A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900–1949

A Passion for Facts

ASIA PACIFIC MODERN

Takashi Fujitani, Series Editor

1. Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, by Miriam Silverberg

2. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, by Shu-mei Shih

3. The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910–1945, by Theodore Jun Yoo

4. Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth Century, by John D. Blanco

5. Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame, by Robert Thomas Tierney

6. Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan, by Andrew D. Morris

7. Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II, by T. Fujitani

8. The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, by Gail Hershatter

9. A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900–1949, by Tong Lam

A Passion for Facts

Social Surveys and the Construction

of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900–1949

TONG LAM

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

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University of California Press, Ltd.

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© 2011 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lam, Tong.

A passion for facts : social surveys and the construction of the Chinese nation state, 1900–1949 / Tong Lam.

    p.   cm. — (Asia Pacific modern ; 9)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-26786-2 (cloth, alk. paper)

1. Social surveys—China—History—20th century.   2. China—Social conditions—1912–1949.   3. China—Social policy.   I. Title.

HN740.Z9S6752    2011

300.72′051—dc22                                              2011010281

Manufactured in the United States of America

20   19   18   17   16   15   14   13   12   11

10   9   8    7   6   5    4   3    2   1

In keeping with its commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.

For my parents

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

1.   THE RISE OF THE FACT AND THE REIMAGINING OF CHINA

2.   FROM DIVIDE AND RULE TO COMBINE AND COUNT

3.   FOOLISH PEOPLE VERSUS SOULSTEALERS

4.   THE NATIONALIZATION OF FACTS AND THE AFFECTIVE STATE

5.   TIME, SPACE, AND STATE EFFECT

6.   CHINA AS A SOCIAL LABORATORY

EPILOGUE

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

TABLE

1.  The implementation of selected New Policies

FIGURES

1.  His weight is thus known (ca. 1920s)

2.  Matching the medicine with the illness (1933)

3.  Literacy as the foundation of the nation (1927)

4.  Mandatory education and national progress (1927)

5.  Designs of census verification form and doorplate (1909)

6.  Bicycle training for social surveyors (ca. 1930s)

7.  Surveyors on parade (ca. 1930s)

8.  Vital statistics laboratory (ca. 1930s)

Acknowledgments

A first book is the occasion for acknowledging inspiration, help, and support over the years that led, often in circuitous ways, to this moment. My sincere thanks first go to the members of my original dissertation committee at the University of Chicago: Prasenjit Duara, Guy Alitto, Tetsuo Najita, and Jan Goldstein. Without their critical insights, patience, and constant support, this project would have never reached its present form. I also owe a particular debt of gratitude to my former teachers, Lionel Jensen, Susan Blum, Daniel Bays, and William Tsutsui, who have faith in me and offered me invaluable encouragement and guidance in different stages of my career. I must also gratefully thank Takashi Fujitani, who took an interest in this project and offered me perceptive and motivating advice for revisions.

I first started writing this book in the University of Chicago’s Wilder House, which is only about two hundred meters from the headquarters of the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), one of the most prominent social research organizations in the United States, at a time when the nation’s public opinion was becoming increasingly vulnerable and when facts, contradicted by actual events, were being shaped by emotions. Although this book is not a direct response to this troubled moment of American and global history, recent events have heightened my sense of urgency to interrogate why the proliferation of information, numerical data, and professional knowledge do not always lead to public reason and greater understanding.

Throughout my academic training and work I have been privileged to be supported by various institutional and personal commitments to interdisciplinary and critical historical scholarship. At the University of Toronto, the Markets and Modernities Project at the Asian Institute, the Critical China Studies Working Group, and the Department of History offered me opportunities to discuss some of my ideas. I am also grateful to the support and encouragement I received from colleagues at the University of Richmond, where I taught previously. As well, I owe a special thanks to my Chicago peer group, which helped to nurture this project in its early stages.

I have also had the advantage of sharing and discussing different aspects of this project with colleagues and interlocutors in a variety of disciplines during lectures, conferences, and informal conversations in North America, Asia, and Europe. It is impossible to list all of those who provided me with useful comments, but I would especially like to extend my gratitude to Nadia Abu El-Haj, Tani Barlow, Li Chen, Mark Elliot, Joshua Fogel, James Hevia, Joan Judge, Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Li Hsiao-t’i, Meng Yue, Rebecca Nedostup, Mary Poovey, Gyan Prakash, William Sewell, Michael Tsin, and Wang Fan-sen for their helpful interventions at different stages. I also want to thank the participants in the Modern Chinese History Seminar Series and the Deviance and Social Control in Early Twentieth-Century China Workshop at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, the Genealogies of Modernity Workshop at the University of Amsterdam, the Medicine, Technology, and Society Workshop at the Institute of Modern History, and the Cultural and Intellectual History Workshop at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, as well as the Empires and Colonies Workshop and China’s Long Twentieth Century Workshop at the University of Chicago.

