Surveying like a State: Bottom-Up Legibility Making in Early Twentieth Century China

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Abstract

This article extends the state–society relations approach to information gathering by analyzing a bottom-up legibility-making project that is oriented toward the state but designed, organized, and implemented by social actors. Building on recent census studies that move beyond Scott’s state-centered framework by emphasizing cooperation between state and social actors in data collection, I argue that society can not only pressure the state to collect information, but also generate information that calls for state intervention. The case examined here is the Ding County Survey (1926-1937), one of the most ambitious and systematic non-state-led investigations of rural society in Republican China. What distinguishes the Ding County Survey is that it was not a conventional reformist, problem-solving survey but an amalgam of census, local gazetteer (fangzhi), and social survey, whose full potential could only be realized by the state. However, despite the surveyors’ strenuous efforts to make society legible, the findings of the Ding County Survey elicited little response from the state. I suggest that the state’s neglect of this bottom-up legibility project can be explained by its limited capacity and motivation to see society through this lens. For the Nationalist government in the early 1930s, the primary concern was consolidating political power in response to expanding Communist influence. The legibility of rural society mattered only insofar as it served this goal. As a result, comprehensive social surveys were less attractive than forms of information geared toward population control and surveillance. The paper thus highlights the limits of bottom-up legibility-making under conditions of fragmented statehood.

Author

• Yunpeng Chen, University of California-San Diego