Advancing a Modern Statistical State: American-Educated Chinese Economics Students, American Foundations, and the Professionalization of Statistics in the Nanjing Government

The China Economic Society (Zhongguo jingji xueshe) was founded in Beijing in 1923. Students returned from study in the United States made up a majority of the new society, which became the first professional group for modern economics research in China. However, the spread of modern economics and its application in China took time: research methodologies based on surveys and statistics did not yield significant results until the 1930s. In the establishment of the discipline of social science in modern China, American-educated economics students played the roles of translators, disseminators, and practitioners of knowledge production, bringing their discipline to the forefront instead of merely being dependent on Western economic theories. Additionally, their achievements in economic surveys made economists more “visible” to the Nationalist government. Consequently, in the early 1930s, economists were recruited into government agencies as technocrats, and they developed a modern administrative system of statistical management.