Prasenjit Duara, Thomas Mullaney, Kathryn Ragsdale, and two additional anonymous reviewers have read the entire book manuscript. I sincerely thank them for their perceptive and generous criticisms. I am, of course, responsible for all the remaining shortcomings.

Numerous friends and colleagues on different continents also played a significant role during the research and writing of this book, reacting to my ideas or generally bolstering my spirits over coffee, wine, and food in various contexts. They include Thomas Allen, Joshua Baker, Daniel Bender, Andreas Bendlin, Ritu Birla, Robert Blecher, Alana Boland, Monica Turk Burden, Richard Burden, Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, Linda Rui Feng, Evie Gu, Mareile Haase, Katsuya Hirano, Patrick Ho, Kajri Jain, Ken Kawashima, Sho Konishi, Fung Kwan, Thomas Lahusen, Ken Lam, Wai-pui Lam, Su-chuan Lee, Tania Li, Victor Li, Daniel Monterescu, Michelle Murphy, Olenka Pevny, Janet Poole, Richard Reitan, Scott Relyea, Ilka Saal, Andre Schmid, Jayeeta Sharma, Jesook Song, Carol Summers, Kunihiko Tanaka, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Yiching Wu, and Theodore Jun Yoo.

Special thanks are also due to senior editor Reed Malcolm for his extraordinary stewardship; to Cindy Fulton and Sharron Wood for their meticulous copyediting; and to my graduate assistant Meaghan Marian for her careful indexing.

In a book on facts, social survey research, and the production of social scientific knowledge in general, acknowledgments are certainly more than just a performance, but also a confirmation that knowledge is inseparable from and enabled by networks and institutional resources. My graduate training was supported by a University of Chicago Century Fellowship and a Macau Foundation Graduate Scholarship. My dissertation research and writing was made possible by financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Center for Chinese Studies at the National Central Library in Taiwan. In addition, research and travel grants from the University of Toronto, the University of Richmond, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the American Historical Association have allowed me to carry out additional research and substantial revisions.

I am also deeply thankful for the support and assistance this project has received from staff members of many archives and libraries on both sides of the Pacific. They include the Institute of History and Philology Archives at the Academia Sinica, the Kuomintang Archives, Academia Historica, the First and Second Historical Archives of China, the Special Collections of the Peking University Library and Nankai University Library, the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Harvard-Yenching Library, and the Library of Congress.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge my parents for their love, support, and patience. This book is dedicated to them.

Introduction

We take it for granted that the gathering of social facts is indispensable to everyday life, and even more so when it comes to governance. From United Nations yearbooks to U.S. Gallup polls, governments and institutions constantly occupy themselves with facts, so much so that some have referred to the contemporary world as a fact-based society. In recent years the Chinese government, too, has begun to deploy public opinion polls to popularize its policies and legitimize its rule. Individuals, for their part, govern themselves by religiously checking nutrition facts, stock indexes, and an infinite pool of numerical data, believing that a mastery of these numbers will lead to a good life. However, as common and universal as empirical facts appear to be in our everyday lives, this culture of fact came into being rather recently.¹ In this book, I will study one aspect of this global history by analyzing the rationale, politics, and passions behind the production of facts, especially what Chinese intellectual elites regarded as social facts (shehui de shishi), in early twentieth-century China. In particular, I will examine how and why the production of social facts was a crucial activity for constituting the new Chinese nation.

Central to this operation of gathering facts was what anthropologist Bernard Cohn called the rise of investigative modalities as political technologies of the modern state.² These investigative modalities, whether they are censuses, ethnographic studies, sociological surveys, or similar modes of knowledge production, involve not only the collection of empirical facts by trained experts but also the ordering, classification, calculation, preservation, and circulation of facts for governing purposes. In turn, the very production of such facts fundamentally transformed the nature of governance by making the complex human world appear to be knowable and manipulable in ways that were not possible before. In the same fashion, empirical facts enabled individuals and groups to reimagine their social and political existence and turn themselves into a new form of political subject.

