Kicking. Squealing.
Geoffrey Miller’s answer to this year’s Edge question is worth discussion. The question is “What should we be worried about?”, and his answer concerned Chinese Eugenics (Miller’s is listed first):
China has been running the world’s largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China’s ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization. Yet the most likely result is that America and Europe linger around a few hundred more years as also-rans on the world-historical stage, nursing our anti-hereditarian political correctness to the bitter end.
I saw this played out at the microscopic level last night at work. I waited on a table of two white parents and five kids. There were two white kids and three Asian kids, and all of them were wearing gymastics attire. I might be wrong, but the kids looked Chinese. Certainly not Southeast Asian, and probably not Korean. I could tell that the Asian kids had been adopted by the white parents rather than, say, being guests of some host family (like Gabby Douglas was in Iowa). They used intimate parent-child language rather than overly formal house guest language.
Anyway, the littlest Asian girl was cute as could be, but she was missing half of her left arm. I saw that – an American family adopting a deformed Chinese kid, and then I read Miller’s essay. That kind of brought it home. If the U.S. – and by “the U.S.” I mean the good citizens of the U.S. – do what is generally thought to be “the right thing”, and if China takes advantage of the fact that other nations are doing the right thing, we are at a disadvantage. In game theory, we are acting altruistically while they are acting selfishly. How long can we continue to take the high road while others take the low?
More Miller:
Many scientists and reformers of Republican China (1912-1949) were ardent Darwinians and Galtonians. They worried about racial extinction (miezhong) and “the science of deformed fetuses” (jitaixue), and saw eugenics as a way to restore China’s rightful place as the world’s leading civilization after a century of humiliation by European colonialism. The Communist revolution kept these eugenic ideals from having much policy impact for a few decades though. Mao Zedong was too obsessed with promoting military and manufacturing power, and too terrified of peasant revolt, to interfere with traditional Chinese reproductive practices.
But then Deng Xiaoping took power after Mao’s death. Deng had long understood that China would succeed only if the Communist Party shifted its attention from economic policy to population policy. He liberalized markets, but implemented the one-child policy —partly to curtail China’s population explosion, but also to reduce dysgenic fertility among rural peasants. Throughout the 1980s, Chinese propaganda urges couples to have children “later, longer, fewer, better”—at a later age, with a longer interval between birth, resulting in fewer children of higher quality. With the 1995 Maternal and Infant Health Law (known as the Eugenic Law until Western opposition forced a name change), China forbade people carrying heritable mental or physical disorders from marrying, and promoted mass prenatal ultrasound testing for birth defects. Deng also encouraged assortative mating through promoting urbanization and higher education, so bright, hard-working young people could meet each other more easily, increasing the proportion of children who would be at the upper extremes of intelligence and conscientiousness.
Now, it is entirely possible that this small Asian girl will be a net plus for the U.S. For her own sake, I hope that she will be. She was almost assuredly a net negative for China and for her family with its One Child Policy and its generally less forgiving attitude towards disabled people. There is no equivalent to the Americans with Disabilities Act in China. The girl would struggle physically which would take away from her all-important schooling. Nobody would marry her because the government would forbid it – not that another man or his family would take that risk anyway. But this is a risk, and the family and our collective have incurred that risk. It is a setback that will have to be overcome. China sees such risks and decides not to mess with them. They put the kid up for adoption and take advantage of the fact that others in the world place a greater value on all life.
Mitt Romney made a big deal about China being unfair in terms of their currency manipulations and their stealing of U.S. intellectual property, but Miller helps us realize that their eugenics programs may pose a much bigger long-term threat. This also brings up the question of whether or not the U.S. and other more “humanitarian” nations are just enabling eugenic policies in China and Russia and eastern Europe, etc.
China is nothing to worry about. 90% of the population lives in absolute poverty, their military can’t put a dent in U.S. hegemony, and their economy is a giant bubble that is finally beginning to burst. Its implosion will make Japan’s “Lost Decade” look like a blip in comparison. And China has never been a global power, only an (occasional) regional one.
Worrying about these silly “eugenics” programs misses the forest for the trees.
Jodie Foster and Mel Gibson have been good friends for a long time.
GLPiggy, you witnessed a low-road behavior whose effects were “outsourced,” but a lot of these behaviors – massive accounting fraud, punishing the messenger, insistence on conformity and groupthink, corruption, opacity – only hurt themselves and are occurring there on a much greater scale than even here during the Angelo Mozilo/Fannie/Freddie era.
Wow. This connects 2 dots I’ve seen in the past 10 years.
Years ago, my friend’s Evangelical Christian family adopted a young Chinese girl with a mental disability. And just this year, another Evangelical Christian couple (early 30s) I know adopted a Chinese boy with a cleft pallatte due to her infertility.
