From Empirical Observation to Social Intervention: The Marxization of Psychology in China,1949–1958

Introduction

Today, Marxism is accorded no more than a minor presence in psychology, yet it has highly distinctive theoretical and methodological insights to offer. Regarding the discipline, Marxism has stimulated scholars to radically reconsider the role of psychological studies in capitalism (Parker, 2009; Teo, 2005), the relationship between theory and practice (Murray, 1988), and the separation of value and fact (Arfken, 2017). Regarding human psychology as the subject matter, Marx saw it to be a historical and social phenomenon, providing major inspiration for scholars working on issues such as human nature (Geras, 1983; Sayers, 2013; Teo, 2001), alienation (Brook, 2009; Seeman, 1959), and ideology (Parekh, 1982; Teo, 2005). It should be clarified, though, that Marx did not develop a complete theory of human psychology (Jost & Jost, 2007; Rubinštejn, 1987). Partly because of this lacuna, interpretations of the Marxist legacy vary significantly by individual, school, and country, and what Marxist psychology should be has been swamped in persistent debates (Augoustinos, 1999; Jost & Jost, 2007; Parker, 2009). In the home country of Marx, in the wake of the Second World War, the Frankfurt School famously combined Marxism with psychoanalysis to make up for Marxism’s insufficiency on the mental matter (Fromm, 1941; Reich, 1946). From the 1960s to the 1990s, another German school, developed by Holzkamp and his associates, endeavored to reconstruct the discipline of psychology by incorporating Marxist theories (Teo, 1998, 2013). The Russian history of Marxist psychology has been bifurcated due to political interference. Stalin heavily promoted Pavlovian psychology as a Marxist science, a synthesis later considered highly controversial (González-Rey, 2015; Joravsky, 1977; Spencer, 2004). Vygotsky’s theory, which had been repressed until Stalin’s death (Spencer, 2004), is nowadays considered to have laid the foundation for the lauded Marxism-bearing activity theory (Packer, 2008; Ratner & Silva, 2017; Roth & Lee, 2007). In a broader scope, namely today’s European and American academia, Marxist psychology has found a niche in the branch of critical psychology, even though the congruence between the two is occasionally questioned (Parker, 2009).

The above brief review of the international developments of Marxist psychology poses a question: What happened in China, one of the few remaining societies labeled to be socialist? Existing literature provides scanty information concerning Marxist psychology in China. Since the founding of the socialist regime in 1949, several scholars from the West have made efforts to learn about Chinese psychology despite barriers to access (Chin & Chin, 1969; Munro, 1971a). During the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, they largely lost contact with China (Chin & Chin, 1969; Munro, 1971a) so that the only information available was based on meager materials transferred via Hong Kong (Whittaker, 1970). Their curiosity would not have been better satisfied even with greater access, because during the 10 tumultuous years, psychology research institutes were shut play and psychologists were sent to the countryside for reeducation. Western scholars reconnected with Chinese psychology in the early 1980s, when the discipline became restored and when China began to open up itself to the globe (Brown, 1981; Hsü, Ching, & Over, 1980; Over, 1980). Overall, the Chinese discipline’s calamity and isolation significantly impoverished Western accounts of it. Furthermore, the handful of available accounts failed to depart from the official narrative about Marxist psychology, which resulted from heavily ideological regulation and censorship. A second group of records stems from Chinese psychologists who lived through the socialist movement; these scholars, however, tend to limit discussions of Marxist psychology to brief rehashing of the official narrative (Ching, 1984; The Executive Committee of Chinese Psychological Society, 1983; Jing, 1994; Jing & Fu, 2001; Z. Wang, 1993; L. Zhao, 1996). Their self-restraint can be partly explained by the contemporary psychology community’s abhorrence of the political violence exercised during the Marxization of psychology (F. Peng, 1979; Ren, 2010; Xue, 2006; Yue, 1994; L. Zhao, 1996). In a nutshell, neither Western nor Chinese scholars sufficiently elucidate what Chinese Marxist psychology actually meant.

It might appear to some that Marxist psychology in China has little to offer. As present-day Chinese psychologists eagerly apply Western scientific approaches, the impact of the Marxization movements in the 1950s and 1960s has proven practically negligible. Indeed, as Yang and Ye (2013) find, the post-Cultural Revolution debates regarding the connection between psychology and Marxism failed to produce a substantial consensus and contributed little to the advancement of the discipline. Furthermore, the historical significance of Chinese Marxist psychology is generally rejected under the popular perception that it was little more than a regurgitation of the Soviet Pavlovian school (Brown, 1981; Higgins & Zheng, 2002; Jing, 1994). In this case, what would be the point of studying the Chinese translation instead of the original Soviet materials? Very recently, this dismissive perception of Chinese Marxist psychology has been challenged. Gao (2015, 2018, 2019a) argues that the Chinese identification of Pavlovian theory with Marxist dialectical materialism was largely a propaganda message to bolster state ideology. Pavlovian psychology gained currency in China also because its classical conditioning method promised the creation of the new socialist human, a utopian ideal defined by simultaneous academic, physical, and political excellence (Cheng, 2009; Munro, 1971b), even though its practical efficacy remained unproven. In 1958, following China’s political radicalization and its deteriorating relationship with the Soviet Union, a nationwide campaign took place, in which a loose group of radical intellectuals criticized Pavlov’s theory for having paid too much attention to the biological basis of the mind at the expense of the influence of the sociopolitical environment. Focusing on this critical event, Gao (2018, 2019a) argues that a distinctively Chinese Marxist psychology is to be found not so much in the Pavlovian school, as in its repudiation.

This article builds on the findings by Gao (2015, 2018, 2019a) and others (Cheng, 2009; Munro, 1971b) to explore the epistemological implications of Marxist psychology in China’s socialist movement, specifically by focusing on the period 1949 to 1958, namely, the formative decade of Chinese socialism. It argues that the Marxization of psychology demanded a shift from the empirical observation model imported from Western psychological science to a social intervention model geared toward supporting China’s socioeconomic undertakings. This paradigmatic transition would deconstruct three epistemological cornerstones of the empirical observation model: ahistorical empiricism, the context of observation, and value neutrality. Each epistemological issue was, respectively, entangled with an ontological assumption: human malleability, agency, and the priority of mental content over mental process. The inextricability of epistemology from ontology is not only recognized by contemporary theoretical psychologists in the West (Arfken, 2017; Teo, 2005), but also articulated by Chinese psychologists who participated in the Marxization movement in the 1950s: “Because subject matter determines methods and methods serve subject matter, the study of human psychology must determine its methods in accordance with its subject matter’s nature and specificities” (Guo, 1958b, p. 14). True to this statement, radical Chinese intellectuals typically launched criticisms of how psychologists had conducted research with problematic methods before proceeding to the underlying ontological questions. First of all, the empirical observation model maintained that observable data constituted the source of knowledge. The radical intellectuals argued that with a static understanding of reality, psychologists had been extrapolating the mental phenomena observed in a given historical circumstance as though those phenomena were universally present. Yet, the very fact of the socialist revolution was about change; it was aimed at bringing a new mental reality into being. Indeed, the radical intellectuals held a progressive belief that the human mind was highly malleable and perfectible. Real human potential, which was repressed by class domination, could only be fathomed in generations of well-developed individuals who were yet to appear. Second, the empirical observation model assumed that the context of observation, be it experimental or naturalistic, allowed reliable studies that could more or less transcend contextual constraints. The radical intellectuals contended that, in reality, psychologists had either manipulated or selected the context of observation, so much so as to discriminatorily reveal only the mechanistic aspects of the human mind. To do justice to human agency and purposefulness, they demanded that psychologists replace their objective worldview with a sociopolitical one. Third, the empirical observation model required value neutrality, meaning that the researcher should not impose normative judgments on empirical data. The radical intellectuals rejected this ideal precisely because of its apolitical stance. They further argued that the popular focus on mental process actually contained instrumental rationality and thus implicit prescriptive judgments. What socialism called for, according to them, was the study of the content of the mind with explicit political preferences.

