Cao Richang

Introduction

Cao Richang (曹日昌, 1911–1969) packed several careers into a life the Cultural Revolution cut short at fifty-eight. A Tsinghua-trained psychologist with a Cambridge doctorate on the distribution of practice in learning, he became the organizing secretary of Chinese psychology's institution-building decades: first director of the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences when it was founded in 1951, vice-chairman of the Chinese Psychological Society, and editor-in-chief of Acta Psychologica Sinica. His edited textbook General Psychology (《普通心理学》, 1964) was the standard university text for a generation of Chinese students. He died in March 1969, persecuted in the political campaigns; the discipline he helped build later rehabilitated his name, and his hometown dedicated a memorial hall to him.

Early Life and Education

Cao was born in January 1911 in Shulu County, Hebei (his birthplace is today Xinji City, which now hosts the memorial hall). He entered Beiping Normal University's preparatory program in 1929, transferred to Tsinghua University's psychology department in 1932, and graduated in 1935 — his first published work, an analysis of Thorndike's learning psychology, appeared in 1936 in one of the first issues of China's newly founded psychology journal. He joined the Mass Education Movement researching adult learning, taught at the wartime Southwest Associated University from 1941, and went to the University of Cambridge, taking his PhD in 1948 with experiments on spaced versus massed practice in learning and memory.

Academic and Professional Career

He spent the late 1940s at the University of Hong Kong as its first publicly recruited full-time psychology teacher, then returned to Beijing in 1950 as the new Academy of Sciences organized its institutes. He became the first director of the CAS Institute of Psychology at its founding in 1951, led it through its early reorganizations, and served again as deputy director when it was reconstituted in 1956 — the year Pan Shu arrived as director, with Cao as his deputy in an institution both had imagined. Alongside the institute he edited the field's journal and helped coordinate the Society's affairs. In 1949, on the Party's instruction, he was among those who wrote to Qian Xuesen inviting the rocket scientist's return to China — a measure of the trust he then held. He died in March 1969.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The institution

The Institute of Psychology and the professional journal are the load-bearing walls of organized Chinese psychology, and Cao was there for both at the founding: first director of the one, editor-in-chief of the other. The history of Chinese psychology of the 1950s is largely the history of the institution he ran.

The textbook

General Psychology (1964) gave the People's Republic its first comprehensive, home-written university psychology textbook — assembled from Soviet, Western, and Chinese sources in a period when such synthesis was itself an intellectual achievement. For students of the 1960s through the 1980s, Chinese psychology was this book.

A cautionary biography

Cao's persecution and death in 1969, followed by posthumous rehabilitation, made his story part of the discipline's memory of what political campaigns cost it — the reason his memorial hall in Xinji reads, to visiting psychologists, as both tribute and warning.