A Passion for Facts

Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900–1949

Tong Lam

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780520267862
• eBook ISBN: 9780520950351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

In this path-breaking book, Tong Lam examines the emergence of the "culture of fact" in modern China, showing how elites and intellectuals sought to transform the dynastic empire into a nation-state, thereby ensuring its survival. Lam argues that an epistemological break away from traditional modes of understanding the observable world began around the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing the Neo-Confucian school of evidentiary research and the modern departure from it, Lam shows how, through the rise of the social survey, "the fact" became a basic conceptual medium and source of truth. In focusing on China's social survey movement, A Passion for Facts analyzes how information generated by a range of research practices—census, sociological investigation, and ethnography—was mobilized by competing political factions to imagine, manage, and remake the nation.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. the rise of the fact and the reimagining of china
• 2. from divide and rule to combine and count
• 3. foolish people versus soulstealers
• 4. the nationalization of facts and the affective state
• 5. time, space, and state effect
• 6. china as a social laboratory
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index