Forging Marxist psychology in China's Cold War geopolitics, 1949-1965

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. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).