When Confucius met Darwin

A brief history of sociobiology in China from Pan Guangdan to reprotech

Written by Craig Willy.

Confucianism is one of the oldest and most influential political philosophies in the world. With its focus on merit, hierarchy, harmony and humaneness (ren, 仁), the philosophical current founded by Confucius (~551-479 BC) is fundamental to the civilization of East Asian nations, that is, China, Japan and Korea. While Confucianism’s impact on the values and governance of these countries is clear, its historic influence on their reproductive patterns and genetics is less obvious.

Like many other value systems—such as Greco-Roman Paganism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity or Islam—Confucianism’s values and assumptions are rife with reproductive implications. At the broadest level, masculinity, femininity and reproduction are given a kind of cosmic significance. Ritually structured life within the family, defined by heterosexual marriage, is then understood to resonate with the “deep reality of the universe.” These premises, which may strike modern Westerners as mystical, lead to a reverence of heterosexual marriage and male-female complementarity.

Traditional Confucianism is intensely family focused, with enormous emphasis on the authority of the father figure (considered analogous to that of the Chinese emperor) and filial piety. The family and filial piety are considered foundational to social order. The maintenance of the family line was crucial to remembering and caring for one’s venerated ancestors.

This familism is patrilineal, meaning that the family only lives on through sons (daughters are subsumed within the identity of the family they marry into). This traditional view has no doubt contributed to the preference for sons and, in combination with the One-Child Policy, led to the selective abortion of females and a serious sexual imbalance in the population. The imperative to perpetuate the family line is also cited as a cause for high fertility in traditional Confucian societies, regardless of adverse ecological or political conditions.

Pan Guangdan and the birth of Chinese sociobiology

Pan Guangdan. Source.

Chinese scholars themselves began to study the reproductive implications of their civilization with the spread of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Pan Guangdan (1899-1967), one of the most influential Chinese sociologists of the first half of the twentieth century, was a hereditarian and eugenicist who made pioneering studies into what he called “the sociobiological implications of Confucianism.” The following extracts from a 1923 survey article on “Eugenics in China” gives a sense of Pan’s research agenda and demographic goals:

In the eyes of the evolutionist China is a land where natural selection is still working more or less unhampered. Population has seldom been a problem in China. The enormous birth rate has always been, at normal times, balanced by an equally high death rate …

Since the middle of last century, with the influx of Western culture, this comparatively selective death rate in China has been perhaps steadily decreasing …

The [dysgenic] problem in China is as yet not so serious when compared with that of some of the countries in the West, since all stocks have until only very recently procreated alike, but it is becoming increasingly so. An intelligent eugenical program, based upon the sound tradition of the race and aiming more at prevention rather than at correction, is highly desired …

Anthropologically, the race exhibits many differences from the races of the West. These differences are, however, not yet adequately and extensively measured to permit of generalizations …

We know still less about the mentality of the average Chinese than about his physical features. Measurements on Chinese children have been taken in California, in the Hawaiian Islands, and by missionaries in China, with a view to ascertaining how far the Chinese children differed mentally from those of the white race. But as groups of children like these are usually small and possess local characteristics, the results of these measurements are far from being representative, though they in general reflect favorably on the race. Mental tests of various kinds are now being devised and enthusiastically experimented on; more accurate returns are expected in the near future

Pan’s policy proposals included “general eugenic education for all,” “a revaluation of all the social institutions” based on whether they “are conducive to racial health,” statistical studies and research, harnessing of animal and plant breeding to study genetics more broadly, and “the conservation of the rural population” as the one body free of urban denatality and dysgenics.

For Pan, early Confucianism had a good deal of “sociobiological common sense,” particularly on the questions of “the goodness or badness of human nature,” equality among men, and the role of environment in individual human development. Confucius emphasized both the inherent inequality of men and the need for education to actualize their unequal potential. Pan criticises the later, influential Confucian philosopher Mencius as shifting towards a more egalitarian and naïve view of human nature.

While traditional Confucianism does not seem to be overtly eugenic, Pan argued that it had eugenic effects. The system of civil examinations scoured the country for the most intellectually gifted and integrated them into the powerful imperial bureaucracy. Officials tended to marry among each other’s families, resulting in assortative mating. It is highly likely that wealthier, often polygamous Chinese officials would have sired more offspring than average. Pan concluded that “the Chinese as a race, not only as a culture, has certainly much to thank for the teachings of Confucius and his school.”

As early as 1925, Pan was deeply concerned that Western sentimentalism was having dysgenic effects. He wrote:

Perhaps very few of us realize, and fewer will admit, that sentimentalism, a peculiarly Western social method of dealing with things and one leading nowhere, is a result, almost a logical outcome, of the disruption of the family. Personal sentiment, which formerly and naturally had as its central point of attachment the hearth, becomes now, as it were, dislodged, scattered about, and finally comes to invade all other provinces of life, wherein it ill fits. The whole situation, in its extreme, is perhaps well epitomized by the following in a comic paper:

“I had to discharge my nurse for the most horrible cruelty.”

