Jian Guan (NanKai University, P.R. China)

Abstract

Knowledge is created and transferred in social sciences and humanities in general, and in psychology in particular. This paper presents an overview of how Chinese psychology was influenced by Soviet psychology, and the social processes leading to such knowledge production and transfer. From the 1920s through the 1940s, Chinese psychology was oriented mainly towards Western psychology. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Marxism-Leninism became a dominating ideology in China. In the process of reconstruction, the new psychology took Marxism-Leninism and Maoism as its underlying philosophical principles, and Soviet psychology became the model of Chinese psychology. With China’s open-door to the outside world and a market economic reform from the late 1970s, and particularly, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Soviet influence has faded away, and both American and European traditions of psychology have become the dominated paradigm of Chinese psychology. Psychology in China is rehabilitating as a scientific discipline. From the perspective of social representations, the rise and decline of Soviet influence on Chinese psychology well illustrate how political-economic-ideological forces affect the production and transformation of scientific knowledge, and such knowledge is always produced through interaction and communication, between the particular groups of people and their contexts.

Key words: Knowledge production and transfer, Soviet psychology, Chinese psychology

1. Introduction
Knowledge is created and transferred in social sciences and humanities in general, and in psychology in particular. China has experienced/accumulated/observed a wealth of psychological thought. As U.S. psychologist G. Murphy notes, “China is the native place of psychology in the world” (Wang, 1996). The study and discussion of psychological issues had a long history in ancient China. Early psychological thinking in China not only was contained in diverse philosophical, political, military, and other literature but was also expressed through various practices in education, medicine, and human resource management. The influence of Chinese culture on world psychology has been widely recognized in current literature in the field and is attracting more and more attention (Jing, 1994; Murphy & Kovach, 1972; Wang, 1993).
At the beginning of the 20th century, some Chinese psychologists had adopted the Western ideas of behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and Gestalt psychology, and the works of I. B. Pavlov, V. M. Bekhterev, and Komilov were translated from Russian into Chinese. As early as in the 1930s, some Chinese psychologists tried to take dialectical materialism as the guiding principle in their work. From the earliest days, Soviet influences on psychology were strong. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Marxism-Leninism became a dominating ideology in China. In the process of such reconstruction, the new psychology took Marxism-Leninism and Maoism as its underlying philosophical principles and Soviet psychology became a model of Chinese psychology. With China’s open-door to the outside world and market economic reform from the late 1970s and particularly, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Soviet influence has faded away, and both American and European traditions of psychology have become the dominating paradigm of Chinese psychology. Psychology in China is rehabilitating as a scientific discipline. Today, psychology in the People’s Republic of China is experiencing rapid growth and a redefinition in response to dramatic changes in economic, cultural, and political conditions.
In a word, knowledge is created and transferred in social sciences and humanities in general, and in psychology in particular. This paper presents an overview of how Chinese psychology was influenced by Soviet psychology, and the social processes leading to such knowledge production and transfer. It also provides a historical and contemporary context of the development of Chinese psychology. From the perspective of social representations, the rise and decline of Soviet influence on Chinese psychology well illustrate how political-economic-ideological forces affect the production and transformation of scientific knowledge, and such knowledge is always produced through interaction and communication, between the particular groups of people and their contexts.

2. Soviet psychology: The historical context
It is well known of the differences between Soviet psychology and Western psychology, but the cause of such differences is still unclear. We think that the situation of the time in Russia can only be understood by tracing the historical foundations of Soviet psychology. Russia has had quite a different political, cultural, religious and social history from Western Europe, even long before the Revolution. Since the latter, its psychology has been even further removed from others. It is based on political action and social changes, as is also revealed by a study of its history and its radical philosophical background.

