Today's world is one marked by the signs of digital capitalism and
global capitalist expansion, and China is increasingly being integrated
into this global system of production and consumption. As a result,
China's immediate material impact is now felt almost everywhere in the
world; however, the significance and process of this integration is far
from understood. This study shows how the a priori categories of
statistical reasoning came to be re-born and re-lived in the People's
Republic - as essential conditions for the possibility of a new mode of
knowledge and governance. From the ruins of the Maoist revolution China
has risen through a mode of quantitative self-objectification.
As the author argues, an epistemological rift has separated the Maoist
years from the present age of the People's Republic, which appears on
the global stage as a mirage. This study is an ethnographic
investigation of concepts - of the conceptual forces that have produced
and been produced by - two forms of knowledge, life, and governance. As
the author shows, the world of China, contrary to the common view, is
not the Chinese world; it is a symptomatic moment of our world at the
present time.