By rejecting sampling in favour of exhaustive
enumeration, communist China’s dream of total information became a nightmare
“As we continue to confront biased and manipulated
data in our daily lives, the example of 1950s China reminds us of the
importance of separating outcomes that can be traced to first principles
(‘statistics is a social science’) from those that are a result of post-hoc
manipulation (‘this estimate is too low, let’s report a higher one’). In a
world increasingly divided by narrow nationalist visions, recognising that all
data are biased, but that not all biases are the same, might well be a matter of
life and death”.