin, Minguo ershi niandai zhongguo dalu tudi wenti ziliao, 91891–97. Zhou li is a book on ceremonies and proper conduct from the Zhou dynasty (1046–771 b.c.e.). 50. Ibid., 91893. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 91896–97; Yang Chengzhi (a), “Yang Chengzhi Zhi Fu Sinian” [Yang Chengzhi to Fu Sinian]. 53. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 31.


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54. Lin, Minguo ershiniandai Zhongguo dalu tudi wenti ziliao. 55. For example, in many of the surveys conducted by RILE, non-Han minorities quickly became part of the sick social body once the survey narratives had established them as members of the Chinese nation through ethnological surveys. For an example, see Li Kuoqing, Minguo ershi niandai Zhongguo dalu tudi wenti ziliao—Ganzu sheng xian diaocha shixi riji [Documents on Land Problems in Mainland China during the 1930s: Fieldwork Diary in Ganzu Province and Ganzu County], Zhongguo Dizheng Yanjiusuo congkan [China Research Institute of Land Economics Series] (Taipei: Chengwen chuban youxian gongsi, 1977), 93442–43. 56. The naming issue was indeed so touchy and urgent that even before the commissioned study was completed the Nationalists had issued a decree stating that the minority population should be named according to their places of origin rather than their conventional insect- and beast-signifying names. But it was only after the institute completed its survey that the regime acquired a scientific basis to implement its political intervention. 57. Rui Yifu, “Xinan shaoshu minzu chong shou pianpang mingming gai lue,” 147. 58. The human, or ren, radical recommended by Fu was different from the double ren radical used by some officials in Guizhou mentioned earlier.Whereas Fu’s choice of the human radical implies the idea of humanity in general, the other commonly used human radical suggests the meaning of a human in motion. There was no consensus as to which character was more human than the other, however. The IHP’s proposal to replace all these animal radicals with a human radical for the sake of consistency, for example, did not sit well with the Ministry of Education, which insisted on the adoption of the human-in-motion radical as the national standard. Fu Sinian, however, reasoned that the human radical was more appropriate than the human-in-motion radical on this occasion because of its strong symbolic connotation of a standing human being. Eventually, the academic expertise of the IHP was honored. Also, in the final proposal, not all insect and beast radicals were replaced by the human radical. In some cases, no human radicals were added back after the derogatory radicals were dropped. 59. Timothy Mitchell, “Society, Economy, and the State Effect: State-Formation after the Cultural Form,” in State/Culture, ed. George Steinmetz, The Wilder House Series in Politics, History, and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).

6. china as a social laboratory 1. Mao Zedong [Tse-tung], Selected Works of Mao, 2nd ed., vol. 3 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), 13. 2. This longing for oneness and singularity in scientific method and truth, as Ian Hacking has noted, is an emotional commitment that is not unrelated to the desire for harmony, coherence, and hegemony in politics and ideology. Hack-


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ing, “The Disunities of the Sciences,” in The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power, ed. Peter Galison and David J. Stump, Writing Science (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 40–42. 3. For discussion of the idea of the “laboratory of modernity” in various contexts, see Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 12, 289, and 317; Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 15–16; Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 4. As a missionary-turned-social-scientist, Gamble did not shy away from the fact that he was inspired by his predecessors such as Arthur Smith and others, who were largely responsible for the popularization of the image of the faulty Chinese national character such as the inability to pay attention to facts. For example, although Gamble criticized previous accounts of China as outmoded and inaccurate, he dedicated the survey to “the missionaries whose work has made this study possible.” Sidney D. Gamble and John Stewart Burgess, Peking: A Social Survey (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), xiii. 5. Gordon, “The Social Survey Movement and Sociology in the United States,” Social Problems 21, no. 3 (1973): 291–93. 6. Gamble and Burgess, Peking: A Social Survey, ix. 7. Ibid., viii. 8. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession, Ideas in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, Ideas in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Mark C. Smith, Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate over Objectivity and Purpose, 1918–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). 9. This proposed comprehensive university was to be a “non-denominational, non-sectarian, essentially Christian” institution to be managed by the University of Chicago or universities of “like spirit and purpose.” William K. McKibben, “William K. Mckibben to Andrew Macleish,” Folder 1, box 1, series 600, RG 1.1 (North Tarrytown, NY: Rockefeller Foundation Archives, 1906), 4–5. See also Wallace Buttrick, “Buttrick to Morley,” Folder 1, box 1, series 600, RG 1.1 (North Tarrytown, NY: Rockefeller Foundation Archives, 1908). The foundation, however, did manage to carry out a significantly scaled-down and apolitical version of its original plan. In 1917, the foundation injected a significant investment into the existing Peking Union Medical College. As a result, by the eve of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, the college had become the best medical school in Asia. John Z. Bowers, Western Medicine in a Chinese Palace: Peking Union Medical College, 1917–1951 (Philadelphia: The Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, 1972); Mary Brown Bullock, An American Transplant: The Rockefeller Foundation and Peking Union Medical College (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Mary E. Ferguson, China Medical Board and Peking Union Medical College: A Chronicle of Fruitful Collaboration 1914–1951 (New York: China Medical Board of New York, 1970).


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10. Grant, “Suggestions in Regard to Teaching Personal Hygiene in the Schools of China,” Folder 349, box 55, series 2, RG 5 (North Tarrytown, NY: Rockefeller Foundation Archives, 1918); Victor G. Heiser and W. P. Norris, “The Control of Uncinariasis in China and Other Sanitary Problems,” IHD Folder 347, box 55, series 2, RG 5 (North Tarrytown, NY: Rockefeller Foundation Archives, 1916); John B. Grant, “John Grant to Roger Greene,” RF Folder 136, box 13, series 601, RG 1.1 (North Tarrytown, NY: Rockefeller Foundation Archives, 1929). 11. The China Foundation was founded in 1924 as a result of a donation from the New York–based Institute of Social and Religious Research. This fund was primarily from the American portion of the war indemnity imposed upon the previous Qing regime after the defeat of the anti-Western Boxer Uprising (1899–1901) by the allied forces formed by the industrial powers. Although the China Foundation was primarily interested in supporting Chinese research in the natural sciences, the institute was also a significant player on the Chinese social survey scene. Yung-chen Chiang, Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China, 1919–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 232; Yang Tsui-hua, Zhongzihui dui kexue de zanzhu [Patronage of Sciences: The China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture], Zhongyang Yanjiu Yuan Jindai Lishi Yanjiu Suo zhuankan 65 [Monograph Series No. 65] (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 1991), 86. 12. Shehui diaocha suo, Shehui diaochasuo gaikuang [Institute of Social Research: A Summary of Its Work, 1926–1932—Prepared for a Century of Progress Exposition at Chicago, 1933] (Beijing: Shehui diaocha suo, 1933). 13. Marcos Cueto, “Visions of Science and Development: The Rockefeller Foundation’s Latin American Surveys of the 1920s,” in Missionaries of Science: The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin America, ed. Marcos Cueto, Philanthropic Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 14. Edward A. Ross, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order, Citizen’s Library of Economics, Politics and Sociology (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 5. Lily Lay has also pointed out that Edward Ross’s notion of “social control,” first introduced by him in 1901, was crucial to the understanding of the Rockefeller Foundation’s science-based social intervention projects. Lily E. Kay, The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology, Monographs on the History and Philosophy of Biology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 15. In this regard, the shift from the Christan eduction that underscored the disciplining of the body and the soul to public health was the prime example of how life itself increasingly became an object of governance. This politicization of life, or what Foucault called “biopolitics,” was necessitated by the need to govern the well-being and productivity of the entire population. Likewise, the dissemination of social science included new ways of conceptualizing the social world and the production of public opinion. In short, the notion of social control articulated by Ross was never just about the disciplining of the docile body but about the manufacturing of a new kind of political and economic subject.