This article argues that the three epistemological–ontological transitions called for by the radical intellectuals would constitute no less than a paradigmatic shift. This paradigmatic change resembles that of Kuhnian analysis in the sense that the two models of research are incommensurable in terms of their objects, methods, and evaluative criteria (Kuhn, 1962). There are also notable differences. First of all, the Chinese desire for a change of paradigm was demanded by a drastic change in the sociopolitical milieu instead of a gradual accumulation of anomalies within the scientific community. The socialist revolution also placed direct pressure on scientific institutions and personnel, making the ideal of academia as an ivory tower more untenable than in the Kuhnian case. In spite of its momentum, the 1958 critical movement was too short-lived to realize its proposal. Nonetheless, this would-be paradigmatic shift was no less ambitious. Instead of focusing on an exemplary theory or model, it covered in a sweeping fashion a fundamental mode of knowledge production commonly found in modern sciences. The social intervention model was to a certain degree a break from the very notion of science. This broadly defined paradigmatic shift thus serves as an opportunity to shed light on the relationship between science and social revolution.

Historical Background

Besides exploring the paradigmatic shift, this study is also interested in the connection between psychology and education. By positioning itself in this transdisciplinary context, this article joins in conversation with the burgeoning program of psychological humanities, according to which a better understanding of psychology can be gained through bringing in other disciplines (Teo, 2017). Indeed, in China, the two fields were so intimately intertwined that it is impossible to understand the Marxization of psychology without involving education. After defeats in a series of international wars, at the turn of the 20th century, China’s sense of acute weakness and crisis led it to begin modernizing its educational system. The educational reform immensely accelerated the import of Western psychology, especially American psychology, as part of teacher training (Gao, 2013). Among other areas, developmental psychology was popularly used to advise school administration and pedagogy. Another prominent area was intelligence testing, the popularity of which was epitomized by a project that, on its own, surveyed more than 100,000 students across 19 cities (Zuo, 1940). These applications of psychology were consistent with the American-leaning nationalist government’s (1912–1949) favorable attitude toward social engineering, which involved psychologists in the military, industrial, and mental health sectors (S. Yan, 2015). It should be noted that these social interventions were strictly based on scientific findings or at least scientific imaginaries (Baum, 2015). In contrast, the communist party, arising from guerilla warfare, had had little control over psychological research institutes and had received no scientific aid from psychologists. Its sheer capacity in mobilizing the masses was instead derived from practical experiences (Perry, 2002).

After founding the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the communist party spared no time in launching its revolution. Its ambitious plan involved the transformation of not only China’s economy and politics, but also the minds of the populace. Unlike the Soviet Union’s heavy-handed use of terror, the Chinese communist party more often relied on motivating and mobilizing the masses, rendering the issue of ideological transformation particularly urgent. The Chinese endeavor to create the new socialist human was motivated not only by the desire to create mass loyalty (T. H. Chen, 1969), but also by Marx and Engels’s vision of future communist citizens who would work spontaneously for pleasure rather than for survival (Marx, 1875), master multiple skills across the typical division of labor (Marx, 1875; Marx & Engels, 1845), and enjoy communal activities to a greater extent than citizens of capitalism do (Marx, 1844). Marx and Engels’s conceptualization of this new human incited Chinese revolutionaries’ utopian passion and promised them a means of participating in Cold War competition with capitalism.

As the governing body, the communist party now had social and behavioral sciences at its disposal to bring about the new human—yet, it chose not to do so (Gao, 2015). It largely banned sociology and anthropology due to their subversive potential (Dai, 1993; Liu, 2003). Psychology fared better but nonetheless suffered pressure to transform itself in conformity with Marxist ideology and China’s sociopolitical goals. In the subsequent years, psychologists spent much time studying political thought and discrediting Western schools. They denounced many findings in developmental psychology, perceiving them to be too conservative for developing a new kind of human. They also accused intelligence testing of reproducing class division and abandoned it. The void left by the dismissal of Western psychology was immediately filled by Pavlov’s theory of classical conditioning, which promised that human nervous activity could be modified so as to create the new human. If the technical effectiveness of the classical conditioning methods remained dubious, Chinese psychologists at least turned Pavlovian theory into a potent pedagogical resource for instilling in students a belief in self-transformation (Gao, 2019b). As mentioned earlier, both the rise and fall of Pavlovian theory were affected by the Sino–Soviet relationship. In 1958, the faltering Sino–Soviet relationship had eroded the authority of Pavlovian theory. Meanwhile, China’s revolutionary ethos had intensified to such a degree that Pavlovian theory came to be perceived as conservative (Gao, 2015). No longer satisfied with the vague promise of behavioral modification, a group of Chinese psychologists based in Beijing Normal University (BNU) launched a nationwide campaign, expanding their critical gaze to the Pavlovian emphasis on the biological foundation of the mind, as well as Pavlovian research methods (Gao, 2018, 2019a). The Pavlovian school, they now claimed, was similar to Western schools in impeding China’s revolution. Due to the commonality posited by the critics, this article’s analysis covers the entire decade, even though it pays particular attention to the 1958 criticism as the most revealing.

