A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900–1949 by Tong Lam (review)

Recent years have seen increasing interest in using the STS lens to evaluate the nature of social knowledge and how it is produced. How can we apply the methods that STS scholars have used to understand (natural) scientific principles to broaden our understanding of social knowledge? Unsatisfied with the traditional analysis of social knowledge, some scholars are drawing attention to the less-studied dimensions of this field: daily practices of social knowledge making, evaluation, and use within or beyond the academy (e.g., Camic, Gross, and Lamont 2011). Tong Lam’s fascinating book, A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-state, 1900–1949, is a welcome contribution to this endeavor. More than that, it also complicates the theorization as well as the history of social knowledge by situating it in a global context and colonial condition.

Lam was trained as a historian of modern China, empire and nation, and knowledge production at the University of Chicago. In A Passion for Facts, through examining the reformers’ pursuit of social facts in the late Qing period, the social survey movement in the Republican Era, and their close link with the Chinese elites’ projects of modernity, Lam shows how the collection and production of social knowledge became interwoven with nation building in modern China. Because his subject matter is huge, the historical materials presented in Lam’s work are diverse, and his approach is original. Rather than devoting the whole book to one case study of a specific discipline or institution, Lam diligently analyzes a series of undertakings, such as censuses, social surveys, and archeological studies, as representative of a new style of collecting and representing social facts. To tackle the decentralized nature of these various but relevant activities, he relies on scattered census archives, survey reports, field diaries, and travelogues.

This book begins with Lam’s central argument in the introduction: Chinese people’s passion for social facts came into being rather recently (the second half of the nineteenth century), and the practices of this new epistemic culture—“investigative modalities,” a term that Lam borrows from anthropologist Bernard Cohn—were deemed by cultural elites as political technologies of the modern state. By collecting, classifying, and circulating social facts for governing purposes, the varied social surveys and the findings not only made the social world “knowable and manipulable” to administrators but also nudged individuals to “re-imagine their social and political existence and turn themselves into a new form of political subject” (2). Considering that social sciences were not well institutionalized before the 1930s, Lam includes both amateurs and professional social scientists in his analysis. He also loosely defines social surveys as “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” (2).

In chapter 1, Lam gives an overview of how facts arose and were transformed in early modern Europe and China. Western thinkers first regarded facts as divine manifestations; then they gradually naturalized facts as “epistemological units.” As political arithmetic and statistical science began to develop in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively, the ability to apply numbers and measurements to examine and manage population, disease, and the economy became inseparable from governance. Emerging Western imperialism and capitalism then carried the “civilizing mission of statistics and social science” abroad, “leaving no territory uncharted, no individual unenumerated, and no indigenous mode of knowledge unshaken” (27).

When Westerners, whose style of reasoning was based on numbers, encountered Chinese, they complained that the Chinese disregarded factual accuracy and saw this as an element of China’s “national character.” At the turn of the twentieth century, for example, language, currency, and units of measurement in China had not been standardized nationwide, nor did the majority of Chinese...