2.1. Prior to the 1917 Revolution: Kaleidoscopic Period
More space is allotted to the history of Soviet psychology, even to its pre-history. Since the Middle Ages, this is seen as a struggle of Tsarist and Christian Orthodox obscurantism against liberating Western influences which reached Russia from Peter the Great onwards (Koutaissoff, 1976). Soviet psychology was a product of a long develop­ment and had varied historical antecedents. These antecedents include the work of Russian educators and educational theorists (beginning with the early part of the 18th Century), literary critics of the 19th Century, psychiatrists, physiologists, and writers of books on psy­chology proper. In 1796, the first Russian book with a near-equivalent of “psychology” in its title appeared. In 1885, seven years before the formation of the American Psychological Association in 1892, the Moscow Psychological Society was formatted,. In 1886, the first psychological laboratories in Russia were established by the psychiatrists Bekhterev and Korsakov. Russia’s first psychology laboratories were created by Bekhterev in 1886, first in Kazan and then in St. Petersburg. It was not until 1911 that an institute of psychology was founded by G. I. Chelpanov, a mentalism philosopher and logician who had taught psychology as well.
Prior to the 1917 revolution, this was seen as a struggle of mentalism and materialism in the field of psychology. Chelpanov and Gelot were representative mentalist theorists. For example, Chelpanov had published a psychology textbook for secondary schools which went through almost twenty printings prior to the Revolution. This large volume, entitled Brain and Mind, was devoted to a discussion of the relationships between subjective experience and the material world. Chelpanov adopted the position that a materialist approach to the study of mind was useless. And, Sechenov, Pavolv and N.N. Langer were representative materialism theorists. Later, the Russian Revolution created a receptive atmosphere for the theories of Sechenov, Pavlov, Bekhterev and others. These psychologists had founded a natural-scientific approach, which turned out to be the most acceptable materialistic view of man and his behavior. Their approach, which became widely popular, was called reflexology. During the mid-1920s, reactology, reflexology and Pavlov’s theory were called “Russian psychological schools” by Western scholars.
The reflexological period is the one in which Bekhterev’s reflexology, coupled with American behaviorism, came pretty close to becoming the official Soviet psychology. Bekhterev set out, right after the revolution, to unweave his reflexology into the Soviet system. He published a monograph on Psychology, Reflexology, and Marxism and an article on “Reflexology and dialectical materialism,” trying to show that reflexology is the proper Marxian and dialectical psychology. The reflexologists were very active in research and, in their own way, very fruitful in hypotheses. Had they continued unhampered, they no doubt would have made significant contributions and probably would have developed a psychology not very different from what some of our behaviorists would like to have. But the school was declared too mechanistic for Communist philosophy and slowly passed out of existence.
Meanwhile, Kornilov’s reactology was a school of psychology that let the physiologists study the reflex while keeping to itself the study of voluntary reactions or voluntary behavior. Its methodology was primarily objective, but it did not completely disdain introspections. The school also contained a principle of wholeness that total behavior dominates individual reaction behavior and social behavior dominates individual behavior and a principle of socioeconomic prepotency, while the form of reactions may be determined biologically, their content is social, specifically economic, and man in general is a variant or a function of a particular economic class. The school was certainly wider in scope than reflexology and no less experimental and, if permitted to exist, would no doubt have been of considerable significance.
Pavlov and Bekhterev shared essentially the same opinion. They accept the existence of two parallel sciences – psychology and reflexology – which study the same object, but from different sides. Pavlov’s research on the physiology of digestion led to the development of the first experimental model of learning, Classical Conditioning. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904 for research pertaining to the digestive system. As his work progressed, Pavlov established the basis for conditioned reflexes and the field of classical conditioning.
Under such world-class researchers as Bekhterev and Pavlov, Russians were at the forefront of world science. The purpose of this kaleidoscopic and largely irrelevant hash is to show the spread of materialist philosophies, and the emergence, prior to the 1917 Revolution, of a Russian school of psychology based on the experimental work of Sechenov and Pavlov. It is here that Soviet psychology should begin. Yet this was an uneven mix of neurology, physiology, psychology, and philosophy, with never a clearly distinguishable psychology during these early days.

