“Peasants Don’t Live in Glass Houses”: Agrarian Data and the Problem of Local Knowledge in Maoist China

Vortrag von Coleman R. Mahler, UC Berkeley

Dienstag, 9. Juni 2026, 12:15 – 13:45 Uhr

Seminarraum, Erbprinzenstraße 12

ANMELDUNG ERFORDERLICH (per Email: sekretariat@mail.sinologie.uni-freiburg.de)

This article examines a central challenge the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) confronted after 1949: how to extract reliable local knowledge about the countryside for purposes of national economic planning. Although Beijing recognized the necessity of possessing comprehensive agrarian statistics for its ambitious industrial policy, it lacked the bureaucratic infrastructure needed to provide them. To resolve this dilemma, Beijing turned to an unconventional solution: crowd-sourcing data, as manifested through practices like “voluntary-reporting and public discussion” (zibao gongyi). First used during the wartime 1940s, “voluntary-reporting” was a method of participatory data collection in which villagers reported and discussed information on local landholdings and grain production in public meetings. In theory, zibao obviated the need for expensive infrastructure, turned peasants into active participants in the socialist project, and provided a forum for resolving conflicts. These “democratic” techniques constituted the backbone of China’s postwar decentralized statistical regime, which heavily relied on peripheral bureaucratic agents like Party activists. However, this participatory approach also catalyzed the rise of informational maladies like “false reporting” (jiabao) by peasants and cadres. The collapse of this experiment in the late 1950s created an epistemic crisis for the CCP, and the informational anarchy that made possible the Great Leap famine.