Cet article fait le lien entre l’histoire des statistiques et les études sur la gouvernance internationale, pour examiner comment l’Organisation mondiale de la Santé ( OMS ) a, d’une part, décidé quelles statistiques devaient être collectées et, d’autre part, standardisé les statistiques ainsi collectées. À mi-chemin entre science et élaboration des politiques, l’utilisation des statistiques par l’ OMS constitue un exemple important de son idéal, à savoir l’utilisation de la science pour résoudre les problèmes de santé dans le monde. À travers le cas de la République de Chine, cet article montre comment cet idéal a été mis en œuvre au niveau local.

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Yi-Tang Lin presents the historical process by which statistics became the language of global health for local and international health organizations. Drawing on archival material from three continents, this study investigates efforts by public health schools, philanthropic foundations, and international organizations to turn numbers into an international language for public health. Lin shows how these initiatives produced an international network of public health experts who, across various socioeconomic and political contexts, opted for different strategies when it came to setting global standards and translating local realities into numbers. Focusing on China and Taiwan between 1917 and 1960, Lin examines the reception, adaptation, and appropriation of international health statistics. She presents the dynamic interplay between numbers, experts, and policy-making in international health organizations and administrations in China and Taiwan. This title is also available as Open Access.

Summary Using an approach based on the sociology of quantification, this article illustrates how actors utilised statistics when importing family planning to Taiwan and exporting their experience to international policy makers. The functions of statistics—producing knowledge and making policies—assisted the implementation of international programmes in Taiwan, where any actions leading to a population decrease were prohibited in the 1950s. The Population Council and Taiwanese officials first secured the provincial government’s tacit consent by claiming the programme to be an experiment in general population policy rather than one focused on the insertion of intra-uterine devices (IUDs). They went on to win the central government’s endorsement in 1964 by presenting IUD insertions as tools for achieving the ideal population size for economic development. Finally, experts packaged and repackaged the Taiwan programme as a success by wielding locally-collected statistics, reframing the programme to fit the conclusions of international research at the time.

This article examines China’s path to joining the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), a private international organization founded in Paris in 1920, of which China was a member from 1931–1949 and from 1994 onwards. The article charts the actors and debates behind two meaningful encounters. The first took place while the Nanjing government was raising funds for economic reconstruction, and the ICC aimed to mediate China’s fundraising efforts through private multilateral channels. The second was in the 1980s, when the People’s Republic was seeking to enter the world trade system. ICC members acted as educators and facilitators of world trade practicalities for the People’s Republic, which eventually rejoined the ICC in 1994. The article draws on Chinese, European, and American source material collected from governments, chambers of commerce, and private businessmen to make a twofold contribution. First, it adds nuance to the narrative of China’s economic internationalization by identifying an important non-governmental diplomatic channel. Second, it questions the ICC’s self-proclaimed identity as a non-political economic organization by showing how the political was indissociable from the economic when it came to China’s membership.