2.2. After Revolution: Dialectical Materialism and Marxist Psychology Period
Marxist philosophy, one of the world’s most complex systems of thought, was assimilated slowly by Soviet scholars. The period following the revolution of 1917, in which the Communist Party seized power in Russia. The once-large Psychoanalytic Institute in Moscow closed its doors when Freudian mentalism was prohibited. After the revolution until the late 1920s, Marxism was the only correct doctrine not only in economics and politics but also gaining ground in science. During the communist era, psychologists were expected to produce a “Marxist psychology” in sync with Marxism-Leninism’s materialist, environmentalist, and egalitarian ideology. The search for ways to introduce the spirit of dialectical materialism into psychology was intensifying, not only because Communist ideology dictated subordinating scientific thought unto itself, but also because psychology was experiencing an inner crisis.
Many Russian intellectuals, anticipating troubled times, felt helpless in the context of the dramatic events that were unleashing new social forces. In the early 1920s, Vygotsky reacted enthusiastically to the appeal to recast psychology on the basis of dialectical materialism. Kornilov studied a number of complex, esoteric Marxist postulates on the level of what was then called “primary political course.” Even Chelpanov, who favored the viewpoints of Wundt and Titchener, argued that his psychology was compatible with Marxism. Kornilov claimed that his psychology was the true expression of Marxist dialectical materialism. More profound theoretical research psychologists were eager to bring Marxism into the field. It was characterized by extensive theoretical discussions about the status of psychology among sciences and about the consequences of Marxist philosophy for psychological theory. A considerable range of viewpoints was represented in the discussions.
Between 1930 and 1936, it began with the Communist cell of the Moscow Psychological Institute initiating a series of discussions of the basic premises for a Marxian psychology, primarily a criticism of the then-established Kornilov reactology. Dialectical materialism in psychology is close to reflexology because it tends to base its system on the principles of dialectical materialism. In the Soviet Union, the pluralism of Western methods was confronted in Soviet psychology by integrated Marxist-Leninist ideology, which has made it possible to understand the real nature of the mind.

2.3. Political Pressure Period
The context of Soviet psychology underwent several changes in the 1930s as a result of political influences. In 1929-30, Lenin Philo­sophical Notebooks appeared in print. According to Teplov (1947), Lenin’s theory of psychic life as the reflection of reality created considerable interest and was much discussed by psychologists. General acceptance of the Lenin reflection theory resulted in greatly increased interest in problems of sensation and perception. In 1936, mental testing largely disappeared. Educational processes and procedures research had been the most prominent feature of Soviet psychology since the late 1930s. During the Stalin era, 1924 till 1953, government control became oppressive of psychologists, to an extent rare in other nations. Psychologists lost their positions and, on occasion, their lives. Bekhterev himself–the day after he made an offhand comment during his physical examination of Josef Stalin–was fatally poisoned at the Bolshoi Theatre buffet. Like Armenia’s top psychologist, Gurgen Edilian, many leading psychologists found themselves exiled or worse during those dark years, putting scientific psychology on a shaky footing (Joravsky, 1989).
Further changes in Soviet psychology followed World War II. In 1946, the Central Committee of the Communist Party passed a decree objecting to the supposedly exaggerated reliance of Soviet scientists on foreign sources, and the failure to credit Russian scientists sufficiently. A tendency developed among psychologists to cite exclusively Soviet sources, or only the “classics of Marxism­ Leninism,” and it became difficult to trace the influence of foreign sources in Soviet psychology. There is a conspicuous omission among the principal historical sources consulted in writing these “historical remarks on Soviet psychology.”