“What did she do?”

“She kicked my poor darling Fido for biting the baby.”

It is only upon such a view that one can reconcile such social phenomena as the birth control movement and the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals.

Sentimentalism is nothing but a form of diffused and undifferential affection which Confucius and his school took special pains to point out as a subtle and yet powerful cause of social disintegration.

It is interesting to observe that Lee Kuan Yew (1923-2015), the later Prime Minister of Singapore and an avowed hereditarian, took a similar view of Confucianism’s genetic impact. As Lee told journalists in later life:

In ancient China, a bright official could marry multiple wives and spread his genes around the country each time he gets a new posting. If he retired, he often settled in Suzhou, for the mild micro-climate, and had several wives.

According to Lee, this practice contrasted with that of India where endogamy within each caste was the norm and therefore successful men of high genetic worth were less likely to spread their seed. It is unclear whether Lee’s thinking was directly influenced by Pan. As a British-educated overseas ethnic Chinese, Lee’s ideas on heredity likely reflect traditional Chinese “common sense,” as well as the general eugenic ideas that were virtually hegemonic in British intellectual life during the 1930s.

Studies on Confucianism’s reproductive impact

Determining the genetic impact of Confucianism’s most striking sociobiological features—exam-based meritocracy and natalist familism—is not straightforward. It is far more difficult than determining the genetic impact of, say, Jewish or Hindu endogamy.

Nonetheless, several studies suggest there was a significant positive relationship between education and/or wealth and fertility in pre-20^th century China. H. D. Lamson conducted an early study finding that literate women with literate husbands had more children than illiterate women with illiterate husbands. More recently, Steven Harrel analyzed the genealogies of three Chinese clans between 1550 and 1850, and found that holding an official degree was associated with higher fertility. More broadly, scholars have found an association between wealth and fertility in China at least before 1940.

Source.

Specific figures on the fertility advantage of the wealthier and more educated are quite variable. Using the genealogical records of 35,691 Chinese men, Sijie Hu found a positive relationship between social status and fertility between 1400 and 1900. Confucian gentry scholars produced three times as many sons as commoners, an outcome mediated by the number of marriages: high-status males found it much easier to find a wife. In his influential book A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark cites a study showing that men of the imperial lineage had about 7 children on average in 1700, as against a Chinese average of 4.2, but that this advantage declined to slightly above average from the 1770s onwards.

Some researchers have even found a negative correlation between education and fertility in certain cases. Analyzing data on 43,000 individuals in a single province, Carol Shiue found a negative relationship between education and fertility during the seventeenth century. She argues that the greater predictability of the imperial examination system during this increased the return on investing in human capital, leading to fewer children but higher parental investment per child. On her account then, Confucianism when it functioned was actually dysgenic.

The pattern Shiue describes, of fewer children combined with massive investment in education driven by credentialism, certainly applies to today’s status-obsessed ultra-low fertility societies across East Asia. Researchers at the Beijing University of Agriculture have found evidence for “dysgenic fertility” in post-1960s China, with a rising association between intelligence/education and lack of children.

Science is never static and the nature of Confucianism’s historical reproductive impact remains murky in both nature and extent. Further studies would therefore be welcome.

Towards a neo-Confucian reprogenetics?

There may well be renewed interest in Confucianism’s genetic impact in the years to come. After massive attacks on Confucianism—seen as outmoded, stifling and conservative—from the 1919 May Fourth Movement to Mao Zedong’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution, there has since been a resurgence of Confucian institutions and teaching. This has occurred partly because the Chinese are keen to rediscover what is ethically valuable in their rich cultural heritage and partly because they hope to build up an indigenous ideological alternative to Western liberalism.

Neo-Confucianism may have reprogenetic implications. Contemporary Confucian bioethicist Ruiping Fan has argued that certain forms of genetic enhancement, such as embryo selection, are licit if they are compatible with or promote “a family-based, ritual-following, virtuous way of life.” Selecting embryos for traits such as muscle strength, improved memory, or normal genitalia (non-intersex) would therefore be acceptable on Confucian grounds, Fan argues.

It is noteworthy that taboo subjects in Chinese society and academia are often not the same as those in the liberal West. While “eugenics” was taboo in Western academia in the 1980s, Yuehtsen Juliette Chung notes that during the same period “eugenics science” was embraced in China and grew into “a gigantic interdisciplinary system.” This was partly driven by the One-Child Policy’s emphasis on population quality instead of quantity and partly by Charles Darwin’s prestige as a “great materialist scientist”.

More generally, the attitudes of a neo-Confucianizing China towards emerging reprogenetic technologies may well differ from those of Western countries. Throughout our history, diverse human cultures have often had divergent reproductive attitudes and norms, and therefore divergent genetic impacts. Different cultures’ values and approaches will continue to vary in the age of reproductive technologies. As the world’s most populous country and a scientific superpower, not least in the field of biotechnology, China is an important nation to watch in understanding our continued evolutionary trajectory.

Craig Willy is an EU-US political writer, policy consultant, and author of the Evopolitics blog..

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