The present study focuses particularly on what could broadly be called social surveys (shehui diaocha) and examines how these surveys were deployed to produce legible and calculable empirical facts that were associated with the representation, imagining, and governing of the Chinese nation. By social surveys I refer not only to the mostly survey-based sociological research that appeared in quantity during the 1920s and 1930s, even though they are very much part of the story. During the first half of the twentieth century, social surveys, not unlike the ideas of society (shehui), social science (shehui kexue), and social problems (shehui wenti), were still very novel to Chinese practitioners of this new mode of knowledge production. As a result, it was not unusual for amateur as well as professionally trained social scientists to cross their own disciplinary boundaries and conduct surveys related to other academic fields. In addition to surveys that were sociological in nature, practitioners of social surveys also carried out ethnological, economic, philological, historical, and even archaeological surveys that relied heavily on field research and direct observation to collect empirical evidence in order to investigate the newly conceived social world.³ Rather than imposing our contemporary understanding of the social survey onto the past, therefore, I define as social surveys those organized empirical studies that sought to make sense of the nation in a variety of contexts and to analyze the emerging social field, which involved particularly the well-being of the aggregate social body.

The social survey as a mode of knowledge production is best understood not as a narrowly defined academic endeavor or research activity but rather as a cultural and political practice. For this reason, this book approaches the rise of the social survey as part of the larger epistemological upheaval in which Chinese intellectuals increasingly used the claims of science and reason to construct new organizing principles for cultural production and political life. Culturally, this shift was inseparable from the breakdown and abandonment of the old Confucian moral universe and statecraft techniques of the turn of the twentieth century. Nowhere was this more conspicuous than in the iconoclastic New Culture Movement (ca. 1915–21) and the May Fourth Movement (1919), as Chinese intellectuals openly championed Mr. Science (sai xiansheng) and Mr. Democracy (de xiansheng) as the foundation of the new nation. In fact, it was during this time that concepts of social science and social surveys began to circulate widely in Chinese public discourse. Politically, the emergence of social surveys as new technologies of governance was related to China’s transformation from a dynastic empire to a nation-state in which the people—not tradition, classics, or Heaven— became the new source of political authority and legitimacy. As part of the transformation, a national census, along with surveys of customs and other similar programs of fact collection, was implemented in the last decade of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). The 1920s and 1930s saw the peak of a social survey movement (shehui diaocha yundong) that would have a lasting impact on Chinese culture and politics in the rest of the twentieth century and beyond.

During this entire period, late Qing and Republican practitioners of surveys frequently used the slogan seeking truth from facts (shishi qiushi)—an expression first used by Neo-Confucian scholars who practiced evidential research in the seventeenth century—to describe their endeavors.⁴ But in spite of such a continuous preoccupation with the ideas of truth and facts, the meanings of these terms had departed significantly from their previous definitions. Specifically, for early modern scholars of evidential research (kaozheng), to seek truth through facts was to use philological methods to determine which sections of the classics were verifiable and therefore authentic and true.⁵ However, when late Qing and Republican scholars and officials invoked the idea of seeking truth from facts to characterize their survey activities, they were neither interested in using philological evidence to authenticate the meanings of classical texts nor in retrieving the moral truth of the ancient sages. Instead, they focused mostly on the gathering of population statistics, sociological and ethnographic facts, economic data, cultural artifacts, archaeological evidence, and similar empirical information about the Chinese nation. Likewise, by seeking truth they were looking for the patterns and logics of social mechanisms, cultural formations, and national history that were thought to be manifestations of the universal truth. To put it bluntly, these survey practitioners were interested in collecting empirical facts to affirm a set of emerging claims about society, nation, culture, and history, not the moral principles of high antiquity. It goes without saying that this new truth that they were searching for was inseparable from the particular conception of time and space vital to the operations of the nation-state and industrial capitalism.

Throughout this book, I refer to Chinese activities involving the collection of social facts as the Chinese social survey movement, and not only because the practitioners of survey-based social science used the phrase themselves.⁶ Even if they had not used this term, the Chinese quest for facts in the first half of the twentieth century can be regarded as a movement in at least two respects. First, since the mid-nineteenth century European and American observers had complained about the inability of the Chinese to appreciate the importance of exactitude and facts, even for such simple matters as a person’s height or the size of a population, and they regarded this absence of facts as a sign of China’s weakness and backwardness. For Chinese intellectual elites, the accusation that China was a place without facts and that the Chinese people had no factual knowledge of their own society was like a stab to the national psyche. Traumatized by this perceived national humiliation, these intellectuals became determined to overcome the alleged deficiencies by producing empirical facts about China themselves. These loosely coordinated yet interconnected efforts essentially constituted an intellectual and cultural movement with a clear sense of urgency and purpose.