2.4. Restructuring in Psychology in Russia
In 1989, the Soviet Psychologists’ Society held an All-Union Conference in Moscow (Gindis, 1992). Prior to this meeting, a round table discussion, “Restructuring in Psychology: Problems and Means of Resolutions,” was published in the leading professional journal Problems of Psychology. Participants in both events bitterly acknowledged a state of crisis in the theoretical domain, in the area of professional training, in the field of practical functioning, and in the sphere of scientific communication. As a result, Soviet psychology found itself ill-equipped to participate in the socio-economic reconstruction of the Soviet society. The blame for this crisis is laid at the door of rigid ideological control which has adversely affected the development of all the social sciences in the former U.S.S.R., with psychology being no exception. Fear of critical revisions of basic theoretical assumptions, lack of freedom in discussion, extreme ideologization of scientific criticism, and isolation from and confrontation with the world psychological community on the basis of ideological differences have been named as the leading causes of the current stagnation in the domain of Soviet psychology. Another openly acknowledged problem of Soviet psychology was the lack of reliable and valid methods of research and psychological evaluation. Despite the hardships it has endured, Soviet psychology has indeed achieved significant results in certain areas. The accomplishments of Soviet psychology in psychophysics, psychophysiology, neuropsychology, and developmental psychology have earned international recognition and respect in the world’s psychological community.
Since 1991, the changes in Russia and the other 14 republics have been so transforming that the world is unsure even what to call these republics, which are now separate, yet interdependent. In less than 20 years, psychology has seen changes. The oppression of the Stalin gulags is apparently long past, and psychology is relatively free from political pressure. The Marxist influence on psychology still exists, but on a voluntary basis, while the science of psychology grows more diverse. Now, post-Soviet psychology continues to grow into a more vibrant and diverse force in order to address the also-growing social problems which await it.

3. Psychology in China: evolution and transform
3.1 The Birth of Psychology in China: Prior to 1949
There is a rich body of psychological thought present in the writings of ancient Chinese philosophers. However, psychology in China did not develop into a systematic discipline, despite the fact that the concepts of psychology have deep roots in Chinese civilization dating back to almost 2,500 years. Some researchers thought that Chinese psychology has lacked a scientific basis because of the belief that Chinese scholars should only concern themselves with “book learning, literature, history and poetry, but not with science” (Higgins & Zheng, 2002).
In the early 1900s, Chinese intellectuals began the Reform Movement. They promoted an uncompromising rejection of Chinese traditions (especially those with Confucian roots) and advocated total or whole-hearted Westernization, in terms of science. At the beginning of the 20th century, China’s emphasis turned to modernism and technological development after the devastating invasions by Western countries and the fall of the imperial system. It led to the development of a number of areas of study and research, including psychology (Hsu, 1983; Yang, 1998). Chinese students who had studied in the West brought back ideas fundamental to modern psychology and translated Western books. In 1889, for example, Yan Yongjing translated a Japanese version of Joseph Haven’s Mental Philosophy (1875), which was regarded as the first Western psychology book to be published in China (Kodama, 1991). Later, the Chinese educational reformer, Cai Yuanpei, who studied psychology at Wundt’s Laboratory in Leipzig and who later became president of Peking University, set up the first psychology laboratory at Peking University in 1917 (Jing, 1994). Meanwhile, some Chinese scholars finished their studies in Western universities and returned to China to teach and do research in psychology. They played important roles in laying the foundation for the development of modern Chinese psychology. This included renowned scientists like Z. Y. Kuo (1898-1970), who did research on instinct and heredity in animals. He went to the University of California at Berkeley in 1918 and returned to China in 1929. Wei Ai (1890-1970), wrote about educational and experimental psychology, and C. W. Luh (1894-1970) researched on memory. Li Chen (1902-2004), known as the founder of Chinese industrial psychology, carried out field studies in Chinese factories after studying under C. Spearman of University College London. S. K. Chou (1903-1996) researched on the recognition of Chinese characters. S. Pan, who obtained his Ph.D. in Chicago in 1927,worked with Carr on the influence of context on learning and memory. He later became president of the Chinese Psychological Society when it was reestablished in 1955 after the People’s Republic of China was founded.
In short, from the 1920s through the 1940s, Chinese psychology was oriented mainly toward Western psychology. Psychology was basically an imported product whose general development was slow because of the unstable social environment in China during this period.

