Chen Daqi

Introduction

Chen Daqi (陈大齐, 1886–1983, also known by his courtesy name Chen Bainian) was the person who did the most to make psychology a modern academic discipline in China. Trained in philosophy and psychology at Tokyo Imperial University in the years after the Meiji reforms had carried German experimental psychology into Japanese universities, he brought that inheritance to Peking University, where in 1917 — with the support of the university's transformative chancellor Cai Yuanpei — he established China's first experimental psychology laboratory. A year later he published Psychology: An Outline (《心理学大纲》, 1918), compiled from his lectures and generally regarded as the first university psychology textbook written by a Chinese author. Psychology in China was institutionalized around what he built; his later career, after 1948, moved fully into philosophy in Taiwan, where he became better known under the name Chen Bainian as a logician and scholar of pre-Qin thought.

Early Life and Education

Chen was born in Haiyan County, Zhejiang, in 1886 (some sources give 1887), into the late-Qing literate world in which the classical examination path was collapsing and study in Japan had become the fastest route to modern knowledge. He joined the wave of Chinese students in Tokyo and completed his training in philosophy — with psychology as his specialization — at Tokyo Imperial University in the early 1910s. Japan was then the main conduit through which Chinese scholars encountered Wundt-style laboratory psychology, and Chen absorbed it in that mediated form: German science, filtered through Japanese textbooks and Japanese university practice.

Academic and Professional Career

Chen joined Peking University as a professor in the early 1910s, teaching psychology within the philosophy department in the pattern of the era. In 1917, backed by Cai Yuanpei — himself a former student of Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig — he set up the university's experimental psychology laboratory, the first of its kind in China. (Peking University's psychology department came later, in 1926; the common shorthand that Chen "founded China's first psychology department in 1917" merges two events that should be kept apart.) The laboratory mattered because it fixed the discipline's identity from the start: psychology in China began as an experimental science rather than as moral philosophy or mental healing.

He rose through the university's administration — heading the philosophy department and serving as dean of academic affairs — and trained the small first generation of Chinese psychologists. In 1919 he was among the co-founders of the university's philosophy research society, alongside figures such as Hu Shih. After 1948 he relocated to Taiwan, where his career entered its second act: professor of philosophy at National Taiwan University, dean of its College of Liberal Arts, and a prolific scholar of logic and pre-Qin philosophy. He died in Taipei in January 1983, aged 96.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The first laboratory and the first textbook

The 1917 laboratory and the 1918 Psychology: An Outline are the two facts on which Chen's place in the history of psychology in China rests. The textbook — fifteen chapters covering method, physiological bases, sensation, emotion, and memory — gave Chinese classrooms a psychology written in Chinese rather than translated at second hand, and its compilation from live lectures set the genre for the discipline's early teaching materials.

Institution building

Chen's contribution was less a theory than a foundation: a laboratory, a curriculum, a textbook, and a cohort of students at the moment the discipline could otherwise have failed to take root. Every later landmark of early Chinese psychology — the societies, the institutes, the Chinese Psychological Society tradition — presupposed the academic foothold he established at Peking University.