Jing Qicheng

Introduction

Jing Qicheng (荆其诚, 1926–2008) stood at the doorway between Chinese psychology and the international discipline, and for two decades he was the person holding it open. A student of psychology at Fu Jen Catholic University who rose through the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, he did rigorous experimental work on color vision and visual perception — co-authoring Color Science (《色度学》, 1979), the foundational Chinese text in the field — and then converted his scientific standing into diplomacy: as president of the Chinese Psychological Society (1984–89) and the first Chinese psychologist elected to the executive committee of the International Union of Psychological Science, he shepherded Chinese psychology back into the world congresses from which it had been absent. He later served as vice president of the Union and was elected to the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World.

Early Life and Education

Jing was born on March 3, 1926, in Shenyang, and moved to Beijing as a child. He entered Fu Jen Catholic University in 1942, graduated from its psychology department in 1947, and completed a master's in the university's graduate institute in 1950 — training that straddled the Western-run curriculum of Fu Jen and the new institutional order that followed.

Academic and Professional Career

He spent his entire research career at the CAS Institute of Psychology, becoming a full researcher and doctoral supervisor and later serving as deputy director. His perception and psychophysics work of the 1960s–80s fed the Color Science monograph of 1979. In 1980 the Chinese Psychological Society joined the International Union of Psychological Science — the single most consequential opening in modern Chinese psychology's history — and in 1984, at the Mexico International Congress, Jing was elected to the Union's executive committee, later rising to vice president. He presided over the Chinese Psychological Society from 1984 to 1989 and edited the psychology volume of the second edition of the Encyclopedia of China. He died on September 28, 2008, aged eighty-two.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Color science in Chinese

Color Science (1979) was built on his laboratory's psychophysics of color vision and contrast sensitivity, and it remained the standard Chinese reference for a field — color measurement — on which perception research, lighting engineering, and industry all draw.

Re-entry into world psychology

His signature contribution was representational: carrying Chinese psychology into the IUPsyS, sitting on its executive when almost no Chinese psychologist had a international institutional presence, and using that position to normalize exchange — visiting professorships, joint congresses, and the return of Chinese students to international graduate programs. The globalization of Chinese psychology after 1980 has many authors, but the first chapter is his.