Teaching Psychology in Chinese Contexts: Historical and Cultural

Considerations

Geoffrey Blowers

University of Hong Kong

China: to first decade of C.20• Defeat in the Second Opium war (1860) led a

reluctant Qing court to reconsider its enforced isolation from the outside world.

• Subsequent defeat in the first Sino-Japanese war (1895) and the success of Japan in its war with Russia (1904) persuaded it to emulate the learning of its more successful oppressors.

• ‘Self-strengthening’ was required.

• But it had to be in accord with the ti-yong principle (ti: ‘essence”; yong: “utility”)

Educational reforms • (i) Abolition of old style government

examinations

• (ii) Opening up of new teacher colleges (Normal Universities - Psychology becomes integral part of new curriculum)

• (iii) Sending large numbers overseas for training (Japan, America)

• Effect of (ii) and (iii) above triggered big increase in numbers of translated books

The first psychology texts• 1. Joseph Havens’ Mental Philosophy [1899 –

transl. YK Wen (Yan Yonjing)] dealt with (i) nature of mental science (ii) analysis and classification of mental “power”

• Seen as an aid to self cultivation (understanding the emotions in order to control them)

• 2. Harold Höffding’s Outline of Psychology [1907 -- transl. Wang Guo Wei] influenced by Wundt, proved useful for the science of sensory discriminations (mind as an analytic instrument]

Establishment of the Republic (1912)• Led to improvements in higher education due to (i)

Bai hua (vernacular language) movement and (ii) May Fourth (1919) movement

• These called for a universal education, importing of more foreign ideas, and making textbooks and teaching materials relevant to everyday life.

• In this climate a number of magazines and journals devoted to modern western knowledge including psychology and psychoanalysis, emerge.

Early institutional developments• 1917 Under the urging of Peking University

President Cai Yuenpai [a student of Wundt’s] the first psychology lab in China is opened.

• 1920 First Psychology department (at South-Eastern University in Nanking) opens.

• 1921 Formation of Chinese Psychology Society which publishes the first psychology journal, Xinli [Psyche]. In its first editorial psychology is proclaimed as “the most useful science in the world”.

The 1930s• Psychology departments open in Canton, Shanghai,

Tsinghua, Amoy and Tientsin. • 1928 the Institute of Psychology is founded within the

Chinese Academy of Sciences.

• Behaviourism and Functionalism dominate the curriculum thanks to American-educated students returning to China, in spite of their deterministic conceptions which, arguably, were a challenge to Confucian notions of mind.

• Psychoanalysis is treated more circumspectly.

The 1930s cont’d• The dominant research practice was the

psychometric variant of the group study with an emphasis on educational testing of children, and testing adults for recruitment into military and other services.

• This had led to serious enquiry into the nature of testing, and a journal and a society devoted to these ends.

• However, no clear intra disciplinary directive, nor any developed social administration policies impacting directly upon psychology emerged

People’s Republic of China (1949)• Following two periods of instability brought about

by the Sino Japanese war (1937-1945) and the Chinese civil war (1946-1949) the formation of the PRC ushers in a broad program of socialist reform.

• Western (including psychology ) ideas have to be revised to fit better into the new social and political milieu.

• Like other intellectuals psychologists have to study Marxist philosophy and practice their subject according to two principles:

Psychology in early days of the PRC

• 1. Psychological phenomena are a product or function of the brain, and

• 2. Mind is a reflection of outer reality

• Source for these principles came from Lenin's theory of reflection in his Materialism and empirio-criticism and Mao Zedong's On Contradiction and On Practice

• Soviet psychology had to be studied, and Western psychology, in its various schools had to be critically examined for its failings

• Thus, Western psychology from 1949 ceased.• Allowable textbooks were translations from

Russian.

• Psychology informed exclusively by dialectical materialism which meant that:

• Consciousness was a historical and developmental mental product. Its objects were not to be thought of as separate from the reflection process which brings them into being i.e. there should be no separation of subject and object, or mental image and objective reality.

• In the 100 Flowers movement (1957) psychologists fought for their own view, questioning much Pavlovian reductionist psychology.

• But like other outspoken intellectuals, they were censured in the Anti-rightist campaign (1958)

• Psychology was banned as “bourgeois pseudoscience”; its practitioners criticized for abstracting entities from their social contexts (thus dehumanizing their class nature)

• This line of thinking, quite unfounded, denied the possibility of there being any common or universal features of the mind that were worthwhile objects of study.

The 1960s• Following the failure of the Great Leap Forward,

(1959) these criticisms were stopped, and discussions amongst psychologists led to an integration of the viewpoints of psychology as both a natural and social science.

• However under Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” (1965) anarchic students were encouraged to overthrow the authority of intellectuals (whom Mao distrusted) leading to psychology and many other disciplines coming under attack.

• Minister of Propaganda, Yao Wenyuan, in a leading editorial attacks an article on colour and form preferences in children by Chen Li and Wang Ansheng, for much the same reasons that had motivated the criticisms during the Anti-rightist campaign:

• The experiments abstracted from the lived realities of people in actual social contexts, and were not therefore legitimate objectives of research.

• Yao's criticisms fuels the flames of a growing attack on the discipline as a whole, forcing it to be shut down by 1966, with the banning of its books and journals and the ceasing of its teaching in universities and research institutes.

Rehabilitation• 1978 In a more favorable post-Mao climate,

psychologists are called upon to contribute to the modernization program, as China, once again, becomes receptive to the West.

• In spite of the gap in continuity of education created by the closing of the University doors for ten years, the loss of intellectual development of a whole generation of actual and potential students, dramatic developments in psychology have occurred due to a change of attitude of the Chinese government.

The Outlook• Currently over 150 psychology departments and

institutes run approximately 130 master’s programs and 30 doctoral programs for approx. 10,000 undergraduates and 2,000 master’s level and 300 doctoral level graduate students.

• Dialogue with Western psychologists continues, through visits, and exchanges for study.

• Since 1980 China has been a member of the International Union of Psychological Science (IUPS) and in 2004 hosted the International Congress of Psychology which attracted over 6,000 participants from locally and overseas

• The Chinese Psychology Society has over 6,000 members each of whom has to have “at least a master’s degree in psychology or relevant research experience in psychology”

• The Government has recognized that with its booming market economy, it is encountering social problems for which psychology services are now very much needed particularly in the areas of Counselling (now a government approved job category), Human resources and Health Psychology

• Sichuan earthquake

Issues• But: the development of an appropriate theoretical

perspective for Chinese psychology has yet to emerge.

• Present day Western psychology is welcomed for its utilitarian value, yet there is little evidence that its metaphysical assumptions -- rigid determinism in radical behaviourism and psychoanalysis; individualism in personality and intellectual assessment -- are embraced in any fundamental way by the Chinese.

Issues cont’d.• Western psychology, seemingly, provides skills

training in helping society solve a myriad problems in child and adult development, health, and industry, but these skills are in the service of an authoritarian collectivist culture.

• All the more reason, therefore, for the Chinese themselves to develop a specifically Chinese framework for future study