The Human Factor: Work as Science in Modern China

Modern industry has never depended on machines alone. It has also relied on workers who could read uncertain signals, coordinate hand and eye motions, and adapt to changing conditions, all in the interest of keeping production moving. This talk traces how Chinese psychologists made that “human factor” an object of scientific study across the twentieth century its changing political regimes. Beginning with factory investigations and suggestion systems in the 1930s, it follows industrial psychology through wartime testing, socialist labor psychology, engineering psychology, and reform-era management psychology. Along the way, psychologists studied a range of topics, from fatigue and skill, perception and motivation, and machine design and workplace organization. At Beijing’s Shijingshan steelworks, for example, they sought to teach novices how to “watch the fire” inside a converter by breaking expert judgment into trainable visual distinctions. Such projects promised to raise output while also advancing the interests of workers, yet they also gave experts and managers new authority to define improvement. By reconstructing these efforts, the talk asks what happened when work became a science: whose knowledge counted, where responsibility for failure was placed, and whether industrial progress could reconcile productivist impulses with the securing of workers’ well-being.

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About the speaker: 

Victor Seow is a historian of science and technology, whose research explores how scientific knowledge, technological artifacts, and forces of production intersect in shaping economic life and environmental landscapes across modern industrial society. He is the author of Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2022), a study of the relationship between energy and power through the history of the region’s onetime largest coal mine. Carbon Technocracy received the Association for Asian Studies’ John Whitney Hall Book Prize, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ Michael H. Hunt Prize in International History, and other awards. At present, Victor is completing his next book, The Human Factor: How Chinese Psychologists Reimagined the Science of Work in the Machine Age. In 2025, his work was recognized with the Sarton Prize for the History of Science from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.