Roundtable on Tong Lam’s New Book, A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation (UC Press, 2011)
Friday, April 5th, 2013
| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Friday, April 5, 2013 | 4:00PM - 6:00PM | Seminar Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs 1 Devonshire Place |
Description
PROGRAM:
4:00-6:00 Lecture & Discussion
6:00-7:00 Book signing & Informal reception
A Passion for Facts is an innovative study of the emergence of a “culture of fact” and its role in the making of modern China. Focusing especially on the history of the Chinese social survey movement in the first half of the twentieth century, this book analyzes how social facts generated by a diverse range of survey practices such as census, sociological investigation, and ethnography were mobilized by competing political factions to imagine, manage, and remake the nation. It also shows how the production of social facts was itself a mass mobilization that involved not just the training of credible observers but also the making of new political subjects. By placing this previously unexamined dimension of Chinese history in a global context, A Passion for Facts is also a study of the histories of science, sentiment, colonialism, nationalism, and modern governance. As well, it sheds lights on the unusual pattern of political and economic development in China’s post-revolutionary era.
Tong Lam is an Associate Professor in the Graduate Department of History at the University of Toronto and the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He is also a visual artist with ongoing photographic and documentary film projects on industrial and postindustrial ruins, as well as China’s hysterical transformation.
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