It was no coincidence that the critical movement occurred in BNU. The majority of psychologists worked in departments of education or teacher training institutes (Pan & Chen, 1959), and BNU, as China’s leading teacher training university, certainly exemplified this aggregation. There, psychologists were expected to provide support to pedagogy and in turn to stay attuned to social affairs; purely academic research would likely appear to be misplaced. The 1958 critical movement was largely championed by politicians, junior faculty members, and undergraduate students. The teachers and students of psychology had received Soviet-influenced education as well as the residue of Western thought, but, beyond the discipline, their school curricula and social activities contained considerable political messaging that was more progressive in nature and that was rapidly being updated. The sociopolitical milieu was able to captivate individuals of greater revolutionary enthusiasm, lesser authority in the academic hierarchy, and possibly stronger desire to conform to the official ideology by attacking their previous academic training. This article dubs these activist individuals, along with other intellectuals who displayed similar progressive thinking throughout the 1950s, “radical intellectuals.” Instead of rebutting experimental findings with counter-experiments, the radical intellectuals derived most of their speculative arguments from Marxist and Maoist principles, as well as from observations of questionable validity of so-called new socialist phenomena. To make matters worse, they commonly extended intellectual issues to their opponents’ political stance, thus launching ad hominem attacks. Furthermore, the sweeping critiques involved oversimplification of the diverse branches and applications of psychology, as well as denial of the nuances of Pavlovian theory. There are good reasons why, in the following year, the Chinese government called a halt to this critical movement (Gao, 2015; L. Zhao, 1996), and why contemporary Chinese psychologists shy away from or downright denounce it (Jing, 1994; Jing & Fu, 2001; Ren, 2010; Xue, 2006). Nevertheless, this article argues that much insight can be gained from this movement if it is seen through theoretical and historical lenses. This article applies a “sympathetic” reading strategy focusing on the stronger arguments made by the radical intellectuals to reconstruct their conceptualization of Marxist psychology. As selective as this sample may seem, this analysis also ascertained that there was no self-contradiction at the theoretical level in the entirety of the radical intellectuals’ criticism. In fact, regardless of their arbitrary style and frequent lack of refinement, the radical intellectuals achieved an overall theoretical coherence. This article restricts its sympathetic reading to an analytic sense, without intending to glorify the Chinese Marxization of psychology. Because of its incomplete theorization (Chin & Chin, 1969) and political ferocity (Ren, 2010; Xue, 2007), the critical movement may not be in the strongest position to serve as an exemplar. Instead of introducing Chinese Marxist psychology as a “lost gem,” this article has a non-normative theoretical and historicist goal, namely to use the Chinese case, in comparison with Western mainstream and critical schools, to tease out how international psychologists’ research commitments are conditioned by their sociopolitical milieux.

A Historical Empiricism and Human Malleability

The conventional empirical observation model holds that the discipline of psychology is a fundamentally empirical enterprise in which only observable phenomena can be admitted as valid sources of knowledge. In the history of philosophy in the West, the empiricist school opposed the rationalist school with the proposition that since the human mind is a tabula rasa at birth, it must acquire knowledge through sensory perception of external reality (Martin, 2009). The emergence of modern psychology can be characterized to a certain degree by the replacement of armchair introspection with empirical observation (Sexton, 1978). In the most radical case, behaviorism deemed consciousness an illegitimate subject matter because it is not directly observable (Pickren & Rutherford, 2010). Although it is no exaggeration to say that empiricism is an epistemological pillar of psychological science, theoretically informed psychologists have cautioned against various forms of it, such as “naïve empiricism” and “reductionistic empiricism” (Teo, 2011, p. 240; Toulmin & Leary, 1985, p. 598). One popular critique is that even the most rigorous empirical research cannot rid itself of assumptions, which are embedded in researchers’ methodological toolkits and their sociocultural backgrounds (Robinson, 1985; Teo, 2008). Another discontent is that a dogmatic focus on empirical facts creates a tunnel vision that narrows the range of psychological inquiries to the exclusion of topics such as meaning (Toulmin & Leary, 1985). The Chinese critique of empiricism joins in the Western discussions but had its own distinct angle that stemmed from a view of the human mind as a historical phenomenon.

In the 1950s, Chinese radical intellectuals frequently refuted previously proposed developmental laws regarding what children of a particular age could accomplish. For instance, it used to be said that children of three and four could not distinguish sheep from dogs due to the immaturity of their differential inhibition mechanism (Teaching and Research Unit of Psychology, BNU, 1956). The critics considered this statement to be based on a partial observation of children from bourgeois families, who had never been required to go to farms in the first place. How could one expect these well-off children to distinguish between sheep and dogs without having had firsthand experience with them? Had psychologists bothered to study children of the working class, it was suggested, they would have observed excellent cognitive performance, capable of discerning various farm animals and agricultural products (Group for Criticizing Psychology from the Third and Fourth Year of Pre-School Education Major, BNU, 1958). By highlighting psychologists’ selective sampling, this criticism reaffirmed the official perception of scholars as having been affected by a capitalist worldview.

In a similar vein, the radical intellectuals denounced intelligence testing as a class-saturated activity. They were concerned about the observation that intelligence tests in the West had often yielded results that applauded children from rich, White, urban families (S. Chen, 1957; X. Chen, 1957; T. Zhang, 1950). The most disturbing thing, in their eyes, was that psychologists in the West had often claimed that intelligence was something innate or inherited, with little consideration of the impact of external factors such as family income (Z. Yan, 1958; Y. Yang, 1958). Thus, in the eyes of the critics, psychologists had been complicit in social reproduction by treating empirically obtained test results as indicators of students’ intrinsic capacities and as the basis for allocating educational resources. Intelligence testing was now considered to be a tool for justifying the domination of the ruling class in the name of their intrinsic superiority and for preventing children of the working class from attending school (S. Chen, 1957).

In both of the above cases, the radical intellectuals considered psychologists to have failed to incoporate class distinctions in conducting their empirical observations (G. Chen, 1958). This insensitivity, argued the critics, had sometimes led psychologists to extrapolate observations made amongst the bourgeois population to describe the proletariat (R. Peng, 1958c; Zheng, 1958). In other cases, the radical intellectuals challenged the validity of empirical observations of individual variation within a class. For example, Chinese psychologists used to comment on the destitute mental state of working-class children:

A child said: “I wish to have a little piece of chocolate candy, just to find out what it smells like.” Another said: “I wish my dad would find a job and buy mom, little brother and me something to eat” . . . The cruel oppression from imperialism and Chiang Kai-shek’s government has made the masses lose hope in their future; students imagined unemployment after graduation. (Teaching and Research Unit of Psychology, BNU, 1956, p. 82)

This vivid quotation bolstered the veracity of psychologists’ accounts of children’s misery. The critics did not deny the existence of a victim mentality but insisted that it was found only among a few individuals and could not represent the working population as a whole. Judging from the progress that the proletariat had made in resisting oppression, the radical intellectuals concluded that, in reality, confidence and strength prevailed (F. Zhang, 1958).

