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Thought Reform of Chinese Intellectuals: A Psychiatric Evaluation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Robert J. Lifton
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Extract

The Chinese Communist program of szu-hsiang kai-tsao or “thought reform”is unique both as a social experiment and as a laboratory for cross-cultural psychiatric study. Applied to Westerners and Chinese, to professors, students, and peasants, it combines a remarkably widespread dissemination with impressive emotional force and depth.

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Articles
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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , November 1956 , pp. 75 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1956

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References

1 The study was sponsored for the first seven months by the Asia Foundation, and for the remainder by the Washington School of Psychiatry under a grant from the Research and Development Division of the Surgeon General's Office. I am grateful to these organizations for their support, but accept sole responsibility for all opinions expressed.

For invaluable intellectual exchange and stimulation, I am greatly indebted to Dr. David McK. Rioch of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Conrad Brandt and Benjamin Schwartz of Harvard University, Howard Boorman of Columbia University, and A. Doak Barnett of the American Universities Field Staff.

2 Results of this work with Westerners have been presented elsewhere: Lifton, “‘Thought Reform’ of Western Civilians in Chinese Communist Prisons,” Psychiatry, XIX (1956), 173–195Google Scholar, and Lifton, “Chinese Communist ‘Thought Reform’: The Assault upon Identity and Belief,” presented before the Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, Chicago, May 1956, to be published.

3 Ssu-ch'i, Ai, “On Problems of Ideological Reform,” Hsueh hsi, III, No. 7, 01 1, 1951.Google Scholar

4 “Correcting Unorthodox Tendencies in Learning, the Party and Literature and Art,” in C. Brandt, B. Schwartz, and J. K. Fairbank, A Documentary History of Chinese Communism (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 392.Google Scholar

5 In this paper I will make no attempt to explore the many important questions which thought reform raises in regard to psychiatric theory, such as the significance of the occurrence of guilt and shame in Chinese culture. The fact that both emotions are effectively employed in the process would tend to add support to Singer's criticisms of the concept of guilt and shame cultures, in which China is customarily placed in the “shame” category. Piers, G. and Singer, M. B., Shame and Guilt (Springfield, III., 1953)Google Scholar. It is true, however, that the sense of shame is the more important sanction in this all-Chinese application of thought reform. For further understanding, it is necessary to compare the inner meanings of these emotions to individual Chinese and Western subjects, which I intend to do in later publications.

6 See, for example, discussions of these trends in Kiang, Wen-Han, The Chinese Student Movement (New York, 1948)Google Scholar, Lang, Olga, Chinese Family and Society (New Haven, 1946)Google Scholar, Levy, Marion J. Jr., The Family Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass., 1949).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Erikson, Erik H., “The Problem of Ego Identity,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, IV (1956), 56CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Erikson, , “On the Sense of Inner Identity,” in Health and Human Relations (New York, 1953).Google Scholar

8 Erikson, , “Ego Identity.”Google Scholar

9 Lifton, , “Thought Reform of Western Civilians.”Google Scholar

10 See Inkeles, A., “The Totalitarian Mystique: Some Impressions of the Dynamics of Totalitarian Society,” in Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass., 1954).Google Scholar

11 Confucian influence is emphasized by: Brandt, Schwartz, and Fairbank; Gourley, Walter, “The Chinese Communist Cadre: Key to Political Control,” (Russian Research Center, Harvard University, 02 1952)Google Scholar; and Walker, Richard L., China Under Communism: The First Five Years (New Haven, 1955).Google Scholar

12 How to Be a Good Communist (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1951).Google Scholar

13 “Effects of ‘Thought Reform’ on the Masses,” from the Times (London), reprinted in the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong) 10 12, 1954.Google Scholar

14 It is true that public officials in China were traditionally required to accept blame for such things as natural catastrophes, and “confess” that their unworthiness might have been responsible. But this did not involve real shame or a public “loss of face.”

15 See footnote 6.

16 Bunzel, R., and Weakland, J. H., “An Anthropological Approach to Chinese Communism,”Google Scholar Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures, undated.

17 See Chen, Theodore Hsi-en and Chiu, Sin-Ming, “Thought Reform in Communist China,” FES, XXIV (12 1955), 177.Google Scholar

18 Respect for “human feelings” rather than rigid laws or regulations is another important traditional Chinese value which thought reform violates, although in another sense, it gives great recognition to the importance of influencing human feelings.