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Book review: Arunabh Ghosh, Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China by Vikas Kumar is a Social Sciences article available to read on EtoBox.

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Countries strategically use statistics to secure foreign aid and investment, burnish their international image and wage information wars against adversaries. The dogfight over the COVID-19 statistics that has rocked the fragile US-China relations is the latest reminder of the importance of statistics in international relations. The literature has, however, paid insufficient attention to the role of statistics in international affairs. Making It Count examines scientific and state-building activities of the early Maoist China and highlights 'the interplay between technical considerations and broader shifts in domestic and international politics' (p. 7) that generated pathdependent institutional choices in the field of statistics. Drawing on archives in China, India and the United States and interviews in China, Ghosh also illuminates an interface between statistics and international relations by examining statistical exchanges among India, China and the USSR. Other questions raised in the book, which we will skip due to space constraints, relate to science in non-liberal, non-Western contexts and the assumption of universal acceptance of probabilistic thinking. The book consists of

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Author

Vikas Kumar

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Published

2021

Language

EN

Field

Social Sciences