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16. Ross, The Origins of American Social Science; Grant, “Suggestions in Regard to Teaching Personal Hygiene in the Schools of China.” 17. Edward Alsworth Ross, The Changing Chinese: The Conflict of Oriental and Western Cultures in China (New York: The Century Co., 1911), xv–xvi, 3. See also Charles W. Hayford, “The Storm over the Peasant: Orientalism and Rhetoric in Constructing China,” in Contesting the Master Narrative: Essays in Social History, ed. Shelton Stromquist and Jeffrey Cox (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), 159–60. 18. Shehui diaocha suo, Shehui diaochasuo gaikuang, 1. 19. Rockefeller Foundation, “Mr. Gunn’s Program for China,” Folder 143, box 14, series 601, RG 1.1 (North Tarrytown, NY: Rockefeller Foundation Archives, 1934), 105. 20. Song Linfei, Shehui diaocha yanjiu fangfa [Methods of Social Survey Research] (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Chubanshe, 1990), 39. 21. Chen Da, Zhongguo laogong wenti [China’s Labor Problems] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1929). 22. He Yuezhe, Zhongguo bagong shi [A History of Strike in China] (Shanghai: Shijie shuju, 1927). 23. Hu Shi, “Renli chefu” [The Rickshaw Puller], in Hu Shi zuopin jingxuan [Selected Works of Hu Shi], ed. Qin Lixia and Zhou Gang, Xiandai wenxue mingjia zuopin jingxuan [Selected Works of Famous Writers in Modern Literature] (Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 2005). 24. Chen, Zhongguo laogong wenti, 3. 25. Ibid., 4, 465. 26. Ibid., 404–6. 27. “Gansu nongmin shenghuo zhuangkuang” [The Living Conditions of the Gansu Peoples], Kuomintang Archives, ca. 1926; Li Jinghan, Beijing jiaoqu xiangcun jiating shenghui diaocha zhaji [Notes on the Survey of the Livelihood of Rural Families in the Suburb of Beijing] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1981); Liu Baoheng, Shanghai shi renli chefu shenghuo zhuangkuang diaocha baogaoshu [A Report on the Livelihood of Rickshaw Pullers in Shanghai] (Shanghai: Shanghai shi shehuiju, 1934); Tao Menghe, Beiping shenghuo fei zhi fenxi [An Analysis of the Cost of Living in Beijing] (Beijing: Shehui diaocha suo, 1929); Yang Wei, Chengdu Shi shenghuo fei zhi yuanjiu [A Study of the Cost of Living in Chengdu] (Chengdu: Jinling daixue nong xueyuan, 1940); Yang Ximeng, Shanghai gongren shenghuo chengdu de yiguo yanjiu [A Study of the Cost of Living of Shanghai Workers] (Beijing: Shehui diaocha suo, 1930). 28. Chinese social science students who did not have the opportunity to study abroad often gained their training and experience by working with leading Chinese and American social scientists who were conducting surveys in China. For example, under the leadership of Harold Bucklin, a sociology professor at the mission-funded Shanghai College and a representative of the Brown-in-China project, students at Shanghai College conducted a rather extensive survey of Shenjia village in the suburb of Shanghai in 1924. The intention of the survey


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was to examine the transitions in village life in a rapidly developing industrial region. One key objective of this project, accordingly, was to provide social survey teaching materials to serve as a model for those who were interested in pursuing such undertakings. Harold S. Bucklin, A Social Survey of Sung-Ka-Hong China, Brown-in-China Monograph 1 (Shanghai, 1924), 77. 29. Chiang, Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China, 1919–1949, 242; Li Meige, “Zhuiji zhuming shehuixue jia shehui diaocha jia Li Jinghan” [Remembering the Famous Sociologist and Social Investigator Li Jinghan], Shehuixue renleixue Zhongguo wang [Sociology and Anthropology China], (2008), www.sachina.edu.cn/Htmldata/article/2008/12/1610.html. 30. Li Jinghan, Shidi shehui diaocha fangfa [Fieldwork Methods in Social Survey Research] (Beijing: Xingyun shudian, 1933), 4. 31. Liu Yuren, “Zhongguo shehui diaocha yundong” [The Chinese Social Survey Movement], M.A. thesis, Department of Sociology and Social Work, Yenching University, Beijing, 1936, 5; Feng Rui, Xiangcun shehui diaocha dagang [Guidelines on Rural Social Surveys] (Beijing: Xiehua shuju, 1929), 5; Yan Xinzhe, Shehui diaocha dagang [General Guidelines for Social Survey Research] (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1933), 3. 32. The work was eventually published in 1929. Li Jinghan, Beiping jiaowai zhi xiangcun jiating [An Economic and Social Survey of 164 Families near Peiping] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1929); Song, Shehui diaocha yanjiujiu fangfa, 39. 33. Chen Yingfang, “Zhongguo chengshi xiaceng yanjiu de jingwei keti” [On Research of Chinese Urban Lower Strata], Journal of Jiangsu Administration Institute, no. 15 (2004): 64–65. The observation made by Liu Yuren in his 1936 thesis is also very similar, except that Liu further analyzed this trend in different regions. Also, based on Liu’s calculation, there were 7,288 surveys conducted in this period. Liu, Zhongguo shehui diaocha yundong, 40, 47. 34. Yang, Zhongzihui dui kexue de zanzhu, 96. 35. Li Jinghan, “Shenru minjian de yixie jingyan yu ganxiang 1” [A Reflection on the Experience of Going to the People I], Duli pinglun (1935): 8. For a study of this process in terms of the rise of folklore studies, see Chang-tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Literature, 1918–1937, Harvard East Asian Monographs. (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1985). 36. Li, Shidi shehui diaocha fangfa, 1–4. 37. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 11. 38. Ibid., 3, Gamble stayed until 1928 and returned between 1931 and 1932. Sidney D. Gamble, Ting-Hsien: A North China Rural Community (New York: International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1954), xvii. 39. Charles W. Hayford, To the People: James Yen and Village China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 85–87; Sun Benwen, Xiandai Zhong-


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guo shehui wenti [Social Problems in Modern China] (Chongqing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1943), 74; Yang Yabin, Jindai Zhongguo shehuxue I [Modern Chinese Sociology, Volume 1], Shehuixue wenku [Sociology Series] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2001). 40. Wang Fan-sen, “Qingmo minchu de shehuiguan yu Fu Sinian” [Conception of Society in the Late Qing and the Early Republic and Fu Sinian], Qinghua xuebao 25, no. 4 (1995): 335–36. 41. James Yen, “James Yen to James Shotwell,” Folder 71, box 7, series 601, RG 1.1 (North Tarrytown, NY: Rockefeller Foundation Archives, 1936). 42. Yen, “Foreword,” in Ting-Hsien [Ding Xian]:A North China Rural Community, ed. Sidney D. Gamble (New York: International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1954), v. 43. The five stages of Yen’s rural reconstruction experiment are survey, analysis, experiment, performance, and promotion. Details of the first survey stage can be found in Zheng Daihua, Minguo xiangcun jianshe yundong [The Rural Reconstruction Movement in the Republican Era] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 1999), 197–212. 44. Chen Da, as discussed in chapter 5, also made the same observation in a different context. Li, “Shenru minjian de yixie jingyan yu ganxiang 1,” 8; Li Jinghan, “Shenru minjian de yixie jingyan yu ganxiang 2” [A Reflection on the Experience of Going to the People II], Duli pinglun (1935). 45. Li Jinghan, Dingxian shehui gaikuang diaocha [Dingxian: A Social Survey] (Beijing: Daxue chubanshe, 1933). Some of these findings in the book were published as articles before 1933. 46. James Yen, “Yen Xu” [Preface by James Yen], in Dingxian shehui gaikuang diaocha [Ting Hsien: A Social Survey], ed. Li Jinghan (Beijing: Daxue chubanshe, 1933), 1–5. 47. Chen, “Zhongguo chengshi xiaceng yanjiu de jingwei keti.” On Fei’s approach to rural society, see also the introduction and chapter 1 in Xiaotong Fei, From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society, trans. Gary G. Hamilton and Zheng Wang (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 48. Li, Shidi shehui diaocha fangfa, 6. 49. Ibid., 7. 50. Selskar M. Gunn, “Selskar Gunn to Max Mason,” Folder 129, box 12, series 601, RG 1.1 (North Tarrytown, NY: Rockefeller Foundation Archives, 1931). 51. Rockefeller Foundation, “Mr. Gunn’s Program for China,” 105. 52. Selskar M. Gunn, “Report on Visit to China, June 9th to July 30th, 1931,” Folder 129, box 12, series 601, RG 1.1 (North Tarrytown: Rockefeller Foundation Archives, 1931), 2. 53. Gunn was not the only one to discover this so-called “authentic China.” Many other Western writers and observers also shared this view. This world of authentic China, as John Fitzgerald suggests, was essentially coproduced by Chinese and Western writers. Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 139–40.


