The Human Factor: Work as Science in Modern China

Modern industry has never depended on machines alone. It has also relied on workers who could read uncertain signals, coordinate hand and eye motions, and adapt to changing conditions, all in the interest of keeping production moving. This talk traces how Chinese psychologists made that “human factor” an object of scientific study across the twentieth century its changing political regimes. Beginning with factory investigations and suggestion systems in the 1930s, it follows industrial psychology through wartime testing, socialist labor psychology, engineering psychology, and reform-era manage