IIRC, China didn’t adopt the one-child policy based on traditional Chinese eugenics beliefs (优生 yousheng ). Rather, Deng Xiaoping’s advisors in the 1970s over-reacted to Western antinatalist, degrowth, eco-alarmist propaganda as promoted by Paul Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, and others. Then in the late 1970s they hired physicists untrained in demography to do simplistic models of China’s expected population growth, based on outdated, unreliable census data from the early 1960s. They panicked about Chinese ‘over-population’ because the West was panicking about ‘over-population’, and the one-child policy was the result. It was based only a little bit on Western or traditional Chinese eugenics; it was based mostly on eco-alarmism.
Yep, agreed (I haven’t read those books, but I broadly know the story). I wasn’t trying to imply that eugenics was the main cause of the one-child policy, but the two are definitely connected. Post-1CP, the state took a really active role in controlling how and when kids were born, compulsory sterilisation (mostly of females, despite vasectomies being safer) became normalised for ‘quality and quantity’ etc.
A stronger “eugenics taboo” could plausibly have limited the scope of the policy.
IIRC, China didn’t adopt the one-child policy based on traditional Chinese eugenics beliefs (优生 yousheng ). Rather, Deng Xiaoping’s advisors in the 1970s over-reacted to Western antinatalist, degrowth, eco-alarmist propaganda as promoted by Paul Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, and others. Then in the late 1970s they hired physicists untrained in demography to do simplistic models of China’s expected population growth, based on outdated, unreliable census data from the early 1960s. They panicked about Chinese ‘over-population’ because the West was panicking about ‘over-population’, and the one-child policy was the result. It was based only a little bit on Western or traditional Chinese eugenics; it was based mostly on eco-alarmism.
For more details on this strange story, see ‘Imperfect Conceptions’ by Frank Dikotter, and ‘Governing China’s population’ and ‘Just one child’ by Susan Greenhalgh
Yep, agreed (I haven’t read those books, but I broadly know the story). I wasn’t trying to imply that eugenics was the main cause of the one-child policy, but the two are definitely connected. Post-1CP, the state took a really active role in controlling how and when kids were born, compulsory sterilisation (mostly of females, despite vasectomies being safer) became normalised for ‘quality and quantity’ etc.
A stronger “eugenics taboo” could plausibly have limited the scope of the policy.