Teaching Psychology in Chinese Contexts: Historical and Cultural Considerations

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Teaching Psychology in Chinese Contexts
Historical and Cultural Considerations

• Geoffrey Blowers
• University of Hong Kong

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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)

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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

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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 Höffdings Outline of Psychology 1907
  -- transl. Wang Guo Wei influenced by Wundt,
  proved useful for the science of sensory
  discriminations (mind as an analytic instrument

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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.

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Early institutional developments

• 1917 Under the urging of Peking University
  President Cai Yuenpai a student of Wundts 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.

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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.

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The 1930s contd

• 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

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Peoples 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

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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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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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 Maos 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.

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• 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.

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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.

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The Outlook

• Currently over 150 psychology departments and
  institutes run approximately 130 masters
  programs and 30 doctoral programs for approx.
  10,000 undergraduates and 2,000 masters 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

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• The Chinese Psychology Society has over 6,000
  members each of whom has to have at least a
  masters 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

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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.

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Issues contd.

• 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