The COVID-19 pandemic has led to unique mental health challenges for Chinese immigrants due to their cultural, social, and political ties with China, which responded to COVID-19 with controversial measures amid tensions with the Western world. These challenges manifest in three conditions at a time of crisis: racism that associates overseas Chinese with the coronavirus, Chinese immigrants’ “double unbelonging” with regard to both host societies and China, and social disapproval of political criticism among overseas Chinese. This article examines these three conditions by drawing on ethnography conducted in Canada as well as international online media. It uses theories in humanistic psychology, existential psychology, and hermeneutics to explain how, for Chinese immigrants, international political tensions are implicated in a range of mental health–related phenomena including identity, belonging, self-consciousness, shame, depression, and agency. Meanwhile, it offers theoretical discussions of how to make humanistic psychology more capable of addressing social and political issues.
In the early 1950s, the Chinese communist party promoted a massive Learning-from-the-Soviet-Union Campaign and made Pavlov’s reflexology the political-academic orthodoxy in physiology, medical science and psychology. In the late 1950s, however, while Pavlov’s theory was continuously advocated by physiologists and medical scientists, it suffered a major setback in psychology as Pavlovian psychology was criticized as being bourgeois and reactionary. How was it possible for such sheer contrast across disciplines to take place within a few years? This paper argues that the greater ideologization of Pavlovian psychology was conditioned by a number of factors: the Sino-Soviet relations, the shifting Chinese communist policies, professional practices, local social conditions, disciplinary cultures and discursive performances. This historical reconstruction rejects a homogenizing view of the relation between politics and science in the Maoist China, and demonstrates ways in which historical localities and dynamics ruptured the overarching political context.
This article investigates the history of psychology in China from 1949 to 1965, with a focus on the geopolitics involving Western, Soviet, and Chinese schools of psychology. In the early 1950s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) pressured psychologists to replace existing Western approaches with Pavlov’s Soviet-sanctioned psychological theory. The shaky marriage of Pavlovian theory with Marxism, coupled with domestic and international political shifts, paved the way for two leftist criticisms of psychology, one in 1958 and the another before the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Both criticisms demanded that psychologists conceptualize mental phenomena as sociopolitically contingent and replace experimentation with class analysis. The clash between two views of human nature—the natural-biological view, which emphasized intrapersonal mental processes, and the revolutionary view, which highlighted individual connections to the sociopolitical milieu—stemmed from the Cold War ideological division, shifting Sino-Soviet relations, the CCP’s conflicting commitments, and the power dynamic between the CCP and psychologists. Both critical movements were self-undermined by their violent enactment and failed to generate a fully developed Marxist psychology. In tracing these historical events, this article explores two questions. First, inspired by postcolonial historiography of psychology, it excavates Chinese Marxist critiques to rethink Western natural-scientific psychology regarding its disciplinary identity, subject matter, research methods, and social commitments. Second, by situating various schools of psychology in China’s revolution, it argues that whereas natural scientific approaches of the West served scientific modernization, Chinese revolutionaries’ sociopolitical approach to psychological research was tethered to class struggle.
This article examines the Marxization of psychology in the first decade of socialist China, between 1949 and 1958. In this movement, a loose group of radical intellectuals called for the replacement of the empirical observation model popular in psychology with a social intervention model as exemplified by educators. This paradigmatic, transdisciplinary shift would encompass three epistemological–ontological nexuses. First, the radical intellectuals accused ahistorical empirical observation of failing to recognize that the Chinese mental capacity, so far impaired by class domination, could display tremendous growth in socialism. Second, they criticized experimental and naturalistic contexts of observation for revealing the human mind to be mechanistic rather than purposeful. To recognize human agency, psychologists must transform their objectivist conceptualization of reality to a sociopolitical one. Third, they denounced the ideal of value neutrality for eschewing political engagement while permitting instrumental rationality and its hidden normative judgments. The solution lay in a refocusing on mental content instead of mental process as the object of inquiry. By examining the Marxization of psychology in socialist China, this article aims to foster reflection on how Chinese and Western psychologists’ research assumptions are shaped by their sociopolitical milieux.
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