Making National Markets Legible: Price Surveys, Indices, and Governance in Republican China

This paper examines how economic surveys—especially systematic, government-led price collection—helped render “national markets” legible to policymakers and publics in early twentieth-century China. Tracing the evolution of survey practices from the Beiyang period through the 1930s, it argues that the Republican state’s growing capacity to collect and measure prices was inseparable from wider projects of governance: defining economic space, standardizing knowledge, and legitimizing intervention in a transforming economy and society.

It begins with the Beiyang Government’s nationwide price surveys (1912–1927), which attempted—imperfectly—to assemble comparable information across provinces for the first time. Despite uneven coverage, inconsistent units, and interpretive ambiguity, these efforts marked a decisive institutional turn toward numerical reasoning and created new bureaucratic routines and expectations about what “the economy” should be knowable as. The paper then follows the regional price surveys of the 1920s and 1930s, as provincial governments and academic institutions introduced more sophisticated techniques such as price indices and graphical presentation, translating observations into trends, comparisons, and diagnosable “conditions” about the market. It concludes with one case study, Guangdong’s monetary reforms (1935–1936) under Chen Jitang and the financial price survey released in early 1936, where a close reading of the survey’s foreword reveals how political authority and economic knowledge were mutually constituted—measurement signaling administrative competence even as reform reshaped what the numbers were taken to mean. Taken together, these episodes show that price surveys did not simply record market data; they helped produce the categories, baselines, and claims through which markets could be compared, governed, and contested. In Republican China, the tools of quantification became a political terrain in their own right, linking state-building to the everyday problem of making prices—and thus economic order—intelligible.