Pavlovianism in China: Politics and differentiation across scientific disciplines in the Maoist era
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the early 1950s, the Chinese communist party promoted a massive Learning-from-the-Soviet-Union Campaign and made Pavlov’s reflexology the political-academic orthodoxy in physiology, medical science and psychology. In the late 1950s, however, while Pavlov’s theory was continuously advocated by physiologists and medical scientists, it suffered a major setback in psychology as Pavlovian psychology was criticized as being bourgeois and reactionary. How was it possible for such sheer contrast across disciplines to take place within a few years? This paper argues that the greater ideologization of Pavlovian psychology was conditioned by a number of factors: the Sino-Soviet relations, the shifting Chinese communist policies, professional practices, local social conditions, disciplinary cultures and discursive performances. This historical reconstruction rejects a homogenizing view of the relation between politics and science in the Maoist China, and demonstrates ways in which historical localities and dynamics ruptured the overarching political context.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".