This article makes me realize that this is a much broader occurance.
Just wait til China starts unloading massive amounts of its rural population into African colonies.
According to this chart at Steve Sailer, out of country adoption is dropping precipitously, and has been zero from China since 2010.
Chart
China’s eugenics policy is irrelevant considering the population quality/IQ benefit they get from not having an endless supply of low IQ migrant workers streaming into the country and becoming instant citizens.
Oops, I mixed up the green Guatamala line with the blue China line, but the China numbers have dropped 70% since the peak in 2005.
Camlost is right. Any country that doesn’t have the levels of immigration we have, nor the welfare system we have, is eventually going to be better off.
I lived in China for a number of years and think it is by far too strong a statement to say they have anything approaching a eugenic set of policies. One could argue it is actually more dysgenic. Small numbers of foreign adoptions are a drop in the bucket against much more powerful social-economic factors.
Chinese cities are a massive population sink, as insanely high real estate prices, costs of education and education competition discourage middle and upper middle class people from having more than one child. The nastiness of living in the Chinese countryside pushes more and more people into the cities, where they don’t reproduce at replacement levels. There is an option to be exempted from the one child policy by paying a fine, but the costs of urban life are so high that they are more of a brake on fertility than the policy itself for the educated urban middle classes.
Fertitilty rates are highest among peasants and ethnic minorities who are exempted from the one child policy, most of whom are rural people (Chinese minorities are generally ethnic groups related to SE Asians living in the south of the country, along with Tibetans and the Turkish Muslim groups in the west)
There is a very large gender gap due to female infanticide and sex selective abortion – its long term effect on the overall quality of the population is still uncertain.
The massive amounts of chemical pollution and toxins in the Chinese food and consumer products supply is surely also increasing the amount of disease and genetic problems.
Its all well and good to speculate about genetic research in China as the author of the piece you link to does, but its a world away from contemporary China itself, and I can’t really imagine the government sucessfully implementing the policies he describes.
GLP –
I was terrified by your article and then dug deeper. Now I feel that the data is 100% opposite of what you are suggesting. So completely opposite that I think there should be a follow-on post where you reverse your position. Things in China are probably sharply dysgenic right now.
Please study the chart on page 7 of the study at the link below:
http://www.oeaw.ac.at/vid/download/col091217sb.pdf
The smartest and highest earning Chinese are believed to be the residents of Beijing and Shanghai.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/education/07education.html?pagewanted=all
But as the study I linked to shows, the TFR of Shanghainese is a mere 0.67 and it is even lower in Beijing. That is just 1/3 of replacement level.
China’s one child policy and urbanization trends are, I believe, steeply dysgenic. The smart, socialized fraction adhere to the one child policy, which means that their TFR is 1 minus the childless fraction.
Meanwhile, the overall TFR in China is more like 1.5, meaning that the country bumpkins are making up the difference.
“One child for one couple is a necessary choice made under China’s special historical conditions to alleviate the grim population situation. One child for one couple does not mean to “have one child” under all circumstances, but rather, while encouraging couples to have only one child, to plan arrangements for couples who have real difficulties and need to have a second child to do so. In China’s cities and towns where family planning was introduced earlier and the economic, cultural, educational, public health and social security conditions are better, the overwhelming majority of couples of child-bearing age who are pleased with a small family have responded to the government’s call and volunteered to have only one child. In 1990, of the non-agricultural population in China’s urban localities, the total fertility rate of women dropped to 1.26, or 1.05 lower than the nation’s average figure. In the countryside, the total fertility birth rate of women was 2.8.”
http://www.china-un.ch/eng/bjzl/t176938.htm
So in just one generation, the country bumpkins have 4x the fertility of the brilliant Shanghainese.
Dan,
i don’t see how that refutes the argument – one that isn’t mine orignially, but is Geoffrey Miller’s. China may not be purely eugenic, but they have governmental polices that directly incentivize eugenic-like outcomes. Contrast that with the U.S. which has national polices i.e. welfare that incentivizes dysgenic outcomes. The point is to compare and contrast those two different types of policies.
As far as the tie-in to adoption, few other countries would take disabled Americans off our hands, but many more American families will take disabled foreign children off of the collective hands of those other nations.
Chinese culture is matriarchal and it has female infanticide. Seems weird right? Compared to Japan (which is more patriarchal monogamous?), we have a matriarchy in China which discourages female children.
Abortion in the USA is more racist/eugenicist and far less misogynist though. Some people keep linking abortion and “women’s rights” in the USA but abortion in the USA is purely eugenic/racist/classist/tribal. It’s not an issue of men/women as a whole. Most abortion clinics are situated near minorities (about 70-80% of them) and a lot of Black/Hispanic babies are aborted.
