MCLC: Passion for Facts review

Sat Jun 30 11:32:46 EDT 2012

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Passion for Facts review
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Source: China Beat (6/21/12): http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=4305

Book Review: A Passion for Facts
Books by Twentieth-Century China

Lam, Tong. A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the
Chinese Nation State, 1900-1949
<http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520267862>. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2011. xiii, 263 pp., $60.00 (cloth).
By Maggie Clinton

Tong Lam’s engaging new study A Passion for Facts analyzes the processes
by which modern modes of apprehending and ordering the social world were
forced upon and ultimately embraced by Chinese political and intellectual
elites during the late Qing and Republican periods. Lam focuses on the
rise of the “social survey” (shehui diaocha) as a means of knowing and
constituting a new object called “society” (shehui), as well as the
epistemological violence of imperialism that rendered the social survey a
seemingly natural way of investigating the world. By the time the
Nationalists assumed state power in 1927, Lam argues, “seeking truth from
facts” (shishi qiushi) gathered via empirical observation of social
phenomena had supplanted the methods of text-oriented evidential
scholarship prevalent during the Qing. A Passion for Facts explicates this
paradigm shift in terms of the forms of imperialism to which China was
subjected, resulting in a novel and compelling contribution to studies of
colonialism, knowledge production, and state-society relations in modern
China.

Lam pursues three primary lines of argument. Although these lines do not
always successfully intersect, each is provocative and unfolds with
illuminating detail. First, the book addresses how nineteenth-century
colonialist discourse, epitomized by the writings of Arthur Smith,
disparaged Chinese people for disregarding time and concrete particulars,
and for generally lacking facts about themselves. As China was subjected
to imperialist violence that rendered it commensurate with global
capitalism, the concomitant invalidation of indigenous forms of knowledge
collectively traumatized Chinese intellectual and political elites and
charted the winding road by which they came to embrace the social fact as
a “medium for discerning the truth about the human world” (p. 6). Second,
the book traces how the adoption of new enumerative modalities (in
particular a revamped census) by the late Qing and Republican states not
only rendered society legible to the state in new ways, but also
disciplined citizens to recognize themselves as members of a coeval
national community. By the 1930s, this generated what Lam, following
Timothy Mitchell, calls the “state effect” by which social surveys, as
well as state-affiliated surveyors, effectively conjured the state into
being as an entity apparently distinct from society. Third, as per the
word “passion” in the book’s title, Lam argues that objective facts
gathered by social surveyors inevitably contained traces of sentiment.
These extra-scientific traces, which became manifest in surveyors’
narratives of hardship and sacrifice, had to be locked away in what Bruno
Latour has called a “black box” if facts so gathered were to successfully
assume the position of authoritative truth.

The six chapters plus introduction and epilogue that comprise Lam’s study
develop these points and many others. The introduction and Chapter 1
establish the historical and theoretical stakes of the project. Chapters 2
and 3 chart transformations in Qing state methods for knowing and
tabulating Qing subjects. These chapters pivot around a fascinating
analysis of the 1909 census that attempted to collect population data
“using a singular enumerative framework,” as well as the anti-census riots
that revealed popular dissatisfaction with the invasive, homogenizing
efforts of the modernizing state (p. 63). Chapters 4 through 6 turn to the
1920s and 1930s, highlighting the ways in which the by-now widespread
practice of social survey research functioned to gather “empirical
evidence of the nation,” in particular at the hands of surveyors employed
by the Nationalist state and affiliated research institutes (p. 93). Here,
Lam elaborates on how Nationalist-sponsored surveys and censuses graphed
Chinese society as uneven and heterogeneous, blighted by “backwards” and
“immoral” populations, which in turn prepared the ground for state
expansion and biopolitical intervention. Lam also sheds light on the ways
in which researchers, many of them trained in methods of American
positivist social science, came to see the endurance of hardship and toil
as a necessary precondition for the production of truthful facts.
Particularly telling are elite characterizations of life among the
impoverished, such as researcher Li Jinghan’s exhortation to investigators
to accustom themselves to “the peasants’ smell, their disgusting food, and
their unhygienic condition” (p. 163).

The book’s insights are too numerous to summarize here, but an important
one involves Lam’s attention to the speed and enthusiasm with which
certain liberal intellectuals turned colonial derision of China’s
ostensible factual deficiencies and general “backwardness” against fellow
nationals, in particular subaltern populations. Lam presents Hu Shi’s
character “Mr. Chabuduo,” who supposedly embodied Chinese imprecision, in
this light, as well as James Yen’s frustration with Ding county peasants
who refused to yield the kind of factual information he desired. Much of
Chapter 6 discusses liberal researchers who criticized the urban bias of
the Nationalist state that provided an umbrella for their own endeavors,
and who also characterized the peasantry as ignorant and uncivilized. This
chapter is careful to note that Republican-period social scientific
practice was neither standardized nor politically univocal; investigators
worked with “different assumptions, methods, theories, and conceptual
categories,” and society itself was “far from a stable and well-defined
object” (p. 142). In this vein, Lam discusses the rural surveys of Mao
Zedong and Marxist Chen Hansheng, but the overarching point is to
underscore Republican-period struggles between “which vision of truth …
would be elevated and implemented” and which vision would be
“delegitimized and suppressed” (p. 143). Although this was certainly at
issue, Lam might have reflected more deeply on the ways in which certain
methodologies and social perspectives countered rather than facilitated
capitalistic development and hierarchical national integration, and how
the plurality of approaches to “the social” suggest fissures in the
Nationalist “state effect.”

Lastly, Lam might have pushed his conclusions about the role of affect in
the production of objective truth a bit further, in particular regarding
its gendered implications. For instance, how did the emphasis on hardship
and long hours in the field render the production of knowledge a masculine
endeavor? What did this mean for truths generated about the emergent
social category “women”? As these questions are intended to suggest,
readers will find A Passion for Factscompellingly written, thoroughly
researched, and thought-provoking.

Maggie Clinton 
<http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/hist/faculty/mclinton/node/56321>
received her PhD from New York University and is Assistant Professor of
History at Middlebury College.