Review: Frank Dikötter. Sex, Culture And Modernity In China; Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period, pp. 233, (Hurst and Company, London, 1995) £19.50.

This book undeniably contains some fascinating incidental detail. We learn, for example, that in 1793, the Chinese scholar Hong Liangji presented a theory of over-population anticipating many of the elements of Malthus’ Essay, published five years later.

We discover also that in China, as in England, demography was a starting point for intense speculation as to the possibility of human evolution by artificial selection. For the notion of racial degeneration, due to the higher reproductive rates of biologically inferior social strata, had arisen quite independently in China.

Indeed, imperial China developed its own indigenous versions of Malthusianism and race hygiene. Certain scholars maintained that restriction of the growth of population was the prerequisite of national wealth and power. Wang Shiduo (1802-1889) advocated a crude system of negative eugenics to solve the population problem. The female children of poor parents should be drowned, he said. So should all physically abnormal sons.

Imperial reformer Yan Fu (1853-1921) emphasised the higher reproductive rates of the lower classes. He identified a social problem group in which the "wrong seed" was spread "generation after generation" and children were not properly cared for. His solution was a ban on early marriage. Kang Youwei went a little further, calling for human stud farms so that selected women could be impregnated and doctors could conveniently kill off any inferior babies.

The Western science of eugenics, the author suggests, found a congenial soil in a country where the doctrine of state regulation of the sexuality and reproduction of the individual had deep historical roots. Eugenics was enthusiastically taken up by the Chinese intelligentsia in the 1920s and 1930s and Sir Francis Galton’s portrait in scientific textbooks became "an emblem of modernity".

Dikötter’s analysis contains serious flaws, however. First, there is a palpable lack of objectivity. In a postscript to the book, published in the Times Literary Supplement (January, 1996), entitled, indicatively, "Throw-away babies", he claims that reproductive freedom "is an inalienable part of … human rights". Such an opinion might be thought to handicap a historian not a little from making a fair examination of eugenic theory.

An equally serious failing, the author’s insufficient grasp of Western eugenic science, prevents him from achieving his stated objective of assessing the interplay of Western and Chinese scientific ideas. His knowledge of Chinese scientific and medical texts is prodigious. He has studied "… 350 publications produced by the new presses of Republican China", he proudly tells us (p. 3). All of the cited sources for Western eugenics are secondary sources, however. And of these a not insignificant proportion deal with Nazi Germany!

Having derived his view of the Western eugenic movement second-hand, from an unbalanced set of contemporary critiques, Dikötter then proceeds to demolish the straw man he has erected. Thus, the gravamen of his indictment of eugenics in China is the hackneyed charge that it subordinated the rights and needs of individuals and their families to abstractions "… like the "race", "future generations" and the "gene pool" (Dikötter, T. L. S. ). And an unconvincing attempt is made both to debunk the concept of race and to establish an indissoluble link between eugenics and racism. Racial nationalism has historically underpinned the Chinese state’s attempt to regulate sexuality and reproduction, we are informed.

Dikötter believes that compulsion is an essential element of any attempt to implement eugenic policies. In his estimation, the eugenic discourse treats the individual as a transient repository of genetic material, rather than a citizen endowed with inalienable rights. He cites the view of Yun Daiying (1895-1931), an early Communist Party member and editor of Young China, to wit: "The existence of the individual is but a means to transmit the race".

An irreconcilable conflict is posited by Dikötter between the rights and needs of the individual and the eugenic goal of biological improvement to strengthen the nation state. Thus, a central theme of Sex, Culture And Modernity in China is the unrelenting attempt, throughout this century, to stamp out all non-procreative sexual activity in Chinese society, notably prostitution, masturbation and homosexual intercourse (the latter, in a momentary deviation from political correctness, is called "sodomy"). All these manifestations of sexuality were regarded as racially damaging in official circles.

Those who think that biology is a determining influence on human society will invariably put the improvement of the breed above the individual’s wish for sexual fulfilment, this book suggests. But examples of British eugenists who were also pioneers of sexual liberation and enlightenment, notably Marie Stopes and Havelock Ellis, do not lend credence to this part of Dikötter’s polemic.

Dikötter points out that notwithstanding the ascendancy of eugenic ideas in the Chinese Republic, they never achieved legislative expression. A wide range of political regimes in the West, on the other hand, from fascistic Germany to the democratic-liberal USA, enacted laws permitting sterilisation prior to the Second World War. This fact alone ought to act as a warning against simplistic attempts (such as this work) to tar eugenics with the brush of totalitarianism.

To the familiar complaint that eugenics is inherently authoritarian, a novel criticism has been added by the writer, that it is "entirely utopian" (as if there could be degrees of utopianism!). He emphasises (correctly) the large numbers of people who would have to be sterilised to rid a given gene pool of certain undesirable genetic traits, as in the case of recessive PKU. For this reason, eugenics has been "…discredited in the West on both ethical and scientific grounds…", Dikötter concludes (T. L. S.), quite unaware, apparently, that genetic counselling is a development of, not a break with, traditional eugenics.

Some readers of Sex, Culture And Modernity In China may consider that its pessimistic theory of the conflicting claims of the individual and the collectivity needs to be demonstrated not merely asserted. After all, this is, arguably, the key question in political philosophy.

Other readers will notice that Dikötter overlooks an avowedly liberal school of Western eugenists (examples are Russell and Blacker) which explicitly rejected compulsory sterilisation as unethical. The possibility that there may be different, culturally variable approaches to eugenics is not considered.

Who would think from reading this, merely the latest attempt to diabolise eugenics, that in many of the areas in which Western eugenists were most active, namely maternal and child welfare, family planning, the discouragement of venereal disease and alcoholism, there was no dichotomy (or even Diköttomy) between the needs of the individual and the claims of posterity?

The assessment of the influence in China of Western science, in particular of eugenic science, requires a deeper understanding of the theory and praxis of the world-wide eugenic movement than this writer possesses.

Dr L C Jones