Thus, the radical intellectuals cast doubts on the trustworthiness of empirical observation. They did not charge their opponents with having falsely reported something that did not exist in reality. Instead, they found fault in the limited scope in which observation had been carried out so that it could not sufficiently represent reality, whether across class divisions or in individual variations within a given class. But, was the problem merely a matter of insufficient sampling that poorly represented the population, as all introductory textbooks would caution against? To answer this question, it is necessary to shift from a static notion of representative sampling to a temporal perspective on whether empirical phenomena observed at a particular time could represent a the future state of affairs. As epitomized in Marx’s (1845) statement that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (p. 8), revolution required abandoning armchair investigation of reality for world-changing practice. In the Chinese revolution, who comprised the bourgeoisie or proletariat was not necessarily static. Class affiliation was instead amenable to change given an appropriate social environment: A landlord, for instance, could undergo thought transformation and acquire a proletarian consciousness. For just this reason, the communist party spared no efforts in carrying out thought reform campaigns, which were aimed at refashioning individual mindsets and instilling new ways of thinking (Smith, 2013). For instance, the radical intellectuals observed that, after undergoing thought reform, a person of privileged status who had used to cover his nose when walking by feces on the road would no longer avoid feces and instead began collecting them to be used as fertilizer (Z. Yan, 1958). The techniques applied to achieve thought reform—whether they were so-called “brainwash[ing]” (Lifton, 1961), “criticism and self-criticism” (Dittmer, 1973), “speaking bitterness” (Wu, 2013), “accusation” (Strauss, 2002), or “emotion work” (Perry, 2002)—were all premised upon the belief that the human mind was highly malleable (Gao, 2018; Munro, 1971b).

It is no wonder that the belief in human malleability shaped the rise and fall of Pavlovian theory in China (Gao, 2018, 2019a). In the earlier years of the 1950s, Chinese psychologists and other intellectuals embraced Pavlov’s classical conditioning method, which appeared to promise that human behavior could be modified. In 1958, however, amid political radicalization, the radical intellectuals came to the conclusion that Pavlovian theory favored biological determinism over mental change and thus had the potential to justify the lethargy of the masses (Yu & Jiang, 1958). Psychologists had argued that changes in one’s living condition disturbed existing neural patterns and would thus cause unpleasant feelings (Teaching and Research Unit of Psychology, BNU, 1956). Were this view correct, contended the critics, soldiers would be in a persistent bad mood as they had to keep relocating, yet this was not the case. The critics called for attention to cadres who were undergoing rustication and students who were helping with dam building—both reportedly happy in spite of their arduous tasks (G. Chen, 1958; D. Zhao, 1958). The critics became greatly concerned about the negative influence Pavlovian theory had exerted on students, some of whom already had come to claim that their thoughts and emotions were determined by neural types and thus could scarcely change (Subject Matter Critique Team, 1958; D. Zhao, 1958).

Human malleability was also the key issue underlying the radical criticism of empirical observation. If the population’s worldview was a historical phenomenon, to define human nature on the basis of its manifestation under capitalism at a given moment was to negate the possibility of thought transformation in the future or, indeed, the possibility of bringing about the new human. In the eyes of the radical intellectuals, the empirical observations that psychologists had previously made were based on samples of impaired individuals: children from bourgeois families who lacked exposure to agriculture and children from the proletariat who displayed stunted intellectual development and a mentality conditioned by destitution. No matter where they stood in the exploiter–exploited divide, they were alienated alike from their true potential due to class differentiation. As China was undergoing rapid sociopolitical and cultural changes, how could psychologists simply place their trust in data about a temporally-specific manifestation of impeded mentality? Shouldn’t they be skeptical and pay heed to its historical particularity? If there even were a real human nature, it would be unlikely to be found in China, then, while the revolution was still unfolding. Although in mainstream psychology, it was commonplace to take observable behaviors as empirical evidence of the nature of the human mind, the radical intellectuals now saw such behavors as potentially reflecting a distorted reality or an abnormal mind. Taking a quasi-social constructionist perspective, the radical intellectuals maintained that the existing mental reality had lost its epistemological significance.

The radical critique of static empiricism resonates with that of contemporary critically minded psychologists who see empirical reality as the historical manifestation of one possibility among many (Gergen, 1973; Teo, 2018). These present-day psychologists refuse to take empirical observation as a reflection of immovable essences—be they physiological, neural, or genetic—that remain fundamentally constant throughout the passage of history. They are instead curious about what alternate findings might exist in differential social environments. In the spectrum of today’s critical psychology, the Chinese intellectuals would occupy the radical end. According to them, to understand what human beings are truly capable of, one should create social conditions conducive to the actualization of individuals’ hidden potential and not rely on observations of the existing mental phenomena. In other words, the radical intellectuals considered real-world practice to be a more valid method than empirical investigation for fathoming the human mind. This preference for active intervention would lead to the simultaneous rise of education and decline of psychology in the Chinese approach to the human subject, as will be elaborated toward the end of this article.

Context of Observation and Human Agency

To collect empirical data, it is important to pinpoint the proper context for observation to take place. In experimental research, for a context to be well-defined, there must be strict control over the experimental procedure, physical surroundings, as well as the relationship between the researcher and the participant. With successful handling of all of the above conditions, it is possible to isolate independent and dependent variables and eliminate extraneous factors. For example, the popular applications of double-blind design and deception are meant to prevent subjective or relational biases from contaminating the targeted causal relationship. A major advantage of experimentation is that, with meticulous control, variables can be clearly distinguished and data then processed through quantification and statistical calculation. At the same time, experimentation is subject to the criticism posed by theoretically and culturally oriented psychologists: That it creates an artificial context irrelevant to the real world, thus compromising external validity (Aanstoos, 1991; Wilson, Aronson, & Carlsmith, 2010). The Chinese radical intellectuals also criticized the artificiality of the experimental context, though theirs was an emphasis on how the objective of experimental control was at odds with the human subject’s agency and purposefulness. They even questioned naturalistic observation, which is commonly considered to enjoy stronger external validity, by arguing that what constituted the context of naturalistic observation was nevertheless determined by psychologists with particular assumptions.

In the 1950s, the radical intellectuals reviewed various Western experiments and declared them problematic. German psychologist Ebbinghaus’s famous study of the forgetting curve was among the disputed cases. Ebbinghaus’s study is often applauded for its application of nonsense syllables—syllables that had no meaning—so that it was possible to test the subjects’ pure capacity for memorization without the interference of their cultural or personal backgrounds. In the eyes of the radical intellectuals, however, the use of nonsense syllables was itself a problem, as human beings rarely memorize meaningless content. In reality, they suggested, people usually memorize things though comprehension and their memories are affected by their life experiences and social conditions (Z. Yan, 1958). In another study, American developmental psychologists recorded how frequently a group of children smiled at others. Noticing that children aged three smiled significantly more often than children of one and half, the researchers concluded that the older children manifested the development of social emotion. Unlike Ebbinghaus’s research, this observational study did not apply any experimental control. But it was not free of error in the eyes of the Chinese radical intellectuals. According to them, social emotions are highly complex phenomena that involve class status, worldviews, and tendencies of consciousness. Because they studied smile-related facial movements in isolation, the American psychologists were unable to explain children’s emotions in the real world (Group for Criticizing Psychology from the Third and Fourth Year of Pre-School Education Major, BNU, 1958).

