ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The “Modern” Census and the “Universally Ridiculed”: Reassessing Chinese Responses to Qing Population Surveys, 1908–1911

• In Event: Public Health and Governance in the 19th and Early 20th Century

English Abstract

Since the 1860s, Chinese residents of treaty-port settlements had cooperated with Western-administered population censuses, contributing data to what settlers regarded as modern, scientific forms of governance that discriminated against them. From 1908 to 1911, however, people across China resisted – and sometimes murdered – census-takers of the Imperial Qing state, as they surveyed the country with Westernised census methods in preparation for representative elections during the Late-Qing Constitutional Reform. This contrast raises questions. If many Chinese people cooperated with census-making under semi-colonial authorities “counting them out”, why did others respond with violence when their own government sought to “count them in” to a new political order?

This paper challenges the longstanding view that such responses reflected Qing administrative backwardness or the ignorance of “ordinary” Chinese people. Drawing on contemporary newspapers and reformist writings, and examining global comparisons, it shows that although Qing officials designed the census as a methodical, cautious step toward democratic rule, its timing amid multiple concurrent investigations into personal wealth and lifestyle led to widespread and rational concerns. Resistance was not confined to the rural masses or frontier regions, and similar scepticisms were echoed by educated urban elites and the gentry. The paper ultimately argues that the introduction of modern census-taking was often not a neutral step towards progress, but a contested political process shaped by competing understandings of what it meant to be “counted” – whether the promised benefits of citizenship rights were understood, or whether the fears of financial and military responsibility or state intrusion were more tangible.

Author

• Qingrou Zhao