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

eugenicists Eugenics ( ; ) is a fringe set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or ...

of China. Educated at

Tsinghua University Tsinghua University (; abbreviation, abbr. THU) is a National university, national Public university, public research university in Beijing, China. The university is funded by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, Minis ...

on a

Boxer Indemnity Scholarship The Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program () was a scholarship program for Chinese students to be educated in the United States, funded by the . In 1908, the U.S. Congress passed a bill to return to China the excess of Boxer Indemnity, amounting to ...

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native A ...

and

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

, where he was trained by

Charles B. Davenport Charles Benedict Davenport (June 1, 1866 – February 18, 1944) was a biologist and eugenicist influential in the American eugenics movement. Early life and education Davenport was born in Stamford, Connecticut, to Amzi Benedict Davenport, a ...

, 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 The Crescent Moon Society () was a Chinese literary society founded by the poet Xu Zhimo in 1923, which operated until 1931. It was named after ''The Crescent Moon'', a poem by Rabindranath Tagore. The society began as a loosely-organized dining as ...

. 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 o ...

, 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 legally recognized minor political parties in the People's Republic of China under the Chinese Communist Party's United Front. The CDL was originally founded in 1941 as an umbrella coalition ...

) 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 was l ...

, 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 sociopolitical movement in the People's Republic of China (PRC) launched by Mao Zedong in 1966, and lasting until his death in 1976. Its stated goal ...

, 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, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, and the

civil war A civil war or intrastate war is a war between organized groups within the same 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 ...

between the

KMT The Kuomintang (KMT), also referred to as the Guomindang (GMD), the Nationalist Party of China (NPC) or the Chinese Nationalist Party (CNP), is a major political party in the Republic of China, initially on the Chinese mainland and in Tai ...

and the

Communists Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a so ...

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.

References

* Includes a substantial bibliography of scholarship on Pan.

Notes

External links

Pan Guangdan

WorldCat WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the OCL ...

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