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54. Gunn, “Report on Visit to China, June 9th to July 30th, 1931,” 38; Selskar M. Gunn, “Selskar Gunn to Max Mason,” Folder 125, box 12, series 601, RG 1.1 (North Tarrytown, NY: Rockefeller Foundation Archives, 1934). 55. Gunn, “Report on Visit to China, June 9th to July 30th, 1931,” 17. 56. Rockefeller Foundation, “Mr. Gunn’s Program for China,” 106–7. 57. At this point, the foundation had already spent more than $37 million in China since 1913. In comparison, it spent $117 million in the United States. The country that had received the third largest investment, $14 million, was Great Britain. Outside the United States, the investment in China counted for more than a third of its total investment in the rest of the world. Ibid., 107. 58. Selskar M. Gunn, “China and the Rockefeller Foundation,” Folder 129, box 12, series 601, RG 1.1 (North Tarrytown, NY: Rockefeller Foundation Archives, 1934); Gunn, “Selskar Gunn to Max Mason.” 59. Gunn, “China and the Rockefeller Foundation,” 3; Gunn, “Report on Visit to China, June 9th to July 30th, 1931,” 17. 60. Gunn, “China and the Rockefeller Foundation,” 3. 61. “Faith in China,” LSRM Folder 837, box 80, series 3 (North Tarrytown, NY: Rockefeller Foundation Archives, 1928). 62. For public opinion as a form of propaganda, see Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Liveright, 1928); Ruth Waring Prosser, “The Social Survey as an Agency of Intelligent Democracy,” M.A. thesis, University of Chicago, 1918. 63. Li, Dingxian shehui gaikuang diaocha, 1; Li, Beiping jiaowai zhi xiangcun jiating; Feng, Xiangcun shehui diaocha dagang; Xiangcun gongzuo taolun hui, Xiangcun jianshe shiyan [The Experiment on Rural Reconstruction] (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1935). 64. Strikingly, an advertisement for this new newsletter showed up in another popular newsletter from Ding county called Minjian, or “The People” (Minjian 2, no. 9 [1935]: 19). Charles Hayford argues that James Yen, contrary to Mao Zedong, did not find any peasant in China. This, however, is untrue. Yen used the term “peasant” five times in just the first two pages of the preface of Li’s Ding county survey. Like most other Chinese intellectuals, he, too, discovered the peasant, even though he might have had a different understanding of the term. Hayford, “The Storm over the Peasant,” 162; James Yen, “Yen Xu,” 1–2. 65. Myron Cohen, “Cultural and Political Inventions in Modern China: The Case of the Chinese ‘Peasant,’ ” Daedalus 122, no. 2 (1993); Hayford, “The Storm over the Peasant”; Sulamith Heins Potter, “The Position of Peasants in Modern China’s Social Order,” Modern China 9, no. 4 (1983). 66. Li, Shidi shehui diaocha fangfa, 68. 67. Xingzheng yuan nongcun fuxing weiyuanhui, Zhejiang sheng nongcun diaocha [A Survey of Peasant Villages in Zhejiang Province] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1934). 68. Hayford, To the People, 85–87. 69. Li, “Shenru minjian de yixie jingyan yu ganxiang 1,” 9. 70. Li particularly emphasized that the social investigator had to make sac-


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rifices by enduring both physical and spiritual suffering. Ibid.; Li, Shidi shehui diaocha fangfa, 54. 71. Li, Dingxian shehui gaikuang diaocha, 329–426. 72. Mao Zedong, “Report to the Central Committee on Observations Regarding the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” in Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912–1949, ed. Stuart R. Schram (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 425. 73. Mao Zedong, “An Analysis of the Various Classes among the Chinese Peasantry and Their Attitudes toward the Revolution,” in Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912–1949, ed. Stuart R. Schram (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 306–7. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. 76. Mao Zedong, “An Example of the Chinese Tenant-Peasant’s Life,” in Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912–1949, ed. Stuart R. Schram (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994). 77. Ibid., 482. In other words, despite its crude structure, the narrative still tries to convey a sense of realism by using precise numerical data. Constituting the bulk of the presentation, then, is an exhaustive list of facts pertaining to the livelihood of the peasant household. Specifically, all numbers are put under one of two categories, expenditure or income. There are eleven items under the former group and four under the latter. The level of detail here is quite striking, and the numbers and prices of many inventoried items sometimes reach four decimal places. This detailed itemizing and counting of facts provides not only the grammar of scientific discourse but also a sense of the comprehensiveness and reality to which science alludes. 78. For how types are being used in anthropology, see Asad, “Ethnographic Representation, Statistics, and Modern Power,” Social Research 61, no. 1 (1994): 55–88; Paul Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason, ed. Sherry B. Ortner, Nicholas B. Dirks, and Geoff Eley, Princeton Studies in Culture/ Power/History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). For how exemplars were used in China, see Borge Bakken, The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control, and the Dangers of Modernity in China, Studies on Contemporary China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 79. Charlotte Furth, “Introduction: Thinking with Cases,” in Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History, ed. Charlotte Furth, Judith T. Zeitlin, and Ping-chen Hsiung (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007); Charlotte Furth, “Producing Medical Knowledge through Cases (Yi’an): History, Evidence and Action,” Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, December 16, 1999. 80. For example, the liberal social scientist Xu Shilian characterized improvised and small-scale surveys done by those who lacked professional training as “naïve” and of poor quality. Xu Shilian, “Xuxu” [Preface by Xu Shilian], in Shehui diaocha dagang [General Guidelines for Social Survey Research] (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1933).


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81. Chiang, Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China, 1919–1949, 164–66; Yang, Jindai Zhongguo shehuxue I, 365–66. 82. In 1929, at the same time he was launching his rural surveys, Chen directed a research team with more seventy members to examine the conditions of workers in a cotton mill district in the International Settlement of Shanghai. The questions of capitalist and colonial exploitation and worker resistance were the pivotal themes of this survey. The team broke down some five hundred factories and workshops into those that were owned by Chinese, Japanese, and Westerners. It examined the general living and working conditions of the industrial workforce and even took an in-depth look at pawnshops in order to highlight the poverty and suffering of the people. Union activities were another focus of the study. The survey was essentially an indictment of the Nationalist regime, as it exposed the contradictions of the National Reconstruction project, which it suggested was being carried out at the expense of the workers, and indicated that the regime was endorsing colonial and capitalist exploitation. After facing intense scrutiny within the government and from some unsympathetic colleagues, the sociology section of the institute never carried out another survey of urban and industrial conditions of such magnitude. Chen Hansheng, Zhongguo nongcun jingji yanjiu zhi farren [The Origin of Research on the Chinese Agrarian Economy] (Nanjing: Institute of Social Science, Academia Sinica, 1930). 83. Chen Hansheng, Guangdong de nongcun shengchan guanxi yu nongcun shengchanli [The Relations of Production and the Forces of Production in Guangdong] (Shanghai: Zhongshan wenhua jiaoyu guan, 1934). For background, see Yang, Jindai Zhongguo shehuxue I, 367–70. 84. Chen Hansheng, “Chen Xu” [Preface by Chen Hansheng], in Dingxian shehui gaikuang diaocha [Ting Hsien: A Social Survey], ed. Li Jinghan (Beijing: Daxue chubanshe, 1933). 85. Feng Hefa, Nongcun shehuixue dagang [Principles of Peasant Studies] (Shanghai: Liming shuju, 1934), 1. 86. In the previous chapters I demonstrated how ethnologists emphasized the need to produce social scientific knowledge for and by the Chinese and even incorporated elements of imperial scholarship from the past, even though the hybrid nature of their practices was hidden behind the banner of science. 87. For an opposing viewpoint see Omnia El Shakry’s observation that peasant studies are a product of the fear of peasant unrest. See Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). In their studies of the rise of the peasant question in China, both Charles Hayford and Myron Cohen have noted the paradox that at the same time when the European populations were depeasantized during the state-building and modernizing process, the Chinese population was being peasantized in a parallel development. However, native populations in European colonies were also frequently peasantized under the colonial gaze. Similarly, in the process of postwar decolonization, former colonial populations were often continued to be peasantized by native in-


