Yang Kuo-shu

Introduction

Yang Kuo-shu (楊國樞, 1932–2018) asked the question that reorganized Chinese-language psychology: what happens to a science of behavior when its concepts are all borrowed? Taiwan's first psychology doctorate, a professor at National Taiwan University from the 1960s and an academician of Academia Sinica, he spent his career arguing that Chinese psychology built entirely on translated constructs — measuring Chinese people with instruments built for American samples — would remain a provincial branch office of someone else's discipline. The indigenous psychology movement he launched from the late 1970s onward became a genuinely international research program, with journals, conferences, and a generation of scholars (among them Kwang-kuo Hwang, Chi-yue Chiu and Kaiping Peng) who turned its questions into mainstream cultural psychology. His own constructs — the social-oriented versus individual-oriented self, and the distinctly Chinese pattern of authority orientation — remain standard vocabulary in the field.

Early Life and Education

Yang was born in mainland China in 1932 and moved with his family to Taiwan in the upheavals of the late 1940s. He studied psychology at National Taiwan University, joined its faculty around 1959, and earned his doctorate in the United States (University of Illinois) — returning as the first Taiwanese psychologist to hold a psychology PhD.

Academic and Professional Career

He spent his career at NTU, twice chairing the psychology department, while building the institutions the movement needed: the series of symposia on Chinese personality and social psychology from the early 1970s (the first, with the anthropologist Li Yiyuan, produced The Character of the Chinese People, 1972), the journal Indigenous Psychological Research in Chinese Societies (founded 1993), and the doctoral programs that trained the movement's second generation. He was elected an academician of Academia Sinica, and his moral seriousness extended beyond the academy into Taiwan's democratic movement, at real personal risk under martial law. He died on July 17, 2018, at eighty-six.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The indigenization argument

Yang's programmatic essays — most famously the case for building a Chinese indigenous psychology — shifted the field's default from translation to construction: derive concepts from Chinese social life (face, renqing, family relations, authority), test them rigorously, and only then compare across cultures. The argument now reads as the founding document of cultural psychology in the Chinese-speaking world and a model later taken up in India, Africa, and Latin America.

His own theoretical work mapped how Chinese selfhood is organized around relationships and hierarchy — the social- versus individual-orientation distinction, and the psychology of submission to authority — empirical ground for the models of relational selves later tested by Zhu Ying's memory studies and Hwang's formal theories.