Second, one of the hallmarks of modern governance, as Michel Foucault noted in various contexts, is that modern power operates in a diffused manner rather than in a hierarchical and top-down fashion. Put differently, if power is to be able to function and circulate, it is only because individuals reactivate and reaffirm such power by governing themselves faithfully and uninterruptedly.⁷ In a similar fashion, Chinese social scientists explicitly argued that one of their objectives was to communicate social facts to the masses as a way to awaken, reform, and civilize them. This attempt to use social facts to convert the masses into national citizens and new political subjects capable of governing themselves was itself a form of social and political mobilization. Indeed, Chinese social scientists were hardly alone in using social surveys to produce the collective national subject. In the period between the two World Wars, American intellectual elites also repeatedly expressed their distrust of the masses and their belief that liberal democracy required the herding of public opinion through the use of survey techniques. At the time, the Chicago sociologist Robert Park referred to social surveys as a social movement to educate the masses about their social surroundings.⁸

For these reasons, the Chinese effort to survey the nation was nothing short of a movement, one that aimed at mobilizing the elites as well as the masses for the purposes of nation building and social transformation. The intensity of this movement is clearly revealed in a statistic from the period in question, which showed that there were more than nine thousand surveys carried out in China between 1927 and 1935 alone. By contrast, according to another study, there were more than three thousand surveys conducted in the United States in what historians have come to call the American social survey movement of the first few decades of the twentieth century.⁹

This book draws on recent conversations in a broad range of disciplines and subfields. The followings are five interweaving conceptual starting points and lines of inquiry that are particularly central to my analysis of the rise of social surveys in early twentieth-century China.

THE SOCIAL FACT AS A NEW SOURCE OF TRUTH

My interest in examining how the ideas and rhetoric of science and reason were deployed to conceptualize and govern the social field, and how social survey research as novel political technologies in particular contributed to the formation of the Chinese nation, is in many ways indebted to the vast body of interdisciplinary literature on similar developments that took place in other geographical contexts. Mary Poovey and Barbara Shapiro have shown how the ascendancy of the fact as an epistemological medium to make sense of the world in early modern Europe had a lasting impact on the development of science, law, news reportage, literature, historiography, and a broad range of cultural practices. Likewise, Ian Hacking and Theodore Porter have illustrated in great detail how statistical reasoning continue to reshape the modern West, from processes of governance to everyday life. Drawing upon the larger literature in critical postcolonial studies, scholars such as Timothy Mitchell, Nicholas Dirks, and Ann Laura Stoler, among others, have further investigated these issues in various colonial contexts and raised new empirical and methodological questions with influence far beyond their own fields.¹⁰ Most recently, scholars working on Japanese colonialism have also begun to examine similar developments in colonial Taiwan and colonial Korea. American historians, too, have started to work on the edges of these issues, analyzing how statistical and social surveys have fundamentally changed American culture and politics.¹¹

In spite of the insights generated by these works and their tremendous influence beyond their fields, there has been surprisingly little attention given to the parallel processes that occurred in China. Meanwhile, there have been some studies on the development of the social sciences published sporadically in the past few decades. Almost of all these works, however, have limited themselves to the history of specific academic disciplines, especially sociology and anthropology.¹² One study with a broader scope is Yung-chen Chiang’s examination of how American foundations contributed to the formation of sociological and economic research in various Chinese institutions.¹³ The institutional and intellectual processes of academic social sciences, however, represent only one aspect of the larger cultural and political developments that commenced decades earlier. Another noticeable contribution is Xin Liu’s study of the rebirth of statistics in the post-Mao era. Liu’s book, however, does not address the long and complex history of statistical reasoning and facticity in modern China.¹⁴ Most recently, Thomas Mullaney has used a science studies approach to uncover the incipient moment of the ethnic classification project in the 1950s.¹⁵ In showing how the linguistic approach to social taxonomies employed by the ethnologists from the Communist era had previously been adopted by Chinese ethnologists in the Republican period, Mullaney’s work further points to the importance of interrogating the rise of social scientific statecraft and technoscientific reasoning in the first half of the twentieth century.