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tellectuals and elites. After all, peasantization and depeasantization were just two sides of the same coin, for the latter process could not take place without the former. See Cohen, “Cultural and Political Inventions in Modern China”; Hayford, To the People. 88. In this latter case, although the stated intention of many these surveys was to conduct sociological and economic analyses, the surveys were also ethnographical and historiographical in nature as they simultaneously constructed a new spatial and temporal order in which the meanings of Chinese nationhood and civilization were articulated. For how the notion of authenticity helped to construct the “deep nation” as opposed to a cosmopolitan outlook, see Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 245–54. For a discussion of the third world and cosmopolitanism, see Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 89. E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959); Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). See also Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 11. 90. Siu-lun Wong, Sociology and Socialism in Contemporary China, International Library of Sociology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 42–48. 91. Hayford, To the People, 85–87; Ekbladh, “To Reconstruct the Medieval: Rural Reconstruction in Interwar China and the Rise of an American Style of Modernization, 1921–1961,” Journal of American East Asian Relations 9, no. 3 (2000). 92. Li, Beijing jiaoqu xiangcun jiating shenghui diaocha zhaji; Li Jinghan, Dingxian shehui gaikuang diaocha [Dingxian: A Social Survey] (Beijing: Zhongguo Renmin Daixue chubanshe, 1986).

epilogue 1. Deng Xiaoping, “Emancipate the Mind, Seek Truth from Facts and Unite as One in Looking to the Future,” 1978, available at http://english.peopledaily .com.cn/dengxp/vol2/text/b1260.html (accessed July 15, 2009). 2. Even before this, Li’s earlier survey of the outskirts of Beijing was already republished in 1981. See Li Jinghan, Beijing iiaoqu xiangcun jiating shenghui diaocha zhaji [Notes on the Survey of the Livelihood of Rural Families in the Suburb of Beijing] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1981); Li Jinghan, Dingxian shehui gaikuang diaocha [Dingxian: A Social Survey] (Beijing: Daxue chubanshe, 1933). 3. For a general critique of information spectacles and contemporary society, see Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (London:Verso, 1990).


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4. Gary Sigley, “Suzhi, the Body, and the Fortunes of Technoscientific Reasoning in Contemporary China,” Positions 17, no. 3 (2009). 5. For further discussion of this phenomenon as it has been observed elsewhere, see Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003); Nikolas S. Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, 2nd ed. (London: Free Association Books, 1999).


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Glossary

an 案 baojia 保甲 baqi 八旗 Beiping tebieshi 北平特別市 bi 鄙 bianding 編丁 bianjiang minzu 邊疆民族 bianmin 邊民 Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 Cai Yucong 蔡毓驄 chabuduo 差不多 Chabuduo xiansheng 差不多先生 Chen Changheng 陳長蘅 Chen Da 陳達 Chen Hansheng 陳翰笙 chiku 吃苦 chong shou pianpang 蟲獸偏旁 cunmin 村民 cunyu 村愚 dao minjian qu 到民間去 Daoyuan 道院 de xiansheng 德先生 diaocha 調查 diaocha yanjiu 調查研究 diaocha yuan 調查員

diaocha zhang 調查長 ding 丁 Ding xian 定縣 dizheng 地政 dongfang xue 東方學 dongxi 東西 dongyang 東洋 fanren 番人 Fei Xiaotung 費孝通 Feng Rui 馮銳 fengshui xue 風水學 fu 浮 Fu Sinian 傅斯年 fuhu 附戶 fumin 腹民 geren zhuyi 個人主義 Gonganju 公安局 guochi 國恥 guocui 國粹 Guoli zhongyang yanjiuyuan 國立中央研究院

guomin xing 國民性 guoxue 國學 guoyou 國有 guwu 古物

223


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Glossary

guxiang 故鄉 Han 漢 He Qigong 何其巩 Hu Shi 胡適 Huang Zunxian 黃遵憲 huangce 黃冊 Hubu 戶部 hui 會 huji fa 戶籍法 hukou 戶口 hukou diaocha 戶口調查 hutie 戶貼 huzhang 戶長 James Yen 晏阳初 jia 家 Jiang Chaozong 江朝宗 jiaohua 教化 jiapu 家譜 jiefang sixiang 解放思想 jingji 經濟 jingshi 經世 jiushi xinjiao 救世新教 kaogu 考古 kaozheng 考證 kaozheng xue 考證學 Kasake 哈薩克 kou 口 laogong 勞工 Li Guangming 黎光明 Li Ji 李濟 Li Jinghan 李景漢 Li Kuoqing 李擴清 lian 亂 Liang Qichao 梁啓超 Libu 吏部 Libu 禮部 Lifanyuan 理藩院

lijia 里甲 Lin Dinggu 林定谷 Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo 歷史語言研究所

Liu Baoheng 劉寶衡 Liu Yuren 劉育仁 longgu 龍骨 Mao Zedong 毛澤東 menpai 門牌 Miao 苗 Ming 明 minjian 民間 minqi 民氣 minzhe 民智 Minzhengbu 民政部 minzu zijiu 民族自救 mixin 迷信 mixin jiguan 迷信機關 nanding 男丁 nanyang 南洋 Nanyangxue 南洋學 Neizhengbu 內政部 nongcun 農村 nongmin 農民 nongmin hua 農民化 pingmin 平民 qi 欺 qiji 旗籍 Qing 清 qingcha 清查 qiren 旗人 qun 群 qunxue 群學 qunzhong 群眾 ren 人 ren radical (single) 亻 ren radical (double) 彳


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Glossary renzheng 仁政 renkou 人口 renkou diaocha 人口調查 Renkou ju 人口局 renkou xingzheng 人口行政 renkou xue 人口學 renleixue 人類學 riji 日記 Rui Yifu 芮逸夫 sai xiansheng 賽先生 shaoshu minzu 少數民族 shehui 社會 shehui de shishi 社會的事實 shehui diaocha 社會調查 Shehui diaocha bu 社會調查部 Shehui diaocha suo 社會調查所 shehui diaocha yundong 社會調查運動

shehui kexue 社會科學 shehui wenti 社會問題 shehui xingfu 社會幸福 Shehuiju 社會局 shehuixue 社會學 shenggeng bazi 生庚八字 shenghuo fei 生活費 shidi 史地 shidi 實地 shishi 事實 shishi qiushi 實事求是 siwanwan 四萬萬 siwanwan tongbao 四萬萬同胞 suku 訴苦 Sun Benwen 孫本文 suzhi 素質 Tao Luugong 陶履恭 Tao Menghe 陶孟和 tianxia 天下

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tongji 統計 tongpu 通譜 Tongshasnhe 同善社 toyo 東洋 toyoshi 東洋史 Wang Shida 王士達 wenti 問題 Wushanshe 悟善社 xi 蒽 xiaye 下野 xiangcun 鄉村 xiangcun jianshe 鄉村建設 xiangmin 鄉民 xiangyu 鄉愚 xianzheng 憲政 Xianzheng biancha guan 憲政編查館 Xiao Zheng 蕭錚 xin shehui 新社會 Xinzheng 新政 Xingzheng yuan 行政院 xinmin 新民 xiyang 西洋 Xiyu tuzhi 西域圖志 Xu Shilian 許仕廉 Xunjingbu 巡警部 Yang Chengzhi 楊成志 yangguizi 洋鬼子 yanjiu 研究 yigu 疑古 yi mu liao ran 一目了然 yipan sansha 一盤散沙 youxue 遊學 Yuan Shikai 袁世凱 yuanli 原理 yudie 玉牒 yulince 魚鱗冊 yumin 愚民


