FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
16-17 Jul 2025
Deadline: 1st Mar 2025

Organizers: Prof. Dr. Andrea Bréard, Gus Tsz-kit Chan, Sijia Cheng
Education has long been central to Chinese modernization, with educational statistics playing a pivotal role in policy decision making. Literacy rates, years of education, physical parameters of students, and enrollment of women and ethnic minorities were important performance metrics of the state. In China, one of the earliest instances of nationwide school statistics can be traced back to the late Qing period, when the Ministry of Education produced histograms estimating the number of politically educated citizens needed for a proposed constitutional monarchy. Although national education reports were suspended in 1916 at a central level, educational statistics were revitalized under the Guomindang government in tandem with its re-centralization of political authority. In the 2000s, as quantitative history gained popularity, data from the Republican period experienced a new “afterlife.” Scholars addressed inconsistencies and gaps by developing revised estimates that restored and enhanced the legibility of old reports and surveys (Wang, van Leeuwen and Li). Recent database projects, such as the digitization of student registration cards and yearbooks of engineering students, enabled scholars to uncover patterns in the data (Lee-Campbell Group; Pelzer et al.).
Despite these advances, the history of quantification in Chinese education remains underexplored: the mechanisms through which data produced at school sites became quantified, standardized, used and reproduced lack comprehensive analysis, not to mention their circulation and representation in bureaucratic and public discourses. Some studies addressed the cultural changes in other Chinese institutions that undergird quantification in modern China (Lam; Lin). Meanwhile, the wealth of historical material about Chinese education (Ma and Lu) and the vibrant debates on its modernization suggests that viewing schools as sites of statistical production and repositories could offer valuable insights for both the history of quantification and quantitative history.
In light of this, sin-aps (Sinology–Algorithms, Prediction, and Statistics), a group of historians of China at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, generously supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and focusing on China’s introduction of modern statistics, hosts a workshop on Quantifying Education in 20th Century China: Schools as Production Sites and Repositories of Statistics on July 16–17, 2025.
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