Christ S (2025)
Publication Language: English
Publication Type: Journal article, Original article
Publication year: 2025
Book Volume: 6
Pages Range: 11 - 34
Journal Issue: 1
DOI: 10.25365/jeacs.2025.6.1.christ
Open Access Link: https://journals.univie.ac.at/index.php/jeacs/article/view/9369
This article seeks to explain the sharply increasing tendency to quantify Chinese society in the twentieth century. It argues that this trend is inherently connected to the passage from a hierarchically stratified society to a one that was more functionally differentiated, which also resulted in the emergence of a new concept of society. The relation between social differentiation and quantification is explored by way of comparing an eighteenth-century essay by Qian Weicheng, which presents a rather typical late imperial vision of social order, with an early twentieth-century article by Liang Qichao, which is one of the earliest texts to lament the lack of numbers and statistics regarding the Chinese population.
APA:
Christ, S. (2025). The Quantification of Chinese Society: Why Did Liang Qichao Ask for Statistics? Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies, 6(1), 11 - 34. https://doi.org/10.25365/jeacs.2025.6.1.christ
MLA:
Christ, Stefan. "The Quantification of Chinese Society: Why Did Liang Qichao Ask for Statistics?" Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies 6.1 (2025): 11 - 34.
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