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Paper short abstract

China's citizen scientific literacy statistics were initially modelled on international frameworks. This paper traces their de-harmonization, arguing that the indicator's growing political stakes drove its departure from international standards.

Paper long abstract

The harmonization of definitions, classifications, and methods has been a central preoccupation of international statistical governance. The scholarship examining how comparability is constructed often operates on the assumption that harmonization tends to deepen over time, moving from looser toward tighter integration. In contrast, the reverse process has not been sufficiently theorized: how and why statistical indicators might become disentangled from their international frameworks. My paper addresses this phenomenon through an analysis of China’s citizen scientific literacy (CSL) statistics, tracing their development from initial wholesale adoption of an international measurement framework in the 1990s through successive phases of localization. Specifically, I draw on official survey reports and technical appendices, scholarly debates within China, and interviews with researchers involved in CSL measurement, to reconstruct both the governance arrangements that enabled this trajectory and the concrete practices through which de-harmonization was achieved, including changes in threshold definitions, question bank composition, and calculation methods. I argue that China's de-harmonization was driven by the indicator's growing political importance: as CSL rates became official targets in national science popularization work – central to China's ambition to become a leading science superpower by 2035 – authority over measurement shifted from international expert communities to Chinese bureaucratic and scholarly institutions, and claimed international equivalence narrowed from substantive methodological alignment to rhetorical assertion. In conclusion, the Chinese case reveals an overlooked dynamic: that deep national investment in an indicator, precisely because it raises the political stakes of measurement, can actively incentivize de-harmonization rather than consolidate international coordination.