3.2 Psychological Research in Communist China, 1949-1966
After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, psychology was reestablished under the auspices of the Communist Party. The new psychology took Marxism-Leninism and Mao’s thought as the basic philosophy underlying its psychological theory. In the 1950’s, some psychology periodicals were published. The publication of three important Chinese textbooks in the early 1960s reflected a significant development of teaching and research during that period: General Psychology (Cao, 1963), Educational Psychology (Pan, 1964), and Child Psychology (Zhu, 1962). Psychology had a preliminary development in the 1950s and early 1960s and carried out a great deal of theoretical and applied research related to China’s social, economic and cultural development. In 1958, the Institute of Psychology was set up as a part of the Chinese Academy of Science, and about half of the 3,000 Chinese psychologists then worked in normal universities or pedagogical institutes in the fields of developmental and educational psychology (Jing, 1994). Some basic psychological studies were also carried out on perception, conceptual development, memory, and physiological psychology.
For a brief period, Pavlovian dimensions of Soviet psychology were imported into China. Throughout the 1950s there was a strong emphasis on Soviet psychology and, consequently, waves of students went to the Soviet Union to study psychology.

3.3 Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976
Similarly to Soviet psychology fate, the development of psychology in China was not smooth because of the ebb and flow of political movements. In the case of the sciences this is not as difficult as in psychology, because within the history of the People’s Republic the academic discipline of psychology has been attacked twice: once within the Maoist “Great Leap Forward” in 1958 and again in the so-called “Cultural Revolution.” Within the latter movement a ban was enforced against all social sciences, including psychology. This ban was disastrous because no psychological research of teaching was allowed for the long period between 1966 and 1976. All organizations of psychology were completely abolished. Teachers and researchers were dismissed and investigative work was stopped completely. Some psychologists were sent to other workplaces or work camps (Petzold, 1994). The only social psychology articles then published were criticisms of the bourgeois and idealist values of Western psychology. However, some psychologists insisted on and worked hard to facilitate psychological studies in China. Among them were R. C. Cao, S. Pan, and others.
In the politically charged climate of the time, research and psychology suffered severely. Cultural Revolution turned the entire society upside down. Western theories were viewed as a tool for exploiting the working class and a false bourgeois science, which contradicted with the Marxist framework of historical materialism.

3.4 Multiple Rebirths of Psychology: 1976-Present
In 1976, the study of psychology in China entered a period of rapid development. Chinese economic reform launched an open-door policy to the outside world in the late 1970s, and psychology was rehabilitated as a scientific discipline. In 1977, the Chinese Psychological Society was reinaugurated. And next year, the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and many university sections and departments of psychology were reinstated, including those at Peking University, Beijing Normal University, East China Normal University, and Hangzhou University. Meanwhile, many Chinese psychologists visited other countries, and psychologists from abroad visited China and lectured in China’s universities. Since 1979, large numbers of scholars and students from mainland China were sent to the West for study or research. China’s psychological research team has been growing rapidly over the last thirty years and is beginning to take its place in international psychology. With the development of China’s economy, the study of psychology is becoming increasingly important.

4. Soviet psychology and the Chinese response
4.1 Oriented Toward Exotic Ideas
The advent of the May Fourth Movement in 1919 brought forth a challenge to the Confucian political structure, as a strong student movement sought to overthrow the feudal system with which China had been saddled for centuries and to re-evaluate traditional thinking. The attention paid to Western science in the 1920s spread the seeds for China’s receptiveness to many Western subjects and led to their becoming disciplines taught in institutions of higher education: psychology was one such discipline. By the end of the 1920s and 1930s, not only universities but also many teacher colleges were instructing their pupils in the ideas of Freud, Watson, McDougall, Piaget, Lewin, and Kohler using translated texts and essays.
At the beginning of the 20th century, some early Chinese psychologists had adopted the Western ideas of behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and Gestalt psychology, and the works of Pavlov, Bekhterev, and Komilov were translated from Russian. Pavlov and the conditioned response have predominated in basic theory. Sechenov’s research into the physiology of the nervous system and cortical reflexes, and the early experiments of Pavlov on conditioned reflexes led a new road in Chinese psychology. Lenin’s theory of reflexion, combined with Pavlov’s conception of higher nervous activity, became the cornerstone of Chinese psychology.
Later, Marxism became more important than Pavlovianism. As early as the 1930s, some Chinese psychologists tried to take dialectical materialism as the guiding principle in their work. Pan was dissatisfied with the various schools of Western psychology when he studied psychology in the USA in the 1920s. After returning to China, he read Lenin’s Materialism and Empirico-criticism in Shanghai in 1933, and he found that many standpoints argued for in the book provided meaningful solutions for basic theoretical problems in psychology which had not been solved until that time (Pan, 1987). Pan gave a series of lectures about theoretical psychology. In them, he consciously applied dialectical materialism to the basic theoretical problems of psychology. Meanwhile, Pan (1984, 1987) pointed out psychology should be pursued under the guidance of dialectical materialism because only dialectical materialism can help psychologists overcome the defects of traditional psychology and explore scientifically the nature of human beings and human psychological activities (Yue, 1994). Gao (1979) had advanced some principles that can be used to build psychology on the basis of Marxist philosophical theory, and Ching (1980) held that dialectical materialism must guide psychological science. In this period, Shu Pan, Juefu Gao, Zeru Lu and Yicen Guo wrote articles or books introducing Soviet psychology to the Chinese. Guo’s Outlines of Modern Psychology, published in 1937, was the first book written under the guise of dialectical materialism in China (Yue, 1994).
It was a main theme of both Sovietand Chinese psychology, that theory or the evolution of a Marxist psychology was consonant with dialectical materialism. The Marxist-Leninist view, based on dialectical materialism, had been tenacious, with only a slightly added Chinese flavor. In fact, from the 1920s through the 1940s, Chinese psychology was oriented mainly toward Western psychology. Experimental approaches were emphasized, and Chinese psychologists were strongly influenced by the schools of functionalism, behaviorism, and the Freudians. Psychology was basically an imported product whose general development was slow because of the unstable social environment in China during this period.

4.2 Oriented Towards Political Pressure
China was heavily influenced by the former Soviet Union. The Soviet Communist Party (which helped with the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921) was considered by the Chinese to be a successful model of the socialist system. Therefore, it was a natural choice for the Chinese Communist Party to adopt socialism when it founded the new China. After 1949, Marxism-Leninism became a dominating ideology in China, and Marxist dialectical materialism had been considered foundational to Chinese psychology (Gao, 1985). In the process of reconstruction, the new psychology took Marxism-Leninism and Maoism as its underlying philosophical principles, and Soviet psychology became a model of Chinese psychology. Chinese psychology was guided by the slogan “Learn from the Soviet Psychology” (Barabanshchikova & Koltsova, 1989). Contacts with Western psychology were curtailed, and Soviet psychology became a model for Chinese psychologists for it was considered to be the science best conforming to the ideology of the victorious class of the working people. Meanwhile, books by Soviet psychologists (Pavlov, Luria, Sechenov, etc.) were translated into Chinese; Chinese students and postgraduates were sent to study in Russia rather than in the United States. Pavlovian dimensions of Soviet psychology were imported into China, and his theory of conditioned reflex was the main theoretical approach of Chinese psychology. The belief that Marxism was the only correct doctrine not only in economics and politics but in science as well (psychology no exception) was gaining ground.
To understand the Soviet influence on Chinese psychology one must consider the rigid Chinese adherence to the two-camp thesis. For the Chinese, the post-war international system was structurally bipolar. To be certain, this dichotomous view of international politics had its genesis in the worldview of the Yan’an leadership. The two camps were socialist and imperialist. They were headed by the Soviet Union and the United States respectively. At this time it was widely held that psychology, based as it was upon Western ideas would need to be revised to fit better into the new social and political situation. Like other intellectuals, psychologists had to study Marxist philosophy and their discipline had to be practiced. Freud’s psychoanalysis theory was denounced as pansexualism. All the psychologists learned and used Pavlov’s theory and followed the model of the former Soviet Union.
In the latter years of the 1950’s and with the more recent Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution beginning in 1965, the impact has been unprecedentedly great. During the 1950s, the Soviet bureaucracy served as advisor to Mao Tse Tung and others in the political power structure (Jenni, 1999). Given the particular interpretation of communist ideology and practice of the times, psychology was seen as subversive, capitalist, and imperialist. The system remained intact even after the relationship between China and the former Soviet Union broke up for political reasons. The prolonged existence of the system could be attributed to the fact that, having adopted a closed-door system, the Chinese government did not keep in touch with world issues and changes. The Systemic problems peaked during the devastating Cultural Revolution, which turned the entire society upside down. In the politically charged climate of the time, research on psychology suffered severely. Indeed, running through the history of psychology in Communist China was a conflict between two underlying philosophies. One of these sees the subject matter of psychology to be processes universal in man, as in Soviet psychology, while the other sees psychology in the light of the conflict of economic classes, as in recent Chinese development.
In China, confounding political matters with academic ones led to the suppression of certain subfields in psychology. For example, social psychology and psychological testing were abolished “on the grounds that the former ignored the class nature of social groups, and the latter stressed too heavily individual differences rather than social differences” (Jing, 1994). The only social psychology articles then published were criticisms of the bourgeois and idealist values of Western psychology. As Brown (1983) noted, Western theories were viewed as a tool for exploiting the working class and a false bourgeois science, which contradicted the Marxist framework of historical materialism.
As we know, the influence of politics on psychology has at times been strong. Leung and Zhang (1995) note, “even though it is a science, psychology could be construed as an ideology and hence a threat to the doctrine promulgated by the ruling regime or by influential segments of society.” During the period of the Cultural Revolution, psychology was attacked by the extreme leftist revolutionaries as a “bourgeois pseudo-science,” and was uprooted completely as a scientific discipline. Chinese psychology, or in other words, psychology in China, thereby, stands as an acute example of a discipline peculiarly sensitive to ideological influence. Its development was buffeted by enormous political upheavals, and these interruptions had a very strong and very mixed influence.

4.3 Oriented Towards Social Need and Practical Applications
Since it was introduced into China at the turn of the century, psychology has followed a difficult path to arrive at its current standing. However, with China’s open-door to the outside world and market economic reform from the late 1970s, and particularly, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Soviet influence has faded away, and both American and European traditions of psychology have become the dominated paradigm of Chinese psychology. Psychology in China is rehabilitating as a scientific discipline. Psychologists have reached a consensus on building psychology with Chinese characteristics (Chen, 1993; Shi, 1989). Yue (1994) reflected on the need for Chinese psychologists to strengthen their theoretical roots and bind their work closely to life in China. Wang (1993) concluded that much recent Chinese psychological research has been closely linked with economic and social reform, technological developments, and applications of psychology (e.g., the design of Chinese language computers, the effects of the single-child policy). Most research projects are therefore oriented toward society’s need and practical applications. As we have seen, the development of Chinese psychology is closely linked with the social environment and with government policy. This link will continue and will orient most psychological research toward practical applications.

5. Discuss: knowledge production and transfer
For a variety of reasons, psychology was seen from the beginning of its importation to be a foreign discipline, initially American-European, and later Marxist and Soviet. In the second decade of the People’s Republic of China it became progressively Maoist in outlook, only to be outlawed subsequently as a bourgeois discipline. It then re-emerged with a broadened scope and aims, as China once again became receptive to ideas from inside and outside the culture. It is a process of knowledge production and transfer. Knowledge is created and transferred in social sciences and humanities in general, and in psychology in particular. As we known, social knowledge is knowledge in communication and knowledge in action. Communication by definition involves movements of thoughts, transformation of meanings and contents of knowledge. There can be no social knowledge unless formed, maintained, diffused and transformed within society, either between individuals or between individuals and groups, subgroups and cultures. Social knowledge is about the dynamics of stability and change.
The emergence of a new, more social perspective in the psychology of groups involved the gradual reconstruction of a social representations system through the processes of assimilation and accommodation. Social representations processes are transformed in the organism-environment-culture system. Within the realm of the social sciences the organism-environment-culture system embraces the individual, both as a scientist and as a member of society; it embraces the object of study in the research setting as well as in society and everyday life; and it embraces the community of scientists as well as the broader culture. Moscovici developed social representations theory in order to describe and explain the transformation of common-sense knowledge as the innovations and discoveries of science diffuse within society. Science is conceived as a human endeavor in which individuals, who have internalized the language and beliefs of their community, contribute to and evaluate knowledge. Scientifically, research, like any other activity, is a culturally and historically situated activity which is ongoing and open-ended, always open to revision and change. This does not imply an extreme relativism or extreme social constructionism. Such a position could not explain the phenomenal success of the sciences, nor could it explain the transformation of science. Rather, it expresses a reality which is founded in the organism-environment-culture system. Social representations theory, as an expression of the social constructionist paradigm, constitutes a framework in which to develop a social psychology of science in China.
This paper presents an overview of how Chinese psychology was influenced by Soviet psychology, and the social processes leading to such knowledge production and transfer. More generally, it indicates a form of social thought. Social representations are practical and communicable ways of thinking that are oriented towards understanding and mastery of the environment. As Jodelet (1988) states, the concept of social representation indicated a specific form of knowledge, i.e. common-sense knowledge, the contents of which reveal the operation of processes that are generative and that (serve) distinct social purpose. From the perspective of social representations, the rise and decline of Soviet influence on Chinese psychology well illustrate how political-economic-ideological forces affect the production and transformation of scientific knowledge, and such knowledge is always produced through interaction and communication, between the particular groups of people and their contexts.
The field of psychology has long been dominated by Western theories, data, practitioners, and subjects. Within the past some decades, however, a growing body of psychological research on Chinese people has added rich new data and insights to our understanding of both culture-specific and universal learning, thinking, and behavior. We have seen that throughout China’s developm. Early, Chinese psychology became a graft product of Western and Soviet psychology. Chinese psychologists had adopted the Western ideas of behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and Gestalt psychology, and the works of Pavlov, Bekhterev, and Komilov were translated from Russian. Chinese psychology will certainly benefit from learning from Western advanced psychology and Soviet psychology.
However, to interpret the mental phenomena and behavior of the Chinese people, attention must also be focused on the theoretical construction of China’s indigenous psychological heritage traced through traditional Chinese culture. Indigenous psychology strives toward developing a ‘system of psychological knowledge based on scientific research that is sufficiently compatible with the studied phenomena and their ecological, economic, social, cultural, and historical contexts. The adherence to the indigenous culture in modern Chinese psychology will place world psychology in a broader framework and expand psychology to a more complete body of knowledge. Nowadays, however, more and more scholars taking the cross-cultural view of psychology (Matsumoto, 2000) have realized that it is not appropriate simply to apply Western theories to explain the behavior of the Chinese or any other cultural group.
Today, it is seen as a valuable and necessary source of information and practice as China meets the demanding challenges of economic and cultural transformation. It may be expected that psychology will play an important role in the attainment of China’s present goal to modernize industry, agriculture, science, and technology. The goal is to contribute to economic development and national modernization. It began a more favorable environment for the present development of Chinese psychology. Most research projects are therefore oriented toward society’s needs and practical applications.

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