The Chinese criticism of psychology was not limited to research conducted in the West. Many Chinese psychologists had incorporated Western knowledge of sensation, perception, and attention in their teaching and research. In lectures, teachers illustrated the concept of involuntary attention with the example of students automatically turning toward a wind-swung door that had banged (Teaching and Research Unit of Psychology, BNU, 1956). In laboratory demonstrations, they invited students to taste garlic, apple, and quinine, and to smell camphor and alcoholic iodine solution (Lei, 1958; Z. Yan, 1958). These cases were criticized for representing the human mind’s interaction with the environment as mechanistic rather than purposeful (G. Chen, 1958; Lei, 1958 S. Wang, 1958; Z. Yan, 1958). Western mainstream psychologists might protest by asking: Are the mechanistic processes of sensation, perception, and attention not real? According to the critics, these processes were real only in artificial contexts stripped of purpose. They provided examples to explain this point. One experiment on sympathy required a student to drink bitter water; another student, who was watching the drinker, had his breath and heartbeat measured as indicators of sympathy. According to experimental standards, everything was fine. However, since the sympathizer was aware of the constructed nature of the scenario, he could not help laughing at the drinker’s comically miserable face instead of feeling genuinely sorry for him (Z. Yan, 1958). In another study on the development of volition, psychologists asked children of different ages to keep a sentry guard position for as long as possible. To control extraneous variables, they did not reveal to the children the purpose behind the study. In the eyes of the critics, this contrived setting had distorted the very notion of volition; the children ought to have been able to attach a purpose to their task (Group for Criticizing Psychology from the Third and Fourth Year of Pre-School Education Major, BNU, 1958). The critics considered all of the above studies to have failed because they did not take human purposefulness into consideration.

The radical intellectuals’ dissatisfaction with experimental manipulation of the human subject stemmed from a conceptualization of human beings as intentional, active agents capable of initiating change. This conceptualization was at odds with causality-based experimental thinking, which predominantly positions the human subject on the side of dependent variables. In other words, the experimental approach considers human behaviors to be passive, deterministic reactions to external stimuli. According to the radical intellectuals, a self-disciplined individual could, to a certain degree, moderate so-called involuntary attention and remain undistracted by noises or other novel stimuli (Qi, 1958). Noting that cannon’s roar did not paralyze courageous Chinese soldiers on the battlefield, the radical intellectuals also contested the notion of transmarginal inhibition, according to which an organism displays reduced conditioned responses in front of overwhelming stimuli (S. Wang, 1958). According to Pavlovian theory, memory fades after the prolonged absence of the underlying stimulus-response chain (Teaching and Research Unit of Psychology, BNU, 1956). According to the critics, this may hold true in certain memory tasks, but cannot explain why some individuals vividly remembered having been bullied by landlords in their childhoods, even though such events had not recurred for many a year (W. Zhang, 1958). Thus, maintained the critics, it was fallacious to apply laws found in Pavlovian laboratory animals to human beings (D. Zhao, 1958). In so doing, previous psychologists had revealed only the mechanistic aspects of the human mind, as though the mind were merely a mirror passively reflecting reality (Lei, 1958; R. Peng, 1958a; Song & Wang, 1958). The theory of evolution—the foundation of animal psychology research—implies that the primary function of the human mind is adaptation to the environment to satisfy physical needs and avoid danger. Again, the radical intellectuals attacked this assumption for positioning human beings in a passive role in the world, always reactive rather than proactive in their actions (G. Guo, 1958a; He, 1958; R. Peng, 1958a, 1958c). They perceived the idea of mechanistic passivity to be of threat to the cause of revolution. In their own words, such theory

denies the active power of the mind and consciousness; its goal is to require that people be satisfied with their condition, that they do not actively transform the objective world, and that they live as slaves of nature and society with content. It immobilizes people’s revolutionary will; its objective effect is reactionary. (Qi, 1958, p. 23)

This progressive affirmation of human agency, which had been theorized by Marx and radicalized by the Soviet theorists before their thought entered China (Bauer, 1952; Mao, 1937a), required a new relationship to be established between human beings and the world (Shapiro, 2001). In this new relationship, instead of passively adjusting their behaviors to survive in the world, human beings would display the capacity to engender changes in the world through grasping and utilizing laws (He, 1958; R. Peng, 1958c). This was the very prerequisite for a socialist revolution.

To the radical intellectuals, human agency was repressed not only in the experimental setting, but also in naturalistic observation, such as in the aforementioned example of students involuntarily directing their attention to a banging door. One might wonder, How could this observation possibly negate human agency, insofar as it is considered to be naturalistic? According to the radical intellectuals, even though such observation did not depend on experimental manipulation, it nevertheless involved the selection of the context in which the observations were made. Inspired by the physiologically based Pavlovian theory, Chinese psychologists had tended to identify naturalistic stimuli in the context of observation as triggers for behavioral responses. For instance, they commonly chose certain colors, sounds, and foods in their purely physical manifestation as independent variables (Lei, 1958; R. Peng, 1958c). The radical intellectuals contended that such a definition of “independent variable” was based on a conceptualization of an objective reality that acts on the human mind solely in a physical form, devoid of sociocultural meaning (Group for Criticizing Psychology from the Third and Fourth Year of Pre-School Education Major, BNU, 1958). Guided by this notion of objective reality, psychologists had reduced key political issues such as labor and living conditions to physical stimuli (Lei, 1958). Even though psychologists did not set up their research settings, they already were interpreting the context of observation in a particular way. What the objectively defined context elicited were, unsurprisingly, mechanistic mental phenomena such as the sight of flowers and the hearing of sounds (Lei, 1958; R. Peng, 1958c). However, according to the critics, human beings do not simply interact with the world as an objective fact. Instead, their mental reflection of the world is highly contingent upon their social relations and activities (R. Peng, 1958c; Y. Zhang & Feng, 1958).

The controversy here is about representation, namely how psychologists should represent the real world within the context being observed. In her critique of social psychologists’ cognitive approach to the Marxist concepts of ideology or of the false consciousness that members of working classes adopt against their own interests, Augoustinos (1999) contends that the acceptance of ideology should not be attributed to the cognitive fallacies of individuals. Instead, it primarily stems from the deceptive arrangement of reality itself. In light of Augoustinos’s argument, it can be said that the Chinese radical intellectuals implied that psychologists had been complicit in the reproduction of ideology. In the controversial cases being discussed, although psychologists might not have directly acted on the external reality, they had nevertheless offered a particular depoliticized representation of reality, one that concealed the need for resistance. In other words, psychologists were considered to have mediated between the individual and reality, promulgating ideology on the grounds of being objective. The Chinese radical intellectuals instead called for a new conceptualization of reality, one characterized by social relations and ideological struggle, where the human subject could reveal its potential for active participation (Group for Criticizing Psychology from the Third and Fourth Year of Pre-School Education Major, BNU, 1958). This call is to be elaborated in the final section of this article.

