Zhipeng Gao

Dr. Zhipeng Gao received his PhD from York University in 2018, with interdisciplinary training in Chinese psychology. His research explores how, in China’s socialist and economic reform eras, various forms of cultural politics permeate academic and lay discourses about human subjects and regulate human conduct. In particular, he examines two seemingly opposite phenomena: one the one hand, the historical construction and reception of ideals – such as the “new socialist human”, the altruistic role model Lei Feng, and the virtue of thrift; and, on the other hand, the discursive production of moral deviance – such as the scapegoating of the elderly generations. His select publications can be found in History of Science, History of Psychology, Narrative Inquiry, Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, Annual Review of Critical Psychology, The Praeger Handbook of Social Justice and Psychology, Chinese Sociological Dialogue, Encyclopaedia of Critical Psychology, and Acta Psychologica Sinica (心理学报).

Representative Publications
(Forthcoming). Forging Marxist psychology in China’s Cold War geopolitics, 1949-1965. History of Psychology, Special Issue “History of psychology and psychiatry in the global world” edited by H. Y. Wu.
(Forthcoming). “The person who gains the heart of the people reigns the world”: A history of psychology in China. In H. Chiang. (Ed.) The making of the human sciences in China: Historical and conceptual foundations, Leiden: Brill.
Gao, Z. and Bischoping, K. (2018). The emergence of an elder-blaming discourse in 21st-century China. Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, 33(2), 197-215, Special Issue “Elder-care issues in Southeast and East Asia” edited by L. L. Thang & W-J. J. Yeung.
(2015). Pavlovianism in China: Politics and differentiation across scientific disciplines in the Maoist era. In H. Chiang (Ed.), Special Issue “Ordering the social: History of the human sciences in modern China”, History of Science, 53 (1), 57-85.