Carl Rogers in China: 100 Years Later

In the tumultuous life of psychologist Carl Rogers (1902-1987), founder of the modern field of counseling, one of the most important events was his trip to China exactly 100 years ago.

Growing up in a conservative midwestern Protestant farm home, he was prohibited by his religious parents from dancing, playing cards, or attending theaters; after dinner each night, the entire family would read verses aloud from the Bible.

As he poignantly recalled decades later, "I knew my parents loved me, but it would never never have occurred for me to share with them any of my personal or private thoughts or feelings because I knew these would have been judged and found wanting."

Nevertheless, Rogers dutifully followed conservative parental values in joining the YMCA at the University of Wisconsin and becoming so committed to its Christian mission that he was selected as one of 10 students to attend the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) conference in Beijing, China in the spring/summer of 1922.

Twenty years old at the time, Rogers lugged his heavy 25-pound typewriter across seas and continents, recording his observations in a typed diary. He also wrote hundreds of letters and edited a newsletter while aboard his boat to China.

An enthusiastic exponent of Christian values, he gave speeches to thousands of local people and missionaries while touring factories, hospitals, schools, universities, and a prison. In addition, Rogers, with obvious leadership ability, was one of only 10 individuals on the WSCF's Executive Committee and 55 on its General Committee.

On the long voyage from San Francisco to Shanghai, Rogers became close with Henry Burton Sharman, a Canadian theologian whose influential books portrayed Jesus as an iconoclastic humanitarian. Perhaps Sharman hoped to groom Rogers as a future Christian theologian in their many shipboard discussions, but such eventualities were not to be.

Indeed, Rogers came away from the YMCA trip with a more ecumenical and far less sectarian outlook on life. It might be an exaggeration to say that he abandoned conventional Christianity altogether as a result of this excursion, but he seems to have permanently distanced himself from the religion of his parents–and the YMCA leadership–upon returning to the United States.

He rejected an immediate job offer to serve with the YMCA in India, as well as invitations from the U.S delegates to return to China after college to become a missionary.

What happened? Rogers, in his diary, never gave the reasons directly, though he wrote with disgust about "notoriously immoral, wealthy" Catholic priests in his stop-over in the Philippines and dismay about oppressive child labor he witnessed in Chinese factories.

"I no longer wonder that people turn Bolshevik," he stated, relating that the local Christian missionaries "have done nothing" to ameliorate such appalling conditions.

Foreshadowing his later work in cofounding humanistic psychology with Abraham Maslow and Rollo May in the late 1950s and 1960s, Rogers asserted after a visit to a cotton mill in Zhengzhou with thousands of impoverished, toiling workers: "What we need are managers who see so many thousand human personalities, every one of them with great possibilities." Attending graduate school at Union Theological Seminary, Rogers quickly became bored with his courses on religion and decisively shifted to clinical psychology at Teachers College of Columbia University.

In later years, Rogers grew increasingly interested in Daoism and referred to its legendary founder Laozi as among his favorite thinkers. Rogers took special pleasure in quoting from the ancient Daoteching; quite possibly his months in China had catalyzed this interest on some deep level. Indeed, various scholars have noted the Daoistic elements within Rogers' immensely influential system of counseling with his emphasis on empathic listening, "natural" or spontaneous expression of emotions, and honoring the ability of each individual to discover one's abilities, needs, and yearnings for growth.

Commenting on philosopher Martin Buber's interpretation of the Daoist principle of wu-wei or "effortless action," Rogers, in his mid-seventies, observed, "I suppose that my effort with people has increasingly been to liberate `their nature and their destiny.'"