Social Engineering in China: Typical Samples and Big Data

Currently, reports in Western media on a Big Data-based social credit system in China abound in drawing a picture of an Orwellian dystopia of total surveillance. This is in stark contrast with official Chinese publications promoting the system’s positive effect of morality construction in society through a reward and punishment system. In this talk, I will propose a historical approach to the complex state-society relations in the global scientific and technological context of China’s past century. The “typical citizen” from Maoist China is just one possible line of critical inquiry related to the historico-political epistemology of quantification in non-democratic regimes. 
  
Andrea Bréard is professor of the history of science at the Université Paris-Sud (France). Trained as a mathematician, computer scientist (TU München) and sinologist (LMU München & Fudan University), she obtained PhDs from the TU Berlin and the Université Paris 7. She has taught in mathematics, history of science, and sinology at the technical universities of Munich and Lille, the École Polytechnique in France, and the universities of Heidelberg and Frankfurt. She has also held fellowships from the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science (Berlin) and the International Research Consortium in the Humanities (Erlangen), and is an associated member of the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” (University of Heidelberg). Her scientific work ranges from historical research on the global circulation of mathematical concepts, practices, and institutions to the investigation of numbers as a cultural technology in Chinese intellectual history. Her dissertation Re-creation of a mathematical concept in Chinese discourse (Steiner Verlag 1999) was rewarded the Prix des Jeunes Historiensof the Académie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences and the Prix de Thèse of the Fondation Sino-Française pour l'Éducation et la Culture. Her monograph Nine Chapters on Mathematical Modernity: Essays on the Global Entanglements of the Science of Numbers in Chinais currently in press with the Springer book series Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context.