Value Neutrality and Mental Content

The shift from an objective worldview to a sociopolitical one appears to violate a principle cherished in the mainstream scientific community: value neutrality. This principle requires scientists to keep sociopolitical motivations at bay in the research process, or, in other words, to privilege the pursuit of truth—as manifest in disinterested representation of reality—over political agendas. The principle of value neutrality would seem problematic in the eyes of Marx, who endeavored to combine rigorous empirical analysis with critical, value-laden claims (Jost & Jost, 2007). Contemporary critical psychologists in the West have also argued that value neutrality is an untenable objective. Teo (2018), building on Habermas’s (1971) conceptualization of cognitive interests, contends that the conduct of empirical psychological research cannot possibly be decoupled from human interests. The Chinese critique goes a step further, maintaining that the principle of value neutrality is not only unrealistic but also reactionary. If human consciousness is laden with values and meanings, how can scholars assume a disinterested stance when studying them? According to the radical intellectuals, any insistence on so doing would, in effect, provide a justification for capitalistic mentality under an objectivist guise. To illustrate this point, the radical intellectuals analyzed an example that psychologists had previously used to explain how a person came to be motivated to pursue a certain lifestyle. In this example, an elementary student in China wrote the following in an essay assignment:

I’m going to study very hard, because I wish to become an engineer like my dad . . . I wish I could receive five points, so that I will be on the honor roll . . . and my dad will buy me a pair of skates. So I’m definitely going to study very hard. (Teaching and Research Unit of Psychology, BNU, 1956, p. 119)

According to this example, the student was driven by a combination of motivations to study: in part to satisfy material needs and in part to attain honor and recognition. This explanation, in the eyes of the radical intellectuals, failed to recognize that the student’s imagined lifestyle was saturated with capitalist lust and instead neutralized it to allegedly universal, natural human needs (Fu & Wang, 1958). Indeed, psychologists had previously described various mental phenomena in neutral language:

People have different mental characteristics, just as the saying goes: “people’s hearts differ just as their faces do” . . . Overall, a person’s mental characteristics include interests, capabilities, temperament, and character. These four characteristics constitute one’s personality, differentiating one individual from another. (Teaching and Research Unit of Psychology, BNU, 1956, p. 137)

The radical intellectuals considered it problematic to compare mental characteristics with physical appearance, and thereby evade the sociopolitical relevance of the mind by treating it as though it had nothing to do with one’s class status (Guo, 1958a, p. 33). This critique resonates with Geras’s (1972) suggestion that capitalism maintains itself through reducing social facts to natural ones, thus obfuscating political influences on the psyche.

The Chinese critique of value neutrality was comprised of two layers. At the surface level, psychologists had popularly considered their knowledge to be a disinterested, objective representation of reality. This discourse of value neutrality, in the eyes of the critics, ran the risk of ignoring political engagement—the point discussed just above. At a deeper level, the critics argued that scientific psychology in fact contained value judgments. These value judgments were achieved through quantitative thinking, according to which, mental function can be assessed numerically: A human subject can think more quickly or slowly, memorize more or less, perform with higher or lower levels of skill, and so on. What psychologists did was more than to measure; they created hierarchies among the numbers and assigned desirability to speed, strength, endurance, and so forth. Seen in a contemporary light, such reasoning would be said to embody what in philosophy is called instrumental rationality (Kolodny & Brunero, 2013; Raz, 2005). The radical intellectuals contended that, in reality, one’s political stance depended on subjective experience instead of formal capacities. In this regard, instrumental rationality could impede the revolution through its predominant focus on formal capacities. According to the radical intellectuals, rather than numerically assessing mental phenomena, it was more important to identify their social origins and implications (G. Chen, 1958). Concerning emotion, they suggested that one’s emotional status could not be evaluated purely as “rich” or “impoverished”; instead, psychologists should seek to understand how emotional reactions to a given event and object might differ, depending on each individual’s social status and relationships (D. Zhao, 1958). To illuminate the danger of instrumental rationality, a group of student critics examined a recent incident in which two children of BNU professors stole electrical wiring from a construction site, removed the insulating layer, and sold off the copper inside for pocket money. To describe this incident in neutral language, the children would be said to have displayed complex sensory-motor skills to accomplish a clearly defined goal. But, asked the critics, should they be praised for having demonstrated successful mental development (Third- and Fourth-Year Students from Pre-School Education Major, BNU, 1958)?

Revisiting a historical controversy surrounding Ebbinghaus’s memory research helps put the Chinese critique of instrumental rationality into perspective. In the late 19th century, a debate took place between Ebbinghaus and Dilthey concerning the primacy of mental processes versus mental content (Teo, 2005). Ebbinghaus maintained that psychology, as a science, should address the form of the mind, that is, the processes through which the mind develops and operates. Accordingly, he designed the nonsense syllables in order to study individuals’ memorization capacity, free of interference from the content of the memorized material. In contrast, hermeneutic philosopher Dilthey attached greater significance to the content of the mind—such as beliefs, attitudes, and emotions, which are laden with meaning. He famously argued that the content of memory is more important because it determines who a person is (Teo, 2005). As Ebbinghaus and Dilthey’s debate heralded the bifurcation of modern psychology into scientific and humanistic branches, the mental process versus mental content controversy was to resurface in other countries (see Toulmin & Leary, 1985). In Russia, Lenin (1908) proposed a definition that took both form and content into account, arguing that the mind is a function of the brain, as well as the reflection of the outer world. But, it remained unclear exactly how the two aspects could be integrated. Although Chinese psychologists frequently quoted Lenin, in practice, under the influence of Pavlov, they had been primarily interested in the function of the brain. To the radical intellectuals, this focus was newly seen to be problematic in the eyes of the radical intellectuals, because it prioritized instrumental rationality over political engagement (T. Wang, 1957). The Chinese radical intellectuals’ discussion on the form versus content controversy covered nearly all mental phenomena (R. Peng, 1958b; Ruan, 1959; Song & Wang, 1958), but the most notable and illuminating was that of memory. Chinese Pavlovian psychologist had treated memory largely as a neurologically based cognitive process, and, similar to Ebbinghaus, assessed one’s memory in terms of its speed, persistence, and correctness (Teaching and Research Unit of Psychology, BNU, 1956). However, asked the critics, should an ego-driven, career-seeking student be lauded for capably memorizing professors’ salaries (W. Zhang, 1958)? An instrumental rationality would not advance the revolution. Should psychologists shift their focus to the content of the mind, they would discover that individuals from different classes vary in the memories they retain. As observed by the critics, for instance, when working in the countryside, most bourgeois professors memorized the harsh workplace and living condition, whereas students from the working class mostly memorized the progress that the farmers were spiritedly making (Guo, 1958a; W. Zhang, 1958). If Ebbinghaus and Dilthey’s debate was mostly confined to the intellectual realm, its sociopolitical implications only became fully elucidated by the Chinese critics.

