Person:

Ghosh, Arunabh

Starting as early as 1951, and with increasing urgency after 1956, Chinese and Indian statisticians traded visits as they sought to learn from each other's experiences. At the heart of these exchanges was the desire to learn more about a cutting-edge statistical method, random sampling, which, while technically complex, held great practical salience for large and diverse countries such as China and India. This paper draws upon unpublished documents, letters, institutional archives, memoirs, oral history and newspaper reports to reconstruct the sequence of these exchanges, their outcomes and the concerns of the participants. The exchanges demonstrate not only the crucial role played by Indian statisticians in the rise of random sampling, but also the amount of resistance these methods generated in places like China (and the Soviet Union). As a clear instance of South–South scientific exchange, they also compel a broadening of our understanding of early Cold War scientific networks, which should no longer be dominated by centre–periphery models that take either the USSR or the US as the centre. Finally, the exchanges hint at the varied nature of post-1949 Sino-Indian history, a subfield still dominated by geopolitics and a focus on the causes, course and legacy of the Sino-Indian War of 1962.

China-India history of the 1950s remains mired in concerns related to border demarcations and a teleological focus on the causes, course, and consequences of the war of 1962. The result is an overt emphasis on diplomatic and international history of a rather narrow form. In critiquing this narrowness, this article offers an alternate chronology accompanied by two substantive case studies. Taken together, they demonstrate that an approach that takes seriously cultural, scientific, and economic life leads to different sources and different historical arguments than an approach focused on political (and especially high political) life. Such a shift in emphasis, away from conflict and onto moments of contact, comparison, cooperation, and competition, can contribute fresh perspectives not just on the histories of China and India, but also on the histories of the Global South.

The founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 has had a significant influence not only on the history of China but also on how that history has been studied. As the mainland closed its borders and barred its archives, historians of China were left with no choice but to turn to Taiwan and Japan as the new geographical loci from which to study China’s history.