Chinese Population and Eugenics

The creation of a people with better genes and higher calibre has been an ongoing issue in contemporary China.

During the late Qing dynasty, reformer Kang Youwei (康有为) advocated the establishment of state "pleasure hotels" where selected young people could mate. He also advocated prenatal education, and the sterilization of the disabled and the mentally deficient.

During the same period, a Chinese Committee for Racial Hygiene, founded by Dr Pan Guangdan, said to be the father of Chinese eugenics, sprang into existence and put into practice the beliefs of influential reform Tan Sitong (谭嗣同) who held that "if we pay attention to the science of racial advancement, each generation will be superior to the last; through endless transformations, it will give birth to another race."

During Mao Zedong's (毛泽东) time, publications such as Population and Eugenics (人口与优生) issued by the Population Research Center of Zhejiang Medical College in Hangzhou (杭州)continued to advocate that genetically fitter elements of the population, such as educated urbanites, should be encouraged to have more than one child, and that the state should take measures to check unhealthy genetic trends in the countryside.

In 1988, Gansu province (甘肃省) became the first to pass a law prohibiting mentally retarded people from having children. Officials there complained that the province had 270,000 retarded people who were breeding 2,000 retarded children a year. Since then, Liaoning (辽宁), Zhejiang (浙江) and Hunan (湖南) provinces had passed similar laws.

At a national eugenics conference held in 1989, officials reported that China had 30 million genetically defective people whose maintenance was costing society up to 8 billion yuan a year.

This prompted a senior family planning officer to declare that "eugenics not only affects the success of the state and the prosperity of the race, but also the well-being of the people and social stability."

A subsequent legislative drive culminated in 1995 in a National Eugenics Law, later renamed the Maternal and Infant Health Law. It authorizes officials to carry out pre-marital check-ups to see if either parent suffers from a serious hereditary, venereal or contagious disease so as to prevent "inferior births". If the official deems it necessary, he can order sterilization or even an abortion.

Indeed, many Chinese believe that something must be done to improve the nation's gene pool which is felt to be too narrow. Centuries of inbreeding have supposedly resulted in a population where 30 per cent suffer from some sort of hereditary handicap.

As Jasper Becker wrote: "Eugenics promote a biologising version of society in which the reproductive rights of individuals are subordinated to the rights of an abstract collectivity."