Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts

For decades, a few numbers came to define Chinese politics-until those numbers did not count what mattered and what they counted did not measure up. Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts argues that the Chinese government adopted a system of limited, quantified vision in order to survive the disasters unleashed by Mao Zedong's ideological leadership. Jeremy Wallace explains how that system worked and analyzes how the problems that accumulated in its blind spots led Xi Jinping to take drastic action. Xi's neopolitical turn, through which quantification decisions have been overtly repoliticized, is an attempt fix the problems of the prior system, as well as a hedge against an inability to do so.

Jeremy L. Wallace is an associate professor of government at Cornell University, on sabbatical leave for 2021-22 at Georgetown's Mortara Center for International Studies. He studies authoritarian politics focusing on China, cities, statistics, and climate change. He recently published work on COVID-19 in APSR and on China's relationship with the international order in International Organization. He serves as an editor at The Monkey Cage and writes the China Lab newsletter.

- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1: A Numbers Game
- Chapter 2: Quantifying Like a Regime
- Chapter 3: Seeking Truth
- Chapter 4: Aftershocks
- Chapter 5: Quantified Governance
- Chapter 6: Hiding Facts
- Chapter 7: A Neopolitical Turn
- Chapter 8: Beyond Count
- Bibliography
- Index