Chuck, you just wrote, “they have governmental polices that directly incentivize eugenic-like outcomes”
Hardly. The “Infant Health Law” relates to birth defects, which are what, 1% of pregnancies, tops?
Meanwhile, the one child policy applied to the more elite urbanites while poor farmers have much more seems strongly dysgenic, and it impacts 100% of chinese, not a mere 1%.
Is it the best analysis to focus on something which matters only at the margins while ignoring the enormous centerpiece (1 child) of their policy?
According to the stats that the Chinese government publishes there isn’t that much of a difference between their rural and urban populations among the Han.
Regardless, eugenics isn’t about birth rates anyway. China’s anti-natalism is eugenic because even though no one has that many children the future generation of Chinese will be the offspring of the winner’s of a billion man rat race.
In China people who are merely above average aren’t good enough to have children because they’ll never be able to afford it, which is eugenic.
Adopting handicapped children is neither dysgenic nor eugenic: most of these children either are unlikely to reproduce due to a SMV-fatal handicap, or if they do reproduce their their handicap is not genetic in origin (accident, malnutrition).
Foreign adoption also tend to be done by infertile couples, so that adoption is not at opportunity-cost of them having their own child.
Niall Ferguson wrote at length in “Civilization: The West and the Rest” about how the struggle to build prosperous, militarily secure societies has, throughout history, basically been a two horse race between China and Europe, with China holding a healthy lead until about the 1300′s, when they started going backward and Europe forged ahead. At the end he talks about how China is now catching up and Europe (and the U.S., to a lesser extent) appears to be the one screwing the pooch. It may be that the situation is worse than he imagined.
On the other hand, the rule of law and free market capitalism still counts for a heck of a lot, so until a Chinese Locke or Smith or Hayek comes along, we still have a large institutional advantage.
Incidentally, Chuck, did you happen to notice that another of the responses (from Helena Cronin) touches on some HBD themes as well? It’s rather poorly written, I thought, but it’s worth reading, nonetheless.
I wouldn’t worry about China. My sister and her fiancé taught English there after college. They both said the Chinese are very conformist and incapable of innovating. They will forever be our assembly line. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to do what we do here in America. The Chinese don’t have it.
China’s policies are ONLY a danger to the American way of life if WE choose to continue handing them our wealth and knowledge so that we can all keep taking advantage of the massive savings in disposable toasters. The only difference between the “powerful” China of today and the “weak” China of twenty years ago is how much of our money they have to play with – nothing more. The day we go broke is the day they go broke and then what? We go back to building shit here and they go back to sitting around waiting to copy someone else’s homework.
Jeff “At the end he talks about how China is now catching up and Europe (and the U.S., to a lesser extent) appears to be the one screwing the pooch. It may be that the situation is worse than he imagined. ”
Ever buy a tool from Harbor Freight? Designs copied from western tools. The poorest metallurgy you’ve ever seen – so bad you’d wonder if it might just be better to use a spoon to cut the board. Brittle plastics, weak motors, shoddy electronics. The Chinese absolutely do not have the ethos to build products to satisfy pride in quality. Their things are built to satisfy the absolute barest most minimal definition of a particular product’s “fitness for purpose.”
The quality shit that you see coming out of China is virtually ALL due to oversight by western corporations. Left on their own, true Chinese products are laughable. The west keeps them afloat. They have nothing else. They just don’t have the culture for it.
“They have nothing else. They just don’t have the culture for it.” Just to add: They know this too. This is why they are so eager to send their students to the west.
You underestimate the power of love on societies.
Christianity has been this way – love for the unborn, the pauper, the handicapped and the weak – for 2000 years. The Roman republic and empire were eugenic and infanticide of suboptimal phenotypes was common. So were most other pre-christian civilizations, including the Germans. However, Christianity won: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_eugenics.
It seems infanticide leads to distrust just as diversity does….
I am a Jew, not a Christian, but the power of love in Christianity never ceases to amaze me.
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That’s one heck of a good troll Miller unleashes at Edge.
Anyone interested in Chinese eugenics and its cultural history in China should read Frank DiKötter’s book “Imperfect Conceptions”. Galtonian Eugenics is new to China; public concern for population health’s got quite a history there.
My first response was to the remark about the armless girl. This assumes that child is in important ways a problem. Is this a valid assumption? Supposing the Chinese State perceives a girl with a missing arm as a problem, a liability, not an asset worthy of investment (much like humans with scarce resources have been likely to do for most of history and before it). Yet she may be a nascent inventor of the cure for some disease yet undiscovered, or not. There is not yet any way to account for chance and grace in human lives.
