A university library in Hong Kong is aiming to open up new fields of research on China by building the world's most comprehensive repository of statistical information on the country, better than anything available on the mainland.

The ambition is huge: to put details about life in China dating back to 1949 into a digital format that permits swift comparisons and reaches down to the country's smallest towns and villages.

The project will "give scholars a new horizon to look at China's evolution," says Xiao Jin, assistant director of the Universities Service Centre for China Studies.

Her description could double as a summary of the center's history. Founded in 1963, the library and research center has served as a locus for scholarship on mainland China for decades, particularly during the years when the country was closed to the West.

Since China opened up in the 1980s, the center, based at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, has been buying hard-to-find county gazettes��official yearbooks filled with figures on income, population, education, employment, and taxes.

The collection has proved to be a valuable resource to scholars, whose only other option has been to hunt through poorly organized provincial libraries on the mainland.

Glenn Shive, executive director of the Hong Kong-America Center, an educational exchange program that helps Fulbright scholars gain access to Chinese libraries, says researchers frequently get frustrated looking for original source material in mainland China, only to find what they need "sitting on the shelf right here." Now that material is being fed into a database that will allow previously impossible comparisons.

The Universities Service Centre was founded by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and its cold-war affiliate, the Education and World Affairs Foundation, a fund designed to strengthen U.S. universities' work on international relations.

The founders were concerned that American colleges lacked the information needed to teach contemporary China studies, according to the Harvard political scientist Ezra F. Vogel, in a 2004 speech to celebrate the center's 40th anniversary.

Modest Beginnings
The center's original home was a dingy villa, and its budget was small, around $200,000 a year.

"It always looked a little mucky," recalls Suzanne Pepper, an American independent scholar who writes about post-Mao-era educational reform. "It was an old house ... the hallway was lined with books and rooms were small."

About 15 visiting scholars competed for cramped offices. The center had no money for stipends: Visitors had to find other sources of financing for their research.

They spent much of their time interviewing new arrivals to Hong Kong, often refugees who swam to the territory to escape the Cultural Revolution's violent political chaos.

These interviews provided researchers with fresher, broader sources of information than had been available. Many Western scholars had been confined to gleaning news by scrutinizing the People's Daily and monitoring radio broadcasts for political innuendo.

The conversations with refugees also encouraged scholars to focus on the details of everyday life, giving their work the kind of nuance not possible to glean from official government pronouncements.

The Universities Service Centre quickly became a popular drop-in venue for journalists and diplomats eager to debate over its lunchtime seminars. It fostered a multidisciplinary atmosphere where academics were freed from the power structures of their home institutions, China scholars say, and alight with the excitement of doing fieldwork.

"The work that came out of the USC has had a very long shelf life, it has stood the test of time," says Jean Oi, director of Stanford University's China Program.

Researchers at the center tried to find out about "the basic aspects of life: how you got rations, how you got housing, how you got jobs" to "piece together" information about the country's new institutions, says Ms Oi.

Two eye-opening books by researchers who had spent time at the center came out in 1967 and 1969.

First was A. Doak Barnett's Cadres, Bureaucracy, and Political Power in Communist China. Then Mr. Vogel released Canton Under Communism, which "really brought to life in great detail what happened after the Communists came to power in the countryside ... land reform, and the beginnings of collectivization," says Ms. Oi.

Other seminal works included a raft of books on rural life, such as Chen Village by Anita Chan, Richard Madsen, and Jonathan Unger.

Ms. Oi herself arrived as a doctoral student in 1979 to study rural institutions, inspired by Martin King Whyte and William L. Parish's joint work on this topic.

"Every single serious China scholar had to go there if you were going to do any kind of fieldwork," she says.

A Shift in Importance
Mao Zedong's decision to open China to the West led to the first academic visits to the mainland, in 1971 and 1972. After his death, Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, threw open the doors.

The center faced a difficult time as scholars rushed to the mainland. It nearly failed as donors took their money elsewhere.

Ultimately, though, it was rescued by politics. The Chinese University of Hong Kong took over in 1988, with the support of the British governor of Hong Kong. Administrators reasoned that Hong Kong's academic freedoms would survive the 1997 handover to Beijing better if the region had a renowned center of China scholarship to focus international attention, Mr. Vogel said in his 2004 speech.

The center also changed course and focused on building up its library. Today it has a staff of eight and a budget of $4.5-million HK, or $578,000 U.S., from the university but depends on donations for its visiting-scholars program.

Most of the 100 or so overseas academics who visit each year come with their own financing, but the center supports up to 40 mainland-Chinese academics each year on short visits, typically one month. That project is supported by the Lee Hysan Foundation, in Hong Kong, but the money runs out next year and replacing it has become a major concern.

Today the center's staff remains busy collecting new materials, including edgy documentaries about rural life, migrants, and sex workers for distribution to Western universities.

It is also digitizing its archives, including documents from Mao's first clampdown on intellectuals, the 1957 Anti-Rightist campaign, which punished those who responded to the Communist Party's appeal for sincere criticism.

Financing remains a perennial problem. Money from the university for the database project will last until next summer, by which time Ms. Xiao expects to have finished digitizing the post-Mao years. But material on the first 30 years after the revolution still awaits financing.

One solution may be to bring together groups of scholars to dig out new stories hidden in the old county records, using the database to prove its prowess, she says. Once again, the center is adapting to the times.