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Glossary

zao shehui 造社會 zhangcheng 章程 Zhao Erxun 趙爾巽 Zhao Yuanren 趙元任 zhenghu 正戶 zhengli guogu 整理國故 zhengming 正名 zhenzheng de minjian 真正的民間 zhi 忮

Zhigong tu 職貢圖 zhina xue 支那學 ziqiang yundong 自強運動 Zhongguo xue 中國學 Zhonghua minzu 中華民族 Zhouli 周禮 zhuangding 壯丁 Zou Rong 鄒容 Zuo Shaozuo 左紹佐


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Academia Sinica, 92, 100, 134, 153, 167, 168. See also Institute of History and Philology; Institute of Social Science academic disciplines: Western, 96, 99 American exceptionalism, 27, 147 American Progressive era, 28, 147 American Sociological Society, 148 An Analysis of the Various Classes among the Chinese Peasantry and Their Attitudes toward the Revolution, 165 Anderson, Benedict, 48, 121, 125 Anhui province, 74–76, 149 anthropology, 108, 139, 164; cultural, 135; physical, 135, 136 anticensus riots: 77–90 anti-imperialism, 101, 158, 173; movements, 82 anti-Manchu sentiment, 33, 82, 83 antisuperstition campaigns, 119, 128, 132. See also superstition antiques, 93 Anyang county, 91, 93; archaeological survey, 93, 103, 201n1 archaeology, 43, 92, 93, 95, 98, 100, 136 archives: of the Ming and Qing imperial courts, 106 artifacts, 3, 92–93, 101, 104, 106, 136 Asad, Talal, 21, 26

Asiatic logic, 99 astrology, 78 autonomy: of banner populations, 51, 54, 70; of families, 86; individual, 86. See also Mongolia; Xinjiang banner population (qiren), 33, 51, 63; census, 54–57, 191n22, 191n29; enumeration of, 69–70, 85, 88 Baoding county, 167 baojia system, 51, 58, 60, 61, 64, 67– 68, 69, 81, 88, 122, 196n80; as a method of surveillance, 51, 58, 60 barbarians, characterization of minorities as, 105, 107–8, 138 Barlow, Tani, 12 Beijing: anticensus riot, 77; municipal investigation of superstitious activities, 129–30; Nationalist capture of, 100; surveys of, 63, 69, 122, 128, 129, 130, 145, 149, 155. See also Li Jinghan, rickshaw pullers. See Gamble, Sidney Beijing Poverty Relief Society, 131 Benjamin, Walter, 125, 126 Berlin University, 167 biopolitics and biopower, 25, 70, 118, 213n15 blogs, 171 Board of Personnel, 63 Board of Revenue (Hubu), 8, 63

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Board of Rites (Libu), 63 Bolshevik Revolution, 164 bound feet, 33, 127 Boxer Indemnity, 146 Boxer Uprising, 62, 81–83 British American Tobacco Company, 167 Buddhism, 128 Bureau for Constitutional Preparation (Xianzheng biancha guan), 63, 72 Burgess, John, 144 Cai Yuanpei, 44, 100, 167 Cai Yucong, 46–47 Call to Arms, 38 capitalism, industrial, 3, 13, 25, 27, 28, 43, 83, 89, 91, 126, 135, 147, 167 Caruth, Cathy, 40–41 cases, 22 Catholicism, 128 Central Asia, 102 Central Political Institute, 109 census, general, 3, 22, 61; of 1928, 18, 117, 119, 121, 124; of 1909–1911, 51–52, 64–74, 80, 120, 128, 162; adult males, 57; anxiety and resistance related to, 69, 76; banner groups, 54–57; Beijing, of, 122; canvassing methods, 84; citizen formation, and, 72; decentralization of, 69; enumerative imaginary, 32–34; family (jia) as unit of analysis, 65; foreigners’ attempts at producing, 32; formation of Qing empire through the census, 89; fraud, 56–57; individual as unit of measure (kou), 66, 71; investigative supervisor (diaocha zhang), 69; investigator (diaocha yuan), 70; Kazakhs, 88; Ming, 52, 57–59; nanding (able-bodied males) as a unit of the, 66; nukou (female dependents) as a unit of the, 66; primary household (zhenghu), 65, 195n60; records, 55; subordinate household (fuhu), 65, 195n60; transparency, 69; use in support of the National Reconstruction, 117

census of 1909: direct enumeration, 69–70; enumeration of frontier populations, 87–90; measure of individuals over household units, 72–74, 85–86; redefining boundaries, 70–71; reliance on baojia system, 60–62 census of 1928: China as nation-state, 120; creation of an imagined community, 117, 119; economic motivation, 120; ethnic assimilation policy, 139–41; frontier regions, 119; lack of precision, 117, 123–24; political motivations, 120; purpose, 117; synchronous canvassing, 121–23. See also bound feet; Chen Da; Institute of History and Philology; Miao ethnicity; Nationalists; pigtailed hairstyles; population management; population studies; secularism; Social Bureau; state-effect; superstition; time cha bu duo, 36–38, 156 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 79, 154 Changxing, 78 Chen, Changheng, 44, 187n68 Chen Da, 122–23, 149, 150, 151; and social happiness, 150 Chen Hansheng, 167–68 Chen, Huayin, 38 Chengdu, 104, 151 Chiang Kai-shek, 109, 153 Chiang, Yung-Chen, 5 children, 58, 61, 66, 71, 74, 127, 172 China: labour problems, 149; political agitation, 149; southwest, 52. See also laboratory China Foundation, 146–47, 213n11; Social Research Department of the, 146 China problem, 27, 32 China Studies, 99 Chinese national character, 29, 30–32, 36, 38–40, 152, 156 Christianity, 30, 144, 146; theology, 23 citizens: formation of, 4, 72–90; qualified, 36


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Index civil examination system, 82 civil society, 10 Civil War, in China, 110, 124, 134 civilization: Chinese, 96, 103; hierarchy, 119, 127, 134, 138–39; and universality, 89, 160 civilizing discourse, 97, 139; and social scientists, 154 Cohn, Bernard, 1 collective memory of the state, 55 Colombia University, 149 Columbus, Christopher, 109 colonial modernity, 12–14 commensurability, 25–26 Committee on Party Affairs, 129 commoners, See pingmin Communists (Chinese Communist Party/CCP), 9, 21, 68, 109, 112, 124, 132, 134, 143, 150, 164; Communist movement, 114, 164, 167; land reforms of the 1920s, 137; regime, 135 Communist International/Comintern, 164–65 conscription, 71, 77, 78, 80, 81 constitutional monarchy, 62, 63, 82, 120 constitutionalism, 9, 51, 66, 71, 72, 77, 120 Cooper, Frederick, 13 core populations, 54 cost of living, 150–51 Crow, Carl, 32, 185n38 Crusoe, Robinson, 109 culture of fact, 1, 16, 20, 23, 170 Daili county, 132 Daipu county, 78 Daoguang Emperor, 56 Daoism, 128 Daoyuan (Society of the Way), 129–30 Daston, Lorraine, 23 Davies, Henry Rodolph, 135 decentralization, 62, 82 Deng Xiaoping, 171 Dewey, John, 44 ding, as unit of census, 59–60, 68, 70

