From anticolonialism to postcolonialism: The emergence of Chinese indigenous psychology in Taiwan

This article gives a brief history of the emergence of Chinese indigenous psychology from the background of Westernized social psychology in Taiwan, and reviews the various debates that have surrounded the first decade of its progress from the perspectives of ontology, epistemology, and methodology. Careful analysis of these debates indicates that their themes are similar to dilemmas encountered by indigenous psychologists in other regions of the world. It is argued that breakthroughs need to be made on three levels for the development of indigenous psychology, namely, philosophical reflection, theoretical construction, and empirical research. There are three philosophical assumptions in cross‐cultural psychology—absolutism, universalism, and relativism—which correspond to three research orientations—imposed etic, derived etic, and emic. In order to achieve the goal of establishing a global psychology, then indigenous psychologists in non‐Western societies must change their thinking from anticolonialism to postcolonialism; switch their philosophical assumption from relativism to universalism; assimilate the Western academic tradition; adopt a multiparadigm approach to construct formal theories on the functioning and mechanisms of the universal mind; use these to analyse the specific mentalities of a given culture; and use the results of this theoretical construction as a frame of reference for empirical research.