In 1935, the Commercial Press in Shanghai published a modest-sized volume on a subject most of its readers likely never heard of. Titled An Overview of Industrial Psychology (工業心理學概觀), this text was written by a young psychologist who was trained in and recently returned from Britain. It was the first in Chinese on the titular subject, which promised to (amid other things) “restore the rightful place of human beings in processes of production.” What was ...