In his study of the "social survey movement," Tong Lam has taken a seemingly prosaic topic and successfully developed it into an engaging study of the "circulation, mutual implication and convergence" (p. 11) of scientific knowledge production, colonial modernity and epistemological practices in late Qing and early Republican China. In the author's own words, "the battle of social surveys was [...] a battle over China" (p. 143). Though never as complete, representative or indeed successful as envisaged by those who designed them, censuses and surveys were crucial components of the nation-building project, both in the years before the collapse of the Qing and during the 1920s and 1930s. As the author convincingly argues, the history to be told is not merely one of the success or failure of surveys; indeed, this is perhaps the least intriguing aspect. Rather, this is a history of epistemological trauma, experienced by those who were forced to engage with foreign concepts of facticity, time and progress, and a history of the search for a scientific approach suited to a modernizing China.
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