Readers familiar with the history of psychology in Western countries might wish to defend the scientific interest in the form of the mind. Indeed, experimental research on mental processes has proven to be of great potential in applied settings. Scientific management, for example, has studied human sensory–motor functions to boost productivity (Taylor, 1947). Here, even mechanistic mental processes have played important roles in industrial production. The Chinese progressive point of view must be understood in its historical context. Throughout the 1950s, the Chinese communist party often found itself torn between two competing priorities: economic development and social revolution (Tsang, 2000). Economically, it needed to accelerate industrial and agricultural development to repair the wartime destruction of pre-1949 and to ensure China’s competitiveness amid the Cold War. Whereas the economic objective required productive forces to be increased, the revolutionary objective stressed that social relations should be adjusted and a new proletarian culture cultivated. Disagreements over the two priorities created factionalism in the communist party and academic community alike. It was not a coincidence that the critical movement originated in BNU, which had a strong progressive tradition. In contrast, another major institute, the Institute of Psychology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, preferred the natural-scientific approach (He, 1958). Since 1953, in alignment with the economic objective, psychologists at the Institute of Psychology had been studying workers’ sensation, attention, fatigue, and motor movements (L. Zhao, 1996). They also trained workers to better time the steel-making by observing the color of flames (Chou, 1959). These projects had the potential to increase industrial efficiency and reduce accidents but offered little to the revolutionary objective. When revolutionary passion came to dominate in late 1958 (He, 1958), the Institute of Psychology—despite its prestige in the discipline—was unable to resist the spread of the critical campaign (L. Zhao, 1996), signaling the downturn of the economy–science–mental process complex.

From Empirical Observation to Social Intervention

The 1958 critical movement, as the climax of a progressive politics that had gradually been evolving in the 1950s, called for a new approach to the human subject. This new approach would consist of three epistemological–ontological shifts. First, time-specific observation of the mental status quo, which was, after all, undergoing transformation, was no longer to be used to produce generalizable knowledge across historical periods. Second, the conventional experimental and naturalistic contexts would not be considered to enable the observation of authentic behaviors, because both contexts had been manipulated or selected to trigger solely mechanistic responses. The new task was to reveal the sociopolitical quality of reality so that human agency could better express itself. Third, the new approach would explicitly guide the truth-seeking scientific activity with values, and accordingly, shift attention from mental processes to mental content. Putting these three epistemological–ontological reconstructions together, the new approach would signal no less than a paradigmatic shift, an overhaul of the discipline concerning its subject matter, research methods, and evaluative criteria. In this new sociopolitical approach, social intervention would supersede empirical observation as the superior approach to understanding what human beings truly are and what they are capable of.

The history of psychology in socialist China is extraordinary in that it is a history of decline. As mentioned earlier, since the 1930s and 1940s, the rurally based communist party had tremendous mass mobilization capacity, yet little interest in psychological expertise. This preference continued in the 1950s, resulting in the official perception of lab-based scientific psychology to be that it was inessential at best, and counter-revolutionary at worst (Gao, 2015, 2019a). In spite of its wide presence in departments of education, in the 1950s, psychology gradually lost its authority in informing pedagogy. Even in its heyday, Pavlovian psychology more often functioned as a propaganda material than as a source of practical solutions. The 1958 critical movement shockingly subverted the status of Pavlovian theory as a politically safe harbor for psychologists and bolstered the accusation that psychology was a reactionary science. When in early 1959 this critical movement was called to a halt by government officials, new publications were made possible on Western theories, but they typically began by criticizing these theories for having deviated from Marxism. In 1965, the eve of the Cultural Revolution, a second critical campaign was to take place that made frequent references to the 1958 precedent. Psychology research and teaching institutes were plunged into complete closure during ten years of calamity (Gao, 2018).

The breakdown of psychological science along with the typical empirical observation model that it embodied must be seen in a transdisciplinary light in relation with education. Indeed, education was in many aspects well positioned to overtake psychology’s authority in speaking about human nature. As mentioned in the introduction, since the beginning of the 20th century, psychology had served education by supplying developmental laws, intelligence testing, and methods of teaching and learning (Lu, 1949). During much of the 1950s, the majority of psychologists worked at educational institutes (Pan & Chen, 1959). At BNU, where the critical campaign originated, the psychology unit was part of the department of education. Besides its institutional domination, education was better aligned with the state agenda than was psychology. As a major instrument of state power, education was responsible for instilling new generations with the knowledge, skills, and morality to ensure economic growth and social transformation. Radical thinkers placed particular emphasis on the function of education in reforming social relations (Price, 1977). Even as psychologists kept political affairs at arm’s length with their principle of value neutrality, many educators were deeply concerned with developing curricula in accordance with China’s domestic and international affairs so that they could deliver a workforce suitable for aiding the revolution. The intellectual–political difference between the two fields began to surface immediately after the founding of the new regime in 1949, when progressive educators expressed discontent with psychologists’ natural-scientific orientation (T. Zhang, 1950). Over the course of the 1950s, educators increasingly abandoned findings made by psychologists as the basis of pedagogy and, as an alternative, showed psychologists how to understand the human subject according to the official policies and tasks (Gao, 2018). The 1958 critical movement signaled that psychologists had lost the authority to define human nature; meanwhile, educators took over with pedagogical interventions that promised to realize students’ true potential for accomplishment. Politically conscious and future-oriented educational intervention replaced objective, static empirical observation as the legitimate approach to the human mind. This transdisciplinary dynamic requires one to reflect on the status of psychology in the sciences. Teo (2017) recently proposed a program of psychological humanities, according to which a better understanding of psychology can be achieved through incorporating insights from social sciences and the humanities—from philosophy, cultural studies, the arts, and more. This article can be considered to be an instantiation of psychological humanities by studying the interrelation of education and psychology, rather than by studying psychology in isolation. In fact, it moves further, because in the Chinese case, extending attention to education is not merely optional for enriching the understanding of psychology so much as it is demanded by how China’s socialist revolution unfolded.

