Data Management and Knowledge Production in Late Qing Institutions

Abstract

This chapter suggests another theme that is both non-technical in nature and global-historically relevant: the institutional history of collecting numbers in late Qing imperial bureaucracy, in particular by China’s first central Statistical Bureau (Tongji ju 統計局) created in 1907, and the related changes that occurred in the conceptualization of numerical data that the Chinese state had collected routinely since early times, and which during late Qing reforms were considered to be central for political decision making. Based on official communications, the historical context is provided within which the late Qing government developed a certain enthusiasm for social counting, what kind of information the reformers were particularly interested in and what purposes the produced numbers were meant to serve in the specific setting of late Qing educational and constitutional reforms. Given the long administrative tradition of collecting numbers in China, lobbying both high- and low-ranking officials to recognize the novelty of the statistical approach imported from abroad was an important task. In the second part of this chapter, a closer look is taken at how numerical data and statistical science was conceptualized more generally by the bureaucrats and by those who authored the first Chinese language theoretical manuals on social statistics. This enables an assessment of the modernization of and the difficulties in the actual production and dissemination of statistical data during the last years of the Qing dynasty.