My parents had Copaganda The Show on in the room, and a Chinese character talked about how her parents were doctors during the cultural revolution, but were accused of using bourgeois science and were sentenced to reeducation. I don’t know enough about the cultural revolution to know anything about that, so I googled. Naturally I found myself on Wikipedia (blech) where they talked about a variety of “bourgeois pseudoscience” ranging from phrenology and eugenics to psychology and sociology. These latter two were specific to the PRC. Of course I know better than to automatically believe NATOpedia, especially on topics like these, but I don’t know any better places to look for accurate information, particularly in English. So I have a few questions.

  1. Where can I go to find these answers? I am aware of ProleWiki, but a lot of the pages I’ve seen have been more summary and less in-depth talks about these things.

  2. Is psychology and potentially psychiatry still considered bourgeois science? I have a variety of psychiatric disorders, and I would be upset if my communist utopia did not see fit to help me deal with them. I have heard of anti-psychiatry, and some random dude claiming it is popular on the left? Not jumping to believe them, but instead asking people who have a better chance of actually knowing.

  3. Is there any truth that the PRC did take these actions? Do they still? If I were to move to China, would I be unable to get psychiatric meds?

  • Commiejones@lemmygrad.ml
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    6 days ago

    There were problems in the implementation of the cultural revolution. A major cause of the problems was the bottom up methods of justice but this was also a major part of its success. The goal was to preempt counter revolution by rooting out liberalism and in this regard it was a great success.

    On the down side some people were wrongly accused and there were many cases of mob justice. Some people used it to settle scores. Some legitimate crimes against the revolution were punished far more harshly than deserved. Some times mobs lashed out in ignorance at things they didn’t understand.

    They broke 10 eggs to make a 3 egg omelet.

    The people who escaped to tell stories however… There were many people who thought because they were well educated they deserved money and power. They were well educated because their parents had the wealth to get them educated before the revolution. Those people had the money on hand to flee. Those are the people who told the world about what happened. Those people claimed they were persecuted because of their education not because they had a bourgeoise mentality of class superiority.

  • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
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    7 days ago

    I’m not going to comment on a fictional family’s fictional experiences as described on a Western TV show, but as for:

    Is psychology and potentially psychiatry still considered bourgeois science?

    Regardless how they were viewed in the past, they certainly don’t seem to be viewed that way today considering that you can get a degree in these fields from most Chinese universities:

    https://edurank.org/psychology/cn/

    https://edurank.org/medicine/psychiatry/cn/

    If I were to move to China, would I be unable to get psychiatric meds?

    This is a completely different question, and the answer to that is: maybe. It depends on the specific meds that you need. If you currently live in the US then it’s not even guaranteed that you will find your exact same meds even in Europe, because different countries have different laws about what kind of drugs they allow on their market.

    Some that are prescription free in one country may not be in another. Also, sometimes certain drugs are legal but just not made/sold in those countries so you would either have to import them yourself, or you would have buy a local alternative that is effectively identical but is just sold under a different brand name.

    In the case of China this is something that you will have to research beforehand on a case by case basis. But i’m guessing that you can find an equivalent for most things, maybe with a few exceptions since China has stricter drug laws than the US (you probably won’t get opiates very easily for instance).

    Edit: About psychology/psychiatry during the period of the Cultural Revolution, this is not a subject i know much - if anything - about, but a cursory search online shows that articles and books were being written about the psychiatric practices in China at the time as well as in the decade immediately afterward:

    https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-41581-006

    https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/ajp.130.10.1082

    https://cir.nii.ac.jp/crid/1130282271175962112

    https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3109/00048678009159351

    So it would seem that at the very least we can say that the discipline was still active during that period, though perhaps it was practiced differently than today, and differently than it would have been at the time in western countries, as the Chinese were experimenting with more social approaches of solving psychiatric and psychological problems rather than purely clinical and individualistic ones. Whether this has merit or not, i don’t know, i’m not a psychiatrist.

  • NikkiB@lemmygrad.ml
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    7 days ago

    About the cultural revolution, yes, horrific and absurd crimes transpired against more or less innocent people, and the angry mobs shouting about reactionary science were generally wrong. If you were to read Chinese sources from the last few decades, they would form a consensus that the cultural revolution was a series of misguided responses to the challenges of industrialization. Mao in particular believed that economic development was a trivial factor in building communism, the primary factor being a protracted class war against bourgeois elements in society. In its own way, it’s idealism manifested. People are liberated through the satisfaction of their material needs, not the absence of their foes. A very wide net was cast concerning what counted as “bourgeois,” and a lot of people needlessly suffered from the reflexive desire to fight perceived class enemies. If you were to move to China, I’m quite certain you would be able to get your prescriptions filled. It’s not the sixties anymore.

    “Bourgeois science” is a real thing, however. All sciences reflect certain priorities and worldviews, whether they are effective or not. In fact, the “effectiveness” of a given science is judged through the lens of these priorities, and the question of what priorities are worth considering is ideological. I would stray away from thinking in terms of “is psychology reactionary?” and instead think “what elements of psychology are reactionary? Are there any that aren’t?”

    More on antispych stuff: people who subscribe to this belief system understand psychiatry as a mechanism by which people’s rights are usurped on the basis that the mentally ill or disabled don’t know what’s good for them, that their judgement has been clouded by the delusions their sick brains induce, and therefore others should make decisions for them. Psychiatric “medicine,” in this sense, becomes a mechanism of dehumanization. A person suffering from cancer could refuse treatment, and physicians would respect this. A psychotic who does the same thing has a slim chance of receiving the same grace. Some leftists think this way, others don’t. Either way, psychiatric medicine exists in China.