In this book I will trace the emergence of survey-based information gathering for governing purposes to the early 1900s, or the last decade of the Qing dynasty, when the imperial court made a concerted effort to refashion the dynastic state into a modern nation. I argue that state transformation, social engineering, and the constitution of new subjectivity in China’s postimperial transition entailed a new conception of the fact, facticity, and admissible evidence. Instead of focusing on the ideas and writings of major social scientists or the building of social science disciplines, this book analyzes how the fact became the medium for discerning the truth about the human world, and how surveys were conceived, implemented, and received. Indeed, the surveys under consideration were conducted not only by professional social scientists; instead, more often than not they were carried out by specially trained fieldworkers, census takers, police officers, student trainees, health officials, and even bureaucrats. This book is therefore an attempt to unravel the relationships between investigative social science, facticity, and modern governance by examining a diverse range of surveys carried out by established social scientists as well as little-known fieldworkers.

THE SENTIMENTS OF SCIENCE

A close examination of the actual practice of social surveys is to follow the social science laboratory process. In doing so, this book will open the Pandora’s box of social scientific knowledge production and reveal crucial extrascientific and nonrational factors that are hidden from the stated intentions and written rules presented by leading thinkers and official guidelines.¹⁶ My second line of inquiry particularly highlights the role of sensibility and sentiment in the production of social scientific knowledge. In China studies, recent works by Haiyan Lee and Eugenia Lean show the importance of sentiment in the cultural and political life of the Republican period. But nowhere is the juxtaposition between sentiment and reason more stunning than in recent works in science studies. Research by Steven Shapin, Ann Laura Stoler, and others have shown that science and reason alone were never sufficient to produce scientific knowledge. These scholars argue that cultural sentiments such as trust, loyalty, commitment, emotion, and passion were no less important in the production of facts and truth.¹⁷

In this study I, too, will highlight at least two areas in which we can see the importance of sentiment as a major force behind the Chinese intellectual elites’ embrace of empirical facts and claims of scientific truth. The first was the desire to overcome the factual deficiency alleged by the colonial powers. Specifically, the epistemic violence inflicted by the industrial powers, which charged that China was a place without rational thought and factual knowledge, was able to shatter the old Chinese cultural and moral universe. This narrative of China’s deficiencies and failure particularly gained momentum in the mid-nineteenth century, when the industrial West needed to forge a new kind of relationship with China. As China increasingly offered economic, political, diplomatic, and military opportunities to the West, the older Euro-American cultural imaginary of China as an incomprehensible, exotic, and distant land became inadequate. What the industrial powers demanded, moreover, was not just up-to-date information, but also knowledge of the Chinese society that was compatible with their framework of analysis. They strove to create, as Marx succinctly put it, a world after its own image.¹⁸

In light of this rising desire to make China commensurable, European and American observers who failed to acquire even the most basic facts about China often turned their frustrations into criticisms of the Chinese people for their inability to be exact and to make themselves intelligible to their interlocutors. Although Chinese intellectuals did not necessary concur with the Euro-American assessment of their society and culture, they were nonetheless deeply hurt and insulted by the apparent inability of the Chinese people to describe themselves and their society in a conceptual language that was characterized as modern, civilized, and universal. Humiliated and traumatized, Chinese intellectuals began to scramble for facts in order to remap China’s territory and population.

Finally, the centrality of sentiment was revealed in the specific ways in which empirical facts were generated in the field. In particular, although scientific training, equipment, institutional infrastructure, and political support were certainly needed for this new mode of knowledge production, they alone were never sufficient. During their training and fieldwork, surveyors were repeatedly told about the importance of being able to endure physical and emotional suffering as a precondition for the successful production of social scientific knowledge. Trainees were even required to document their hardships and commitments during their fieldwork as a way to establish their credibility as capable collectors of facts and witnesses to the truth of the nation. By emphasizing the importance of emotion and sentiment in the production of facts and in modern governance, this book joins similar studies in questioning the myth that modernity is purely rational and that the triumph of science and reason is a self-evident, natural, and unproblematic process, a myth that Chinese cultural and political elites have shared since the beginning of twentieth century even though their own practices have constantly suggested otherwise.

