Today's world is one marked by the signs of digital capitalism and global capitalist expansion, and China is increasingly being integrated into this global system of production and consumption. As a result, China's immediate material impact is now felt almost everywhere in the world; however, the significance and process of this integration is far from understood. This study shows how the a priori categories of statistical reasoning came to be re-born and re-lived in the People's Republic - as essential conditions for the possibility of a new mode of knowledge and governance. From the ruins of the Maoist revolution China has risen through a mode of quantitative self-objectification.

As the author argues, an epistemological rift has separated the Maoist years from the present age of the People's Republic, which appears on the global stage as a mirage. This study is an ethnographic investigation of concepts - of the conceptual forces that have produced and been produced by - two forms of knowledge, life, and governance. As the author shows, the world of China, contrary to the common view, is not the Chinese world; it is a symptomatic moment of our world at the present time.

Auteur

Xin Liu is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley and Fellow of the Sociology Division, the E-Institutes of Shanghai Universities. He is the author of In One's Own Shadow (University of California Press, 2000) and The Otherness of Self (University of Michigan Press, 2002); and editor of New Reflections on Anthropological Studies of (greater) China (IEAS, UC Berkeley, 2004).

Contenu

Acknowledgements
Preface

Chapter 1. Making up numbers

PART I: MORAL MATHEMATICS

Chapter 2. The mentality of governance

The weight of numbers
The obesity of statistical yearbooks
The law for statistical work
Chapter 3. The facticity of social facts
A new life of facts
Socialism and statistics
Let facts speak for themselves
PART II: STATISTICS, METAPHYSICS, AND ETHICS
Chapter 4. Discipline and punish
Professor Dai and his statistical revolution
The colonization of social sciences
PART III: REASON AND REVOLUTION
Chapter 6. The taming of chance
Change and chance
Land and luck
Fortune and fate
Chapter 7. Interiorization
Stories and memories (genealogy of history I)
Temporality and subjectivity (genealogy of history II)
Class and classification (genealogy of history III)
Chapter 8. Exteriorization
Epistemology I: Anti-humanism and narcissism
Epistemology II: Objectivity and corporeality
Epistemology III: Mass and massification
Bibliography
Index