Pan Guangdan (; 1898–1967) known in English as Quentin Pan, was a Chinese sociologist, eugenist, and writer. He was one of the most distinguished sociologists and eugenists of China. Educated at

Tsinghua University Tsinghua University (THU) is a public university in Haidian, Beijing, China. It is affiliated with and funded by the Ministry of Education of China. The university is part of Project 211, Project 985, and the Double First-Class Constructio ...

on a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship,

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College ( ) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the America ...

and

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

, where he was trained by Charles B. Davenport, Pan was also a renowned expert on education. His wide research scope included eugenics, education policy, matrimony policy, familial problems, prostitute policy, and intellectual distributions. Pan's wide-ranging intellect led to his active participation in the Crescent Moon Society. Pan's most famous student was

Fei Xiaotong Fei Xiaotong or Fei Hsiao-tung (November 2, 1910 – April 24, 2005) was a Chinese anthropologist and sociologist. He was a pioneering researcher and professor of sociology and anthropology; he was also noted for his studies in the study of ...

, the "father of Chinese anthropology."

Career

Pan joined the China Democratic Groups League (later

China Democratic League The China Democratic League (CDL) is one of the eight minor democratic parties in the People's Republic of China under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party. The CDL was originally founded in 1941 as a pro-democracy umbrella coalition g ...

) in 1941, and was a standing committee member of the central committee of the League. During the

Anti-Rightist Movement The Anti-Rightist Campaign () in the People's Republic of China, which lasted from 1957 to roughly 1959, was a political campaign to purge alleged " Rightists" within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the country as a whole. The campaign wa ...

, he was determined to be a "rightist." Pan was persecuted in

Cultural Revolution The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a Social movement, sociopolitical movement in the China, People's Republic of China (PRC). It was launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 and lasted until his de ...

, and died in 1967, at 69. He was rehabilitated in 1979.

Eugenics

For Pan, eugenics was both a political and scientific matter, as well as economic, ethnological and sociological; and he is credited with the popularization of eugenic thought in the 1920s and '30s in China. Some of his most influential works include ''The Eugenic Question in China'' () and ''Chinese Family Problems'' ()(1928). In these works, Pan promoted the family structure over individualism, which he believed, along with traditional marriage, to be most effective in racial improvement through biological inheritance. Urban living, he said, only promoted decadent individualism and contributed nothing to the racial fitness of the nation. Although he supported the use of state power for the implementation of eugenic policies, primarily through his founding of The Chinese Eugenics Institute, conflicts such as the Sino-Japanese War,

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

, and the

civil war A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same Sovereign state, state (or country). The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies.J ...

between the KMT and the

Communists Communism () is a sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered on common ownership of the means of production, d ...

prevented governmental adoption of his ideas. In a 1937 volume of essays, "''Minzu texing yu minzu weisheng''" ( Racial characteristics and racial hygiene) Pan argued that government programs of health and reconstruction were of no use if the majority of the people were of low quality. He included his translations from the works of Ellsworth Huntington and the American missionary Arthur H. Smith's 1894 book ''Chinese Characteristics''. Smith's chapters "Absence of Nerves", "Disregard of Accuracy", and "Absence of Public Spirit", he said, illustrated the selfish, unscientific, face-loving, "Chinese Everyman" who weakened the Chinese race. He called for educated and intelligent Chinese to increase their rate of birth and improve Chinese people's health by increasing the number of people who were genetically superior.Ruth Rogaski, ''Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China'' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)
pp.241-242
/ref> Pan argued that the anthropological category of “race” was not yet scientifically substantiated. Eugenics as a newly established discipline should not, he believed, become entangled with dubious claims about superior races, since every “color” of people shared both the good and the bad germplasm distributed in its own population. During the

Second Sino-Japanese War The Second Sino-Japanese War was fought between the Republic of China (1912–1949), Republic of China and the Empire of Japan between 1937 and 1945, following a period of war localized to Manchuria that started in 1931. It is considered part ...

, Pan was among the prominent Chinese eugenists who viewed the war as a contest of population that would allow only the strongest to survive. Consistent with this reasoning, Nationalist China enacted more stringent abortion laws during the war.

References

* Includes a substantial bibliography of scholarship on Pan.

Notes

External links

Pan Guangdan

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Authority Page. {{DEFAULTSORT:Pan, Guangdan 1898 births 1967 deaths Boxer Indemnity Scholarship recipients Chinese eugenicists Chinese sociologists Columbia University alumni Dartmouth College alumni Educators from Shanghai Academic staff of Jinan University Academic staff of Minzu University of China Academic staff of the National Southwestern Associated University 20th-century Chinese writers Scientists from Shanghai Academic staff of Soochow University (Suzhou) Tsinghua University alumni Academic staff of Tsinghua University Victims of the Cultural Revolution Writers from Shanghai 20th-century Chinese non-fiction writers Social Darwinism