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Ding county, 155–58, 161–63, 167–68, 170, 171; Social Survey Division of, 155 Dirks, Nicholas, 5 Doolittle, Justus, 8 doorplates, household, 63, 70–72, 71fig., 78, 81, 84 dragon bones, 93 Duara, Prasenjit, 181n44, 220n88 Durkheim, Emile, 179n28 “eating bitterness” (chiku), 18, 112, 113 Eddy, Sherwood, 145 education, 47, 47fig., 48, 63, 64fig., 71, 77, 89, 93, 100, 110, 119, 120, 124, 133, 139, 147, 155–56, 161– 62, 170 Egyptian logic, 99 Eight Banners Troops, 57 El Shakry, Omnia, 219n87 Elias, Norbert, 26 Elliot, Mark, 52 Elman, Benjamin, 22, 43, 175n5 empiricism, 20, 22, 131, 145 empirical observation, 99, 105, 109, 116, 136, 150 Enlightenment, the, 79 enumeration: categories, 70, 80; direct, 68–70, 120; failure of direct, 123; individual, 121; in rural areas, 122; techniques, 86; units of, 72 epistemic violence, 7, 34–41, 187n56 ethnicity: Chinese race (zhonghua minzu), 140; ethnic minorities, 102, 103, 133–34; minority names rectified, 135–36, 140; Nationalist assimilationist practices, 140; pejorative names for ethnic minorities (shaoshu minzu), 133–37, 211n58; taxonomy of ethnic groups, 136. See also frontier minorities ethnology, 95, 135–37 eugenics, 124 evangelism, 28, 144–45, 147 evidential research (kaozheng), 3, 22, 42, 53, 68, 93, 97–98, 100, 104, 106


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Fabian, Johannes, 116, 139 facts: China’s factual deficiencies, 4, 7, 12, 21, 29, 34–120, 144; as conceptual medium, 5–6, 16, 20–24, 41, 44, 47, 115, 174; in contemporary life, 172; “culture of facts,” 1, 16, 20, 170; defining the social body, 95; as divine manifestations, 23; establishing geopolitical order, 25, 127, 145, 174; “the fact” (shishi), 10, 20, 22; governing with, 1, 85, 95; history of, 23; laboratory processes and, 16; making of national citizens, 4; minority ethnicity and, 103, 113, 137; modernity and, 23, 131; nationalization and, 91–103, 108; New Policies and, 15; numerical, 23; “peasants” and, 123, 157, 161–68; produced by surveys, 2; producing analytic categories, 48, 131; propaganda and, 160; sentiment and, 7– 8; as source of truth, 5; truth and, 43, 143, 169, 174; universalism of, 145. See also citizen formation; laboratory facticity, 6, 18, 21, 24, 103, 116, 173; as autobiography, 116 Farr, William, 25–27 Fei Xiaotong, 157 Feng Hefa, 167, 168 Feng Rui, 152 field researchers, 104–5, 107–9, 110, 111, 112, 139; involvement in local affairs, 109; moral credibility, 113; notebooks of 110, 111, 113; outside of urban areas, 112; training, 110; suffering 104, 110–13 163 Fitzgerald, John, 15 folklore studies, 108, 165 folksongs, 98, 135, 136 footbinding, 139 Foster, John Watson, 32 Foucault, Michel, 4, 25, 71, 113, 141. See also technologies of the self, 113, 183n14, 183n17 Four Modernizations, 171 400 Million (film, dir. Joris Ivers), 32

four hundred million compatriots slogan (siwanwan tong bao), 33–34 Four Hundred Million Customers slogan, 32–34, 36, 186n46; gendered interpretations of the slogan, 33 France, 107, 155 frontier nationalities (bianjiang minzu), 85, 88, 134. See also ethnic minorities Fu Sinian, 9, 106, 107, 115, 139, 155; anti-imperialism, 101; critique of National Studies, 99–103 Furth, Charlotte, 22 Gamble, Sydney, 144–55, 212n4 Gansu province, 111, 167 gazetteers, 21, 52, 56, 105, 136, 157, 163 genealogies, 51, 55–56; jade registers (yudie), 51; yellow registers (huangce), 57–58, 192n31 geomancy, 92 Goodman, Bryna, 11 governance, 16, 23, 51, 58, 85, 124; colonial, 27, 28, 143, 148; facticity and, 6, 24; imperial under the Qing, 58, 59, 61, 120; indirect rule of frontier populations, 87; liberal, 150; Ming, 58; modern, 4, 6, 39, 72, 73; sentiment and, 8; social facts and, 115; statistical reasoning and, 5, 23; supernatural elements and, 84; surveys and, 52, 143; technologies of 2, 147; transition to direct rule, 87 Graunt, John, 23 Green Standard Army, 57 Gu Jiegang, 98 Guangdong province, 53, 69, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 101, 102 Guangxi province, 77, 81, 135 Guizhou province, 53, 67, 138 Gunn, Selskar, 158–60 Hacking, Ian, 5, 45 Han dynasty, 134 Han ethnicity, 73, 89


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Index hardship, 104, 107–113. See also field researchers Harvard-Yenching Institute, 106 He Mingdao, 74 He Qigong, 122 Hebei, 155, 167 Hevia, James, 12, 180n36 Hobsbawm, Eric, 169 Hostetler, Laura, 189n11 Household Registration Law (huji fa), 65; households, 54, 57, 61; certificates, 57; false registration, 56; registration, 51, 53, 58, 67, 121; statistics, 68 Hu Shi, 37, 28, 96, 150, 156 Huang, Zunxian, 8 human quality, See suzhi Hunan province, 53, 164 hypercolony, 13 Igo, Sarah, 10 imperialism, American philanthropy and, 27; influence on Chinese social scientists, 151 India, 151 indigenous knowledge, 22, 44, 97, 116 indigenous scholarship, 42, 99, 114, 119, 135, 143 indigenization of social science in China, 149, 153, 154, 157, 159, 168 indirect rule, 87–90 Inner Asia, 54; tribes and clans, 50–51 International Exposition of 1933, 148 Institute for the Study of International Peasant Movements, 167 Institute of Economics, 153 Institute of History and Philology, 92; Fu Sinian and, 100, 102, 155; rectification of pejorative names, 134–37, 139; social survey research and, 94, 95, 102–7, 111, 113, 115 Institute of Social Research, 146, 148, 151, 153, 155 International Statistical Institute, 38 Islam, 128 Ivens, Joris, 32

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investigative modalities, 3. See also Bernard Cohn Jaffe, Abram, 196n73, 206n2 Japan, 32, 35, 46, 65, 66, 93, 101, 102, 103, 122, 144, 150, 153; Meiji, 62–63; war with 132–34, 136 Japanese Southern Manchurian Railway, 106 Jensen, Lionel, 11 Jesuits, 52, 53 Jiang Zhaozong, 129–30 Jiangsu province, 77, 78, 82 Jiangxi province, 77 Jing Tsu, 36 jingoism, 151 Johnson, Linda Cooke, 193n46 Journal of the Historical and Geographical Society, 97 Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 24 Kang Youwei, 8 Kangxi atlases, 52 Kangxi emperor, 52, 59–60 Kazakhs, 87–88 knowledge, hybrid, 97; production, 15, 98, 99, 143 Korea, 5, 52 Kunming, 123, 151 Kuhn, Philip, 77, 84 laboratory, China as a social, 14, 15, 18, 142–48, 158–59, 168 labor power, 126 land reform, 9, 137 Latour, Bruno, 15, 45 Lean, Eugenia, 6 Lee, Haiyan, 6 Li Guangming, 103–7, 109 Li Ji, 91, 101 Li Jinghan, 35, 112, 156; antiimperialism, 152; criticized by Fei Xiaotong, 157; director of the Institute of Social Research, 151; interviewing rickshaw pullers, 112; instructor at Peking University, 151;