To be fair, the empirical observation model did not preclude practical ends. Psychologists divided their professional activities into two stages: that of knowledge production and that of application. They made explicit suggestions about how their knowledge could be used to cultivate the new human:

Analyze one’s mental life, identify one’s strengths and weaknesses, self-develop positive mental qualities, gain effective observation and attention skills, achieve the capacities to reinforce memory and in-depth thinking, personally establish a well-rounded, rich mental life and spiritual outlook with communist aspirations. (Teaching and Research Unit of Psychology, BNU, 1956, p. 4)

Yet, such an approach, analytically derived from empirical observation, was considered by the radical intellectuals to embody a form of abstract psychological analysis, isolated from the real world. The radical intellectuals called for the replacement of psychological analysis with socially grounded practice (Xu & Lai, 1959), finding theoretical grounding in the thought of Mao Zedong. According to Mao (1937b), “If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself” (p. 300). The radical intellectuals further explained what “practice” meant in the context of mental transformation. It was wrong, according to them, for psychologists to have listed “mending clothes, writing essays, and setting up experiments” as examples of practice (Teaching and Research Unit of Psychology, BNU, 1956, p. 81), because these tasks circumvented class struggle and ideological transformation. To carry out revolutionary practice, the environment, too, must be altered. The objective physical environment, such as plants in their natural forms, did not properly serve pedagogy, nor did the selection of toys and the arrangement of classroom further the building of Pavlovian neutral connectivity (Group for Criticizing Psychology from the Third and Fourth Year of Pre-School Education Major, BNU, 1958). Eventually, the 1958 critical movement saw schools as inadquate sites for education. Meanwhile, education in China was undergoing a major transformation, shifting from the conventional academic model to a revolutionary model, which reallocated a significant number of school hours to labor, requiring students to work in factories and farms (T. H. Chen, 1981). This revolutionary model of education stemmed from multiple reasons rooted in reality, including the government’s efforts to discipline dissidents and to overcome employment difficulties. In addition to these historical circumstances, the goal of creating well-rounded graduates who would be not only academically competent, but also capable of and dedicated to laboring productively, reflected a radical interpretation of the Marxist theory of human development. The radical intellectuals considered that only by joining in the life and work of the proletarian masses could students be prevented from creating new class stratification through ego-centered occupational choices (Gao, 2018).

Scientific psychologists had assumed that the human mind operated according to generalizable natural laws. It was for this reason that they had distinguished the stage of knowledge production from the stage of application, believing that knowledge obtained in the laboratory could be reliably transferred to real-world situations. The emergent social intervention model collapsed the distinction between these two stages. In this model, knowledge about the human mind was immersed in the social world from the inception of the research to the application of the resulting knowledge. Less committed to the pursuit of universal laws, the social intervention model readily situated mental phenomena in their historical, social, and cultural settings. One may understand the social intervention model as another form of experiment; one that, instead of being conducted in the laboratory, was meant to occur in real society with its effects testified to in the life course of the population. Society would thus become the laboratory and real-life practice would become the means of cultivating the new socialist human.

Conclusion

This article discusses the Marxization of psychology in China’s socialist movement, an episode that has eluded scholarly inquiry until very recently. After the founding of the socialist regime in 1949, as groundbreaking transformations rapidly took place in China’s economy, culture, and social relations, Chinese citizens were accordingly required to undergo mental changes. Geared toward the creation of the new socialist human, sweeping thought reform campaigns deeply restructured the discipline of psychology. In merely a decade, between 1949 and 1958, Chinese psychology was to see Western schools repudiated, the Soviet Pavlovian school rise and fall, and, eventually, to bring a Chinese Marxist psychology to inception. Although the short-lived Marxization proposal was not realized, it offers a rare opportunity for reflection on several key epistemological and ontological questions in the discipline.

To sum up, the Chinese critique of scientific psychology had three epistemological–ontological foci. First, the conventional empirical observation model failed to understand the Chinese population’s mental reality as a historical phenomenon, differentiated and distorted by class relations. By taking empirical observation as the basis for developing generalizable, ahistorical knowledge, the empirical model obfuscated what human beings could truly achieve were they in an ideal environment brought about by the revolution. Second, the radical intellectuals considered the conventional context of observation to be problematic. Both experimental and naturalistic contexts had emphasized the mechanistic aspects of the human mind while ignoring its agentic, world-changing power. In order for this power to surface, psychologists had to replace their conceptualization of an objective reality with a sociopolitical worldview. Third, the radical intellectuals considered the ideal of value neutrality to be neither feasible nor desirable. To rectify the error of instrumental rationality and to promote political engagement, psychologists were required to shift their focus from mental process to mental content. Combining the three epistemological–ontological critiques, the radical intellectuals called for the replacement of the empirical observation model with a social intervention model. Instead of objectively describing mental reality as though it were a universal phenomenon, the new model would require the human subject to actively participate in sociopolitical practices in the real world, so as to actualize its true potential. As explained earlier, such a paradigmatic shift would differ from that of Kuhnian analysis in several ways, most notably because the shift had only been proposed and not yet realized and because of the heavy external pressure propelling scientific change. The extensive scope of the criticism, targeting as it did a fundamental mode of knowledge production rather than a single exemplary theoretical model, in fact invites reflections that traverse the bounds of science and look to the interface between science and social movements.

In the case of China’s socialism, one can only understand the Marxization of psychology by taking its historical circumstances into consideration. As aforementioned, China’s socialist movement was torn between economic and revolutionary objectives, which conditioned the contrast between the critical movement spearheaded by BNU and the Western scientific approach exemplified by the Institute of Psychology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The attempt to Marxize psychology, as epitomized in the 1958 criticism, was fueled by the revolutionary dominance over technological-industrial development, which posited human individuals to be mechanistic, reactive beings. The antagonism between the two priorities found expression in the radical intellectuals’ reconceptualization of how one should conduct observation, the very topic of this article. Chinese psychologists had hitherto emphasized observational skills: Familiarity with relevant knowledge, having a thorough plan, and making accurate records could all enhance the quality of observation (Teaching and Research Unit of Psychology, BNU, 1956). This approach was criticized by the radical intellectuals for being technique-centric at the cost of downplaying the importance of political consciousness to defining the objects and contexts of observation (Lei, 1958).

As mentioned in the introduction, because of the political pressure surrounding the Marxization of psychology and the proposal’s lack of completeness and refinement, Chinese Marxist psychology does not offer an ideal toward which to strive. Nonetheless, it provides much insight if examined from theoretical and historical perspectives. The 1958 critical movement signaled a vehement clash between progressive revolutionary ideals and the Western objective scientific spirit. The Chinese criticisms boldly, and sometimes incisively, touched on several fundamental and enduring issues in global psychology, with arguments that call to mind the historical Ebbinghaus–Dilthey controversy regarding the mental process-versus-mental content controversy, as well as the bifurcation of Wilhelm Wundt’s research into experimental and folk psychologies (Teo, 2005; Toulmin & Leary, 1985). These criticisms also find resonance with those of contemporary psychologists who are theoretically, historically, and culturally informed. Institutionally speaking, the paradigmatic transition would reconfigure the relationship of education to psychology: decoupling education from psychology and enabling education to override psychology’s authority in defining the human mind. This transdisciplinary dynamic being investigated instantiates the program of psychological humanities (Teo, 2017). Beyond these resonances with international critical psychology, the Chinese critics also had their unique perspective from which to join in the debates and frequently highlighted far-reaching sociopolitical implications of the intellectual controversies. In various aspects, revisiting the Chinese Marxization of psychology enables us to reflect on how psychology’s core research assumptions are entwined with the sociopolitical milieu one finds oneself in, whether in China or in the Western world.