It seems to me the evolutionary advantage of homo sapiens sapiens (the ape who thinks about his thinking) is in the quality of our minds: how we respond to environmental challenges, the level and nature of our intelligence and talents, our moral universe, etc. And importantly, what systems are in play? A Market economy? Redistribution not through the free market, free agency, and the family apparatus but through coercive state agents? Are there White Anglo-Saxon “Middle class” values? Or the non-answers that have come from the New left?
Are they weeding out sociopaths, too (which do much harm in society)? How will they know? Sociopaths seem to rise to the top of hierarchies based on centralized power.
What about the political economy ? Is it Liberty or Statism? Is it Central State planning that distorts distorts distorts human relationships? Is the system a rule of Law based on principles or a bureaucratic regime that encourages — what? The Christian Western tradition led the world in the 19th and 20th centuries especially, and most especially under the brief flowering of the American System; is it important to understand all the factors that engendered the rapid rise in human thriving under that regime? The Left have worked hard to undermine and destroy that tradition.
China has a long way to go to match the example of the West’s success. Theyir system does not encourage individualism or individual responsibility, nor, evidently the honesty (“transparency is in My concern is that the statists and the Left are rapidly constricting if not destroying the conditions that created the wealth to which they have attached themselves as human parasites.
My first thought was about the eugenics or dysgenics of the girl missing part of her arm.
In Chinese society, having a girl who’d lost part of her arm through accident or birth defect woudl be a significant burden on the family – worse than in the U.S. – and it would make the girl rather more unlikely to have further children as well. But the likelihood that the missing arm is caused by her genetics is low. So for a very wealthy (compared to typical Chinese) American family to adopt her, she’s less of a burden as a child, and is more likely to marry and have children here than in China. Her children will likely be physically fine, and playing the odds, slightly smarter and somewhat more conscientious than the average American of their generation. So she will (likely) ultimately be a net positive to the United States.
AR10308′s friends’ adoptions are a mixed bag – cleft palate is easily fixable (and affordably so in the U.S.), even if it is genetic. Mental handicaps on the other hand aren’t so much, but if the handicap is severe, the odds against reproduction are low.
The Chinese are disgusting. You can’t polish a turd.
Han people are not disgusting. China’s ethnic minorties are disgusting. We were innovative before we were destoryed by nomadic savages. It’s true that educated Han people have much less children than low IQ ethnic minorties.
I’ve been all over China and other parts of Asia. The Chinese, especially the elite, actively discuss this in an open way – especially in Chinese – that would be considered literally criminal in the West.
There’s a very active sense among circles of Chinese elites that they’re breeding a Superior Human Being: More beautiful, more accomplished, definitely much, much more intelligent and prone to attributes like good leadership, wise choices, etc.
This is a direct ideological descendant of the pre-communist semi-Confucianist ideals of proper order in society. But these post-communists have taken it a step further: There’s a very vociferious and clear goal in creating genuinely better people, without limitations.
If a woman has a fetus with the slightest risk of deformities or mental limits, she will abort.
In the end, this will result in a statistically more productive population. It’s already happening.
But the effects will be even more acute when examined in focus and not broadly. Ask yourself what effect this will have on the Chinese *elite*.
Because members of the elite are hand-picked, and there’s no democracy, losers tend to get drummed out over time and shunted off to the side. The ones who rise to the top are almost always socially clever, intelligent (at least natively, if not through education), wily and conniving, and very adept at managing expectations. They also tend to be consumed with self-interest.
They treat China like a personal corporation or farm, to be bled for their own interests – and they’re consummately good at it.
The effect of a Eugenic breeding program and a very coporatist, unremittingly elitist society, the very antithesis of anything communists ever worked towards, will create an absolutely dominant upper class. The Chinese upper class is self-breeding and self-making itself into quite literally people bred to lead and control others.
This is to be expected. It’s also conscious, and a direct result of policy, and not just of accident.
Oddly, China and its policies, like those of Arab nations, come under no scrutiny at all in the West, because only Western countries do elitist and evil things.
Not even the haughtiest Park Avenue residents can hold a candle to the autocratic elitist attitudes personified by the Chinese ruling class.
But they’re not white and American, so they get a pass.
It was probably Plato and Aristotle who first popularized eugenics:
http://tinyurl.com/79y5ssw
…
There are some good things happening in the USA. We have the largest number of innovative fertility clinics mostly taken advantage of by whites and there is a lot of eugenic abortions among the white upper classes. I noted that Mitt Romney’s family used reproductive technology with the birth of some of his grandchildren. The new free abortion and contraception stuff under Ocare will help keep the birth rates of the intellectually challenged among us. RU486 is great! I had a friend who adopted a severely autistic child from the USSR and he has had here on long term birth control since she was 15. I am still not optimistic but there are some rays of sunshine. If you don’t think China is a threat wait till they take Siberia away from the Russians!