Better Science and Better Race? Social Darwinism and Chinese Eugenics

摘要

This essay explores the variegated roles played by racial, eugenic, and Social Darwinist discourse in China over roughly the last century. Using Japan as a parallel for comparison, it analyzes the introduction of the term "eugenics" into Japanese and Chinese. It then locates the deployment of eugenics and Social Darwinism as counterimperial discourse in East Asia. It offers a brief history of eugenics thinking in China across the twentieth century, focusing on the Chinese eugenicist Pan Guangdan, who used race as a category of analysis yet without any sense of hierarchy. He was critically aware of the scientific basis of eugenics and helped craft the study of eugenics in China, from biology to sociology, from economics to ethnology.