Gong Yaoxian

Introduction

Gong Yaoxian (龚耀先, 1923–2009) built the measurement infrastructure that Chinese clinical psychology still runs on. Working from the Xiangya medical complex in Changsha, he directed the Chinese standardization of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale — the WAIS-RC, completed in 1982 with national norms in 1983, and to this day the standard Chinese adult IQ test — and went on to lead the revision or development of some twenty-one psychological tests, by common account roughly half the instruments in routine Chinese use. He founded the Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychology in 1993, trained generations of assessment psychologists, and was, at his death, widely called the father of Chinese clinical psychology — a title an American colleague had used in a memorial address and Chinese colleagues adopted without argument.

Early Life and Education

Gong was born in March 1923 in Yiyang, Hunan. He graduated in July 1950 from the education department of Huazhong University and was assigned to Xiangya Medical College, where the union of education and medicine that defined his career began.

Academic and Professional Career

At Xiangya (1950–61) he worked on clinical psychology and clinical EEG, introducing Pavlovian theory into Chinese psychopathology research. From 1962, at the Second Xiangya Hospital of Hunan Medical College (now part of Central South University), he built medical psychology into a departmental discipline, founding its teaching-and-research section in 1978 and becoming professor in 1983. That same year the United States National Academy of Sciences invited him as one of six Chinese scholars to lecture at Harvard. He chaired the psychological assessment committee of the China Mental Health Association and the medical psychology committee of the Chinese Psychological Society, and founded and edited the Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychology (1993). His honors include National Science and Technology Progress awards (second class, 2000; third class, 1992), National Outstanding Teacher (1989), and the "May 1" Labor Medal. He died on September 3, 2009, at eighty-six.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The Wechsler scales in Chinese

The WAIS-RC (1982) was a test case for whether Western instruments could be made to measure anything in Chinese — norms, item floor and ceiling, urban–rural balance all had to be rebuilt. Its success, followed by the Chinese Wechsler scales for children and preschoolers (the C-WYCSI, 1988) and a culture-fair nonverbal test normed across five Chinese ethnic groups, established assessment as an empirical discipline in China rather than a translation service.

A discipline with institutions

Between the journal, the textbooks (Psychological Assessment, Medical Psychology), and the decades of doctoral training at Central South University, Gong made clinical assessment a career path in Chinese medicine and education. If Zhang Houcan built Chinese psychometrics for the classroom, Gong built its clinical wing — the two together created the measurement culture every Chinese psychology experiment now inherits.