Lu Zhiwei

Introduction

Lu Zhiwei (陆志韦, 1894–1970) belongs to the rare species of scholar who leads two disciplines at once. Trained in psychology at the University of Chicago, he produced China's earliest systematic work on memory and its first standardized intelligence tests, then spent two decades as the head of Yenching University — one of China's leading Christian universities — including the war years, when he was detained by the Japanese military after Pearl Harbor. After 1949 he reinvented himself a second time as a linguist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, doing the probability-driven historical phonology and early word-formation studies that helped pull Chinese linguistics into the quantitative age. In the folklore of the discipline he is one half of the formula "Pan in the south, Lu in the north" — with Pan Shu, a co-founding figure of modern Chinese psychology.

Early Life and Education

Lu was born on February 5, 1894, in Nanxun, Zhejiang (his birth name was Lu Baoqi). He graduated from Soochow University in 1913, sailed for the United States in 1915, and took his PhD in psychology at the University of Chicago in 1920, in the department's experimental heyday.

Academic and Professional Career

He returned to China in 1920 to teach psychology at Nanjing Higher Normal School (soon National Southeast University), where he built one of the country's first psychology programs and did the experimental work — on memory and forgetting — that marked the maturation of Chinese laboratory psychology. In the late 1920s he moved to Yenching University in Beijing. He served as acting president in the early 1930s and, from 1934, as president, guiding the university through Japanese occupation: after Pearl Harbor the Japanese army closed Yenching and detained its leadership, Lu among them.

After the university's dissolution in the early 1950s, his career turned to language. He became a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Linguistics, sat on the committees that planned Chinese script reform and Hanyu Pinyin, and headed the preparatory committee for the CAS Institute of Psychology — a quiet last contribution to the discipline he had helped found. He was elected a member (academician) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, commonly dated 1955. He died in Beijing in November 1970, during the Cultural Revolution, at a moment when his pre-1949 record was politically dangerous.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Intelligence testing in Chinese

Lu's 1924 and 1936 revisions of the Binet–Simon scale for Chinese children were among the earliest serious psychometric standardizations conducted in China, a generation before the country had a measurement infrastructure.

Experimental memory research

His early experimental studies of memory and forgetting — in the direct lineage of Ebbinghaus — helped establish that Chinese laboratories could produce internationally legible experimental results, and he was among the first to introduce Pavlovian doctrine to Chinese audiences.

A second career in language

His later linguistic work was continuous with his psychological training: the 1951 monograph on Beijing Mandarin monosyllables and the 1957 Word-Formation in Chinese (《汉语的构词法》), which introduced the "expansion method" for distinguishing words from phrases, brought experimental habits of mind into Chinese philology.