Measuring Chinese minds: mental ability, race, and nationalism in modern China

The measurement of the human mind, and the ranking of people based on it, was an important yet highly controversial development in modern science. This dissertation examines this history in the Chinese context by focusing on the practices of a group of Chinese scientists I term ‘mind measurers’ during the Republican era (1911–1949). They used brain anatomy, intelligence testing, historiometry, and animal experiments to investigate questions regarding their compatriots’ mental ability. Their purposes were to demonstrate that Chinese people’s capabilities were not inferior to Westerners’ and to gain insights into the most suitable ways to reform the Chinese nation. The threat of imperialism, underpinned by scientific racism, combined with anxieties over China’s intellectual stagnation, fuelled mind measurers’ aspirations to establish ‘facts’ about Chinese minds by turning to seemingly objective numbers and common metrics. However, China’s realities of political and geographical fragmentation, as well as its cultural and textual traditions, and limited state capacity and scarce resources, imposed significant constraints on mind measurement. This dissertation suggests that it was within the tension between aspirations and constraints that mind measurers strategically adapted their practices, thereby fostering a unique discourse on racial improvement and shaping Chinese racial nationalism. Previous work by historians of the science of the mind has paid great attention to Western innovations and colonial exploitation. The Chinese case, while underscoring its global and local entanglements, highlights the complex nature of mind measurement as a means of empowerment as well as oppression.