Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900–1949
ISBN: 9780520950351
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of California Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Social surveys -- China -- History -- 20th century; China -- Social conditions -- 1912–1949; China -- Social policy;

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.

Tong Lam is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto.