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Psychology Around the World In the dark days of China's CulturalRevolution, the government closed the nation's psychology departments andresearch institutes. It banished psychologists to remote areas of thecountryside to work the land. It dismissed psychology itself as a bourgeoispseudo-science promoting a false ideology of individual differences. In the 25 years since the CulturalRevolution ended, China's attitude toward psychology has changed dramatically.Today the government recognizes that psychology has an important role to playin the country's development, whether that means helping citizens cope withrapid economic change or helping employers choose the most suitable employees. In fact, a recent government report listedpsychology as one of half a dozen disciplines that deserve high priority whenit comes to government funding over the next few decades. "In order to achieve all-aroundmodernization, China is to draw on the achievements of civilization the worldover, and to assimilate any advanced scientific and technological achievementsfrom other countries," says Qicheng Jing, a past president of the ChinesePsychological Society and a professor at the Institute of Psychology at theChinese Academy of Science in Beijing. "Chinese psychology, a discipline stronglyaffected by national policy and social environment, is going to seize thisopportunity to develop itself." Priority areas Western-stylepsychology arrived in China at the beginning of the 20th century, brought byChinese scientists who had studied in the West. For a few decades, thediscipline flourished. By the early 1920s, these psychologists had establishedthe country's first psychology laboratory and department, first psychologyjournal and the Chinese Psychological Society. But with the outbreak of waragainst Japan in 1937 and the world war that followed, further development ofthe discipline ground to a halt. With the founding ofthe People's Republic of China in 1949, psychology rebounded, but with a Soviettwist. According to a Chinese Psychological Society report, Pavlov's theory ofconditioned reflexes dominated in this period. The end of Mao's decade-longCultural Revolution in 1976 brought renewed interest in Western psychology. Until recently, mostChinese psychologists focused on teacher training. Although about half of thenation's psychologists still work in education, new needs have emerged.According to Jing and other Chinese psychologists, psychologists' toppriorities include the following: Counseling. Theintroduction of a free-market economy has brought China increasing prosperity.But with that prosperity have come soaring rates of anxiety and depression,says Houcan Zhang, a psychology professor at Beijing Normal University andincoming vice president of the International Union of Psychological Science."People can't adjust to such rapid economic development and socialchange," she says, noting that most schools and universities now havecounseling centers. Although psychotherapy is catching on in the big cities,those in rural areas have little access to psychological services. Those unmetneeds can be deadly. A 1997 report by the World Bank, the World HealthOrganization and Harvard University estimated that China accounts for awhopping 44 percent of the world's suicides each year despite having only 22percent of the world's population. Female farmers represent a disproportionatenumber of the victims.Human resources. The shift from a planned economy hasalso prompted psychologists to get involved in the field of human resources. Inthe old days, Zhang explains, the government assigned everyone to their jobsand expected them to keep their posts for life. Nowadays, people are free tofind jobs that suit their interests and abilities. Both the public and privatesector are using psychologists to find the best candidates for jobs, saysZhang.Health psychology. Helping China's immense population stay healthy isanother emerging priority for psychologists. Especially critical is halting arising HIV/AIDS epidemic. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDSestimates that a million Chinese are already infected. "Stopping theepidemic of AIDS in China has mainly been a governmental issue," saysYongming Chen, president of the Chinese Psychological Society. "However,Chinese psychologists have started to pay attention to this problem." A shortage ofpsychologists Achieving these goalswill require many more well-trained psychologists than China currently has.Thanks to psychology's rocky history in China and a bad case of "braindrain," there are only 10,000 psychologists in a country of more than abillion.
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