258

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Li Jinghan (continued) and Lu Xun, 39–40; and “national self-salvation,” 154; and nongmin, 161–63; responding to colonial and epistemic violence, 30–40; and rural reconstruction, 154–55; and social survey research, 151; survey of Ding county, 156, 157, 168–71 Li Kuoqing, 111 Liang Qichao, 8, 36, 72, 157 Liang Shuming, 155 Lianzhou county, 69, 80, 83 lijia system, 58, 60 Lin Dinggu, 137–39 linguistics, 135, 136 Liu, Lydia, 12 Liu, Xin, 6 Liu Yuren, 152 literacy, 46fig., 64fig., 65fig., 72, 110, 157, 161 livelihood, 56–57, 61, 149, 151; and cost of living, 151 London University, 151 Lu Xun, 39–41, 157 Malaysia, 170 males as census category, 54, 57, 59, 60 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 157 Manifest Destiny, 28, 147 Manchu ethnicity, 52, 54–56, 70, 72, 89; anti-Manchu sentiment, 82–83; court during the Qing dynasty, 62, 86; rule during the Qing dynasty, 32, 42, 50 Mao Zedong, 19, 142, 164–66, 169, 175n5 maps, 22, 69 Marx, Karl, 7 Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Thought, 170 Marxist scholars, Chinese, 163, 164, 167, 169 May Fourth Movement, 2, 44, 96, 135, 149 May Thirtieth Incident, 150 Meiji Japan, 9, 34, 62, 63 Miao ethnicity, 137–38; study by Lin Dinggu, 137

Miao albums, 53 Ming dynasty, 42, 49, 59, 60, 61, 86 Ming Taizu, 57 Ministry of Civil Affairs (Minzhengbu), 62, 63, 75, 77, 85, 87, 88 Ministry of Internal Affairs (Neizhengbu), 117, 122, 124, 127, 129, 132 Ministry of Police (Xunjinbu), 62, 63 missionaries, 29, 34, 52, 83, 144, 145 Mitchell, Timothy, 5, 119, 140 modernity, 8, 11, 14, 25, 79; China as a laboratory of modernity, 15, 170 Mongol ethnicity, 50, 51, 54, 56, 86, 89 Mongolia, 69, 86, 88; autonomy, 86 Moore, Barrington, 170 “Mr. Science” (sai xiansheng), 2 “Mr. Democracy” (de xiansheng), 2 Mullaney, Thomas, 6, 135 Muslim groups, 50, 89 Muslim Rebellion, 87 nanding, 66, 80. See also males, as a census category Nanjing, 58, 100, 117, 118, 121–22, 129, 130, 151 Nankai University, 153 Nanning county, 74 nanyang. See also Southeast Asian studies nation-state: 1911 census and the, 17, 120; China’s transformation into, 51, 63, 96, 120, 135, 173; conceptions of, 15, 73, 89; enumeration techniques and the, 64, 66, 73; epistemology and the, 93, 96; governance of the nascent, 16, 79, 90, 119; industrial capitalism, 3, 43, 126; political subjectivity and the, 3, 67, 72; time and the, 126, 139–40 national essence, 96 National Identification Certificate, 124 National Reconstruction, 9, 18, 93, 100, 110, 117, 124, 127, 131, 138, 153, 158, 159, 167 National Studies/Guoxue, 94, 96–100, 114


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Index Nationalists (Guomindang, KMT), 9, 18, 21, 93, 100, 104, 117, 122, 125, 143, 144, 155, 164, 169; eradicating superstition, 132; interest in regional surveys, 134, 153; interest in urban surveys, 153; land reform, 109; Nanjing decade, 118, 130; Northern Expedition and, 95; policy of cultural assimilation, 102, 133, 135, 137, 139, 140, 209n33; rise of the GMD, 158; time standardized by the, 125; wartime capital, 134. See also superstition, time Nedostup, Rebecca, 125 Neo-Confucianism, 3, 16, 19, 42, 43, 49, 53, 68, 84, 89, 93, 97, 98, 100, 106, 113 New Citizens, 72, 152, 168 New Culture Movement, 2, 44–45, 96 New Life Movement, 9 New Policies, 9, 15, 34, 62, 64, 64fig., 65fig., 70, 72, 76, 77, 81–83 nongmin. See peasant Northern Expedition, 95, 154, 164 numeracy, 17, 41 objectivity, 104–5 Office of Frontier Affairs, 86, 87, 88 opium, 120, 139 Opium War, Second, 62 Oriental Studies, 101 Park, Robert, 4 peasant (nongmin): as a class, 166; concept imported from Soviet Union, 161; as object of investigation, 161–62, 168; studies of 162, 167, 168; rise as a class, 144; uprisings, 61 peasantization (nongmin hua), Li Jinghan’s practice of, 162 Peking University, 44, 97, 98, 100, 151, 167 People’s Republic of China, 170 peripheral populations, 54 Petty, William, 23 philology, 3, 43, 95, 99, 100–101, 107, 135, 136

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photography, 108, 136 pigtailed hairstyles, significance of, 127, 132 pingmin, 161 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 145–46 police, 69; national service, 62; new force, 82 Police Bureau, 153 Pomeranz, Kenneth, 11 Poovey, Mary, 5, 23 population, 26, 34; census and, 71, 120, 121; Chinese problem of 44, 45; colonial regimes and 115, 152; enumeration and, 119, 121; floating, 61; frontier, 76, 85–88, 119; governance and, 73, 95, 114, 119, 124; internal migration of 60; legible, 89; mobile, 60; multiethnic, 89, 103, 133, 134, 137, 138; population statistics, 3, 68; rural, 69, 76, 80, 109, 122, 152, 154, 156, 157, 161–69 Population Bureau, 124, 207n11 population management (renkou xingzheng), 124, 125fig. population quality (suzhi), 172 population studies (renkou xue), 124 Porter, Theodore, 5 positivism, 104, 105 Postone, Moishe, 126 Poverty Relief Society of Beiping, 131 Prakash, Gyan, 13, 114, 181n42 Pratt, Mary Louise, 190n14 Princeton University, 155 Principles of Peasant Studies, 168 probability discourse, 24 Protestantism, 128 public health, 29, 31, 77, 89, 100, 110, 119, 120, 121fig., 124, 146–47, 156, 159 Public Security Bureau, 122, 129, 130 public sphere, 10 Qing dynasty, 3, 6, 10, 12, 15, 21, 50, 59, 60, 61, 62, 72, 74, 76, 82, 85, 86; cartography, 53; collapse, 82, 90, 96; court, 67; ethnography and “illus-


260

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Qing dynasty (continued) trations of tributaries” (zhigong tu), 53; floating population, 61; influence of Meiji Japan, 62–63; internal migration, 61; interest in science and technology, 43; loyalty to the dynasty, 127; multiethnicity of the empire, 34, 50, 55; peasant uprisings, 61, 76; population, 54; rise of specialized academic fields, 43; social scientific mode of knowledge production, 45; territorial expansion, 52; transformation to nation-state, 63, 89; unfixed boundaries, 54. See also anti-Manchu sentiment; anticensus riots; Board of Revenue; Board of Rites; Bureau for Constitutional Preparation; genealogies; Ministry of Civil Affairs; New Policies; Self-Strengthening Movement; souls Qinghua University, 149, 154 Qianlong emperor, 52, 53, 56, 84, 189n11 Rankin, Mary, 82 recordings, audio, 106 Red Swastika Society, 130 Rehe province, 77 religion: as deviant category, 128; popular, 135 ; and social science, 145. See also superstition relocations, illegal, 56 Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan, 164 Republican period, 3, 6, 10, 18, 34, 43, 44, 68, 93, 94, 112, 113, 126, 135, 143; academic disciplines, 95–96; conceptions of society, 95; defense of the geobody, 96; “doubting antiquity” (yigu), 98; ethnologists, 135; as laboratory of modernity, 143; laboratory process, 143; Qing scholarship, 96; “rearranging and systematizing the national heritage” (zhengli guogu), 96; revolutionaries, 90; social survey research,

