Chen Li

Introduction

Chen Li (陈立, 1902–2004) opened two doors for Chinese psychology and lived long enough to see who walked through them. The first was scientific: a London doctorate under Charles Spearman, followed by postdoctoral months in Berlin at Wolfgang Köhler's psychological institute — a pedigree few anywhere in the 1930s could match. The second was industrial: his 1935 monograph A Survey of Industrial Psychology (《工业心理学概观》), the first of its kind in China, built from field studies of locomotive works and cotton mills, founded a discipline — industrial and organizational psychology in China — that now underwrites everything from ergonomics to personnel selection. He co-founded the Chinese Psychological Society in 1936, led Zhejiang University's psychology and later Hangzhou University, and remained active so long that he was supervising doctoral students in his late nineties. He died in March 2004, aged one hundred and one.

Early Life and Education

Chen was born in July 1902 in Pingjiang County, Hunan, into poverty that a scholarship interrupted: he topped a seven-province joint entrance examination to attend the Bowen school in Wuchang, took his BS at Hujiang University in 1928, and won a provincial scholarship to Britain in 1930. At the University of London he worked under Spearman, the inventor of the g factor, completing his PhD in 1933 — by which time he had already moved, in December 1932, to the Berlin Psychological Institute under Köhler, just as the Nazi seizure of power was ending the German chapter of Gestalt psychology.

Academic and Professional Career

Returning to China in the mid-1930s, he was jointly appointed by the Academia Sinica Institute of Psychology and Tsinghua University as industrial psychology researcher, and took psychology to the factory floor — fatigue and efficiency studies at the Nankou locomotive works and the Dasheng cotton mill. In 1936 he was one of the thirty-four co-founders of the Chinese Psychological Society. War displaced him through Changsha and Guilin until 1939, when President Zhu Kezhen — who had taken over Zhejiang University after Guo Renyuan's ouster — brought him to Hangzhou, beginning a sixty-five-year association with the university and its successors. At Zhejiang University he headed the education department and served as dean of liberal arts; he went on to lead Zhejiang Normal College and then Hangzhou University (president from around 1979, later honorary president), where he built industrial psychology into a degree-granting discipline. He served as vice-chairman of the Chinese Psychological Society and sat on national political consultative bodies into the 1990s.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Industrial psychology as a field

A Survey of Industrial Psychology (1935) was written in three months, but it set the agenda for half a century: worker selection, fatigue, working conditions, and the plain argument — radical for the time — that industry should be organized around human capacities rather than the reverse. Chinese human factors and organizational psychology treats this book as its founding document and Chen Li as its founder.

Science administration with staying power

His second contribution was persistence: keeping a discipline alive through war, revolution, and Cultural Revolution, and rebuilding it after. The discipline's own historians credit him as industrial psychology's "founder and originator," and his students — and his students' students — still run the field's major laboratories.