CfP: Quantifying Education in 20th Century China: Schools as Production Sites and Repositories of Statistics

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, is pleased to announce the call for paper for its workshop Quantifying Education in 20th Century China: Schools as Production Sites and Repositories of Statistics on July 16–17, 2025.

This workshop aims to explore schools as institutions central to the production, storage, and communication of population data. It seeks to bridge scholars using educational statistics with historians of statistics, bringing together postgraduate students and senior researchers from both social sciences and humanities. In this workshop, we define quantification as a way of knowing following a highly-structured procedure of measurement, counting, and calculation and consider schools as institutions that are primarily dedicated to the purpose of primary to higher education. Data that proliferated in the twentieth century mainly concerns:

• Economics and Social Mobility: occupations of students’ parents, proportion of students from rural regions; wages of school employees, government spending on high and vocational education.
• Education: average duration of education, hours spent on different subjects, grades and other performance metrics.
• Health and Hygiene: students’ height and weight over the years, diet and nutrition intake, attendance and conducts, frequency of sick leaves, other mental and physical attributes.

Perspectives on such quantitative data from the Chinese state and society are both considered in the workshop, including how the Chinese state apparatus collected, reorganized, and analyzed each category of data or used it for policymaking, and how the Chinese population perceived and accepted these data as knowledge.

We invite submissions of research papers on topics including, but not limited to:

• Educational and Social Mobility
• Categorization of Schools and Academies
• Student and Teacher Populations as Subjects of Data Collection
• Children Psychology, Tests, and Measurement of Intelligence
• Schools’ Data in Bureaucratic and Popular Discourses
• Research and Surveys on Overseas Chinese Students
• Schools’ Statistics as Disciplinary Instruments: Surveillance and Birth Control

With this workshop we aim to lay the foundation for publication of selected papers. The workshop is financially supported by funds from the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship (Prof. Dr. Andrea Bréard). International travel and accommodation costs for participants will be covered.

Submission Guidelines and Timeline:

• Abstract appr. 500 words
• Curriculum Vitae
• Language: English
• Submission Format: PDF
• Submission Deadline: March 1st, 2025
• Notification of Acceptance: March 31st, 2025
• Draft Paper Deadline: July 1st, 2025

Please send your submissions and any inquiries to:
Gus Chan tsz.kit.chan[at]fau.de & Cheng Sijia sijia.cheng[at]fau.de