90; valuation of the nation-state, 96; valuation of science, 96. See also Academia Sinica; Fu Sinian; hardship; Institute of History and Philosophy; National Reconstruction; National Studies Research Institute of Land Economics: depictions of ethnic minorities, 137; training of fieldworkers, 94, 95, 103, 110–11, 113; under the jurisdiction of the Nationalist regime, 109, 137, 153 resistance: against Western influence, 114; passive, 88; political, 79 resources: economic, 86; natural, 86 revolution of 1911, 82, 96 rickshaw pullers, 112, 150–51. See also Li Jinghan Rockefeller Foundation, 121fig.; aims of the, 148, 28, 146, 147, 148, 149, 158, 159, 170; unique policy in China, 146, 159 Rogaski, Ruth, 13 Russell Sage Foundation, 146 Russo-Japanese War, 39 science, 5, 9, 13–14, 17, 19, 22, 25, 26, 30, 38, 39, 73–74, 94–107, 131, 132, 150, 151, 159; colonialism and, 114–15, 147; embracing technology, 43, 149; laboratory process, 6, 45, 142, 145; “missionaries of science,” 147; role of inscriptions in the Scientific Revolution, 45 science studies, 6–7 scientific knowledge, 142; black box of 15–16 scientific research (kexue yanjiu), 92 scholar-officials, 21, 52, 138 scholars, Neo-Confucian, 93 School of National Studies, 98 Scott, James, 73 secularism, 51, 91, 128–32 “seeking truth from facts” slogan (shishi qiushi), 3, 19, 22, 42, 49, 68, 72 self-determination, 73


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Index self-government, local, 82 Self-Strengthening Movement, 43, 62, 82, 114; railway and 82–83 semicolonialism, 11–13 sentiment, 7, 95, 107, 112–14, 116 Shanxi province, 76 shakai, 8, 178n20. See also shakaigaku shakaigaku, 8, 178n20. See also shakai Shandong province, 35, 76, 77, 155; reconstruction project, 155 Shang dynasty, 91, 93 Shanghai, 100, 150, 151 Shangnan county, 132 Shapin, Steven, 7 Shapiro Barbara, 5 Shih, Shumei, 11 shina, 103 Sichuan province, 103, 123, 134, 137 “sick man of Asia,” 38 simultaneity, 48, 118, 121, 125 Sino-Japanese War, 8, 62, 81, 110, 155 sinology, 99 Skinner, William, 193n46 Smith, Arthur, 29–32, 36, 40 Social Bureau, 119, 122, 129, 153 social Darwinism, 9, 35, 43, 47, 73, 82, 89, 97, 120 Social Division of the Central Executive Committee of the Nationalist Party, 133 social facts. See facts social history (shehui shi), 8, 10, 142 social problems (shehui wenti), 2, 15, 38, 63, 72, 139, 145, 146, 150, 156 social science (shehui kexue), 2, 3, 21, 158; American, 144–49; American influence on Chinese, 27–29; Chinese influence on American social science, 12; colonialism, 13–14, 28, 148; displacing Neo-Confucian modes of thought, 45; diverse practices of, 142; relationship to indigenous epistemology, 116, 149–70; religion, 145; spread of Christianity, 144; statistics and, 21–27 social scientists: American, 18, 149, 158; Chinese, 35, 149; Japanese, 144

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social surveys/shehui diaocha, 2, 4, 5, 10, 71, 95, 173 social survey movement (shehui diaocha yundong): in America, 145; in China, 3–4, 9, 13, 21, 43, 103, 114, 141, 142, 169, 174 Society of Enlightened Virtue, 129–31 sociology, 94, 136, 167, 170, 171 Song dynasty, 134 souls: conception of “others” in soul stealing panic, 84; local elite as soul stealers, 84; role of the state in creating soul stealing panic, 84; rumored use in construction, 74, 75, 78; selling, 74; stolen by canvassers, 74, 76, 84, 128 South Village, 75 Southeast Asian studies, 102 Soviet Union, 161, 166 “speaking bitterness” (suku), 112, 113 Spivak, Gayatri, 39 Springfield, Illinois, 145 Standard Oil, 147 state-effect, 117–19 state time, 121 statecraft, 61; benevolent rule in, 58 Statistical Society of London, 24, 25, 26, 28 statistics: as branch of knowledge, 6, 20, 21, 23, 25–27, 28, 45, 89, 136; as determinant of civilization, 28; population statistics, 39, 68, 88, 124; vital statistics, 124, 125fig., 127. See also households Stoler, Ann Laura, 5, 7 strike: Great Strike of Beijing-Hankou Railway Workers, 149; Seamen’s Strikes in Hong Kong, 149 A Study of the Chinese Peasant Society, 168 subject formation, 70, 71. See also citizens Sun, Yat-sen, 9, 33, 34, 133, 157 Sun Ji, 53 superstition: and “foolish people,” 132; and secularism, 128–33; as


262

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Index

superstition (continued) category constructed by surveys, 18, 128, 131; as Other of modernity, 14; reports on superstitious activities, 132. See also antisuperstition superstitious organizations (mixin jiguan), 129 surveillance, 51, 58, 60, 67; See also baojia surveys: of Beijing, 145, 149, 155; cadastral surveys, 58, 63, 69, 70, 71, 72, 111, 137; of Central Asia, 102; of Chengdu, 151; conducted by Western researchers, 107; direct observation, 104–5; during the Republican era, 171; ethnographic, 22; fish-scale registers (yulince), 58; frontier populations, 86; general, 6, 13, 18, 21; of Guangzhou, 151; of Kunming, 151; as laboratory processes, 6, 15; Mao’s interest in survey research, 170; of Nanjing, 151; of rural areas, 152; of Shanghai 151; surveys of households and individuals (hukou diaocha), 64; survey research (diaocha yanjiu), 170; territorial, 22, training, 110fig.; of Tianjin, 151. See also Ding county suzhi, 172–73 Taiping Rebellion, 61, 62 Taiwan, 53 Tanaka, Stefan, 103 Tao, Menghe, 9, 151 taxation, 59, 60, 77, 80; collection, 58, 59; land tax, 60; local, 81 technologies of the self, 113, 211n51. See also Foucault textbooks, 72, 112 The Geography and History of the Western Territories (Xiyu tuzhi) book, 52 The New Religion for World Salvation, 129 The Revolutionary Arm, 33

The Tales of Mr. Chabuduo, 36, 186n49 The Middle Kingdom, 20 The Principles and Methods of Social Surveys, 161 The Ritual of Zhou (Zhouli) book, 138 “the social question,” 24–25 tianxia, 34 Tibet, 52 Tibetan ethnicity, 50 time: “empty, homogenous,” 128; neutral time, 126, state time, 121; in relation to the census, 126; timekeeping, 121; time-space conception, 119 Tongguan county, 132 Tongshanshe (The Fellowship of Goodness), 129–30 toyo. See also toyoshi, 103 toyoshi. See also toyo, 103 travel writings, 21, 52, 136, 138, 166 trauma, 12, 38–41 Treaty of Versailles, 35 A Treatise on Chinese Populations, 44 uprisings: anti-census, 69, 76–79, 81, 85, 90; participation of women in 78 University of Chicago, 167 vernacular languages, 98 vital statistics. See statistics Wang Wei-hai, 60 warlords, 19, 92, 117, 130, 143, 150, 155, 164, 168 White, Luise, 80–81 Williams, Samuel Wells, 20, 26, 29 World War I, 27 World War II, 124; total war with Japan, 136 Wuguang village, 91 Wushanshe (Society of Enlightened Virtue), 129–31


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Index Xin’an county, 78 Xinjiang province, 52, 69, 86, 87; autonomy, 86 Xiao Zheng, 109 Yale University, 155 Yan Fu, 8 Yan Xinzhe, 152 Yang Chengzhi, 107, 111, 113, 137 Yang, Mayfair, 128 Yangtze region, 76, 82, 83 Yen, James, 36, 154–57, 158, 160–62 167, 170; and Ding county survey, 156, 158; and rural reconstruction, 155

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Yenching University, 106, 144, 152 Yili, 87, 88 YMCA, 155 Yongzheng, 56, 60 Yuan dynasty, 134 Yuan Shikai, 129, 162 Yunnan province, 53, 77, 81, 134, 135, 137 Zhejiang province, 77, 78, 82, 162 zhina, 103 Zou Rong, 32–33 Zouping county, 155 Zuo Shaozuo, 80, 81, 85


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