THE SOCIAL QUESTION VERSUS SOCIAL HISTORY

Another important starting point of this study is the inherent connection between the emergence of society (shehui) as a site of political discourse and the rise of social surveys. After all, the idea of a social survey presupposes the existence of an aggregate social world with empirical contents that are observable and understandable. In 1872, when the American missionary Justus Doolittle translated the word society into Chinese in a vocabulary book, he equated it to the Chinese character hui, meaning gathering, assemblage, or association.¹⁹ A decade later Huang Zunxian, the Qing’s first envoy to Japan, was among the first who took notice of the Japanese expression shakai and introduced this semantic compound into Chinese as shehui. Interestingly, he designated shehui along with Buddhism and Shintoism as Japanese rituals and customs.²⁰ Huang, in other words, was apparently unaware of the sociological implications of this compound, even though shakai and shakaigaku had already become the standard translations of the English words society and sociology in the 1870s.²¹

It was only in the final decade of the century that the social scientific connotations of the term society found their way into China. Among the most substantial intellectual engagements with this concept was that of Qing scholar Yan Fu (1854–1921), who, as a naval official, witnessed the defeat of the Qing navy in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95). Shortly after the war, Yan Fu began to introduce Western treatises into China.²² Yet, in his translations of and commentaries on these texts, he mostly used qun and qunxue, which literally mean grouping and the science of group strength, to translate society and sociology.²³ Following Yan Fu, other leading thinkers of the late Qing such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao all echoed this social Darwinist understanding of society and sociology in terms of grouping and the science of group strength in their discussions of communal coherence and national strength.²⁴ However, as more officials and students studied in Japan as part of the initiatives of the New Policies, shehui gradually replaced qun as the standard translation of society by the end of the 1900s. This shift was hardly just a stylistic matter since the neologism shehui allowed Chinese intellectuals and reformers to tap into the discursive framework that involved other novel concepts that had already become prevalent in Meiji Japan such as science, nationhood, popular sovereignty, and constitutionalism. More importantly, it triggered a debate on the Chinese social question (shehui wenti), namely, how to make sense of China using this novel concept, and how to improve the Chinese social world.

Notwithstanding this shift of terminology, the earlier interpretation of society as an organic grouping persisted. In the first decade of the 1900s, many Chinese writers contended in books as well as in emerging print media such as newspapers and journals that China did not have a real society, and they lamented that this was a national shame. They lashed out against the Chinese people, referring to them as unenlightened and parochial foolish people (yumin) who were neither patriotic nor capable of participating in politics. Such disquiet about the absence of a functioning society was perhaps best captured by the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen’s characterization of China as a heap of loose sand (yipan sansha) made up of four hundred million individuals. Nation building, for Sun, was to glue the incomplete and fragmentary social world into a cohesive national social body (minzu tuanti) as solid as a rock.²⁵ When the new republic Sun and his associates helped to establish in 1912 disintegrated, the need to create enlightened citizens for a new society became even more pressing.

During the height of the iconoclastic cultural movement of the 1910s and early 1920s, leading social scientists such as Fu Sinian and Tao Menghe echoed the same sentiment about the need to create an organic society made of real political citizens.²⁶ Indeed, the numerous social engineering projects and political campaigns of twentieth-century China, such as national reconstruction, the New Life Movement, rural reconstruction, and land reform, to name just a few, could all be seen as attempt by the Nationalists, the liberals, and the Communists, respectively, to create their corresponding ideal society or new society (xin shehui). In this respect, the Chinese social survey movement operated on two fronts. On the one hand, the idea of social science and social survey research presumed an external social reality with internal mechanisms waiting to be discovered and dissected. On the other hand, Chinese social thinkers themselves also vehemently argued that China did not have a real organic and functioning society and that their goal was to create one.²⁷ These two arguments, however paradoxical they seem, were not really contradictory, as the social scientific diagnosis of the Chinese social world was ultimately aimed at the curing of the sick social body, making it strong and healthy. In a sense, for Chinese cultural and political elites, the gap between the existing social world described by social surveys and the desired social order prescribed by them was the impetus for their action.²⁸ In many ways, in fact, this gap precisely produced the condition and justification for the emergence of the modernizing state of twentieth-century China.

Despite the fact that a great deal has been written on the emergence of the population as an aggregate social body in the new politics of the nation-state, as well as the rise of the social field as an object of knowledge in the critical historiography of Europe and European colonialism, these issues have remained largely unexplored in Chinese historical scholarship.²⁹ In fact, historians writing about