Otsubo, Sumiko

East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (EASTM - Universität Tübingen)

103 Reviews 
Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, Struggle for National Survival: Eugenics in Sino-
Japanese Contexts, 1896-1945. New York, London: Routledge, 2002, xii, 
193 pp. 
 
Otsubo Sumiko 
 
[Otsubo Sumiko is Associate Professor of History at Metropolitan State Univer-
sity in St. Paul, Minnesota.  She received her Ph.D. from Ohio State University. 
Her publications include “Engendering Eugenics: Feminists and Marriage Re-
striction Legislation in the 1920s,” in Gendering Modern Japanese History, 
edited by Barbara Molony and Kathleen S. Uno (Cambridge, MA and London: 
Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2005), 225-256 and “Between Two 
Worlds: Yamanouchi Shigeo and Eugenics in Early Twentieth Century Japan,” 
Annals of Science, 62.2 (April 2005): 205-231. She is currently working on her 
book manuscript on eugenics in Japan.] 
 
This book compares and analyzes ideas and movements related to eugen-
ics in China and Japan in the turbulent half-century leading up to 1945. In 
her study, Yuehtsen Juliette Chung (National Tsing Hua University in 
Taiwan) emphasizes that the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) marked 
“a turning point” in the power dynamics between the two countries. Ja-
pan, which for centuries had borrowed many ideas and institutions from 
the great Chinese civilization, defeated China, which was struggling to 
modernize its industry and military, and became the object of emulation 
for the younger generation of Chinese intellectuals, including eugenicists. 
Since then, for its own survival and prosperity, Japan embarked on its 
quest for colonial expansion in East Asia in order to compete with the 
imperialist West. Japan’s colonial project forced China to engage in cam-
paigns to resist incorporation into the Japanese empire. Their conflict 
culminated in the second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). By situating the 
circulation of eugenics knowledge in the inseparable history of the two 
countries’ modern experiences, the author aims at complicating the sim-
ple mono-directional transfer of ideas from the West to Asia in typical 
national history narratives. Methodologically, the author defines her ver-
sion of “comparativism”, that is, an “approach to simultaneity which 
encompasses plural nonsynchronic consciousnesses and temporalities, in 
addition to the conventional use of comparativism as juxtaposition to 
locate parallels of similarity and difference” (p. 7). She employs this term 
“in order to locate intersubjectivity in both representations and reality, 
and better understand the conflictual development of Asian experiences 
of eugenics in particular and modernization in general” (pp. 7-8). The 
ambitious conceptual framework is a critique of existing studies, which 
104 EASTM 31 (2010) 
tend to reduce their examinations to such dichotomies as East versus 
West, representation versus reality, self versus other, etc. (p. 8). 
Chung presents three major thematic chapters after a short introduc-
tion and Chapter One. Chapter Two provides background information 
covering American and Nazi connections to the eugenics movement and 
the formation of scientific communities in Japan and China. Chapter 
Three, entitled “Lamarckism versus Mendelism: The Politics of Body and 
Heredity Symptoms: National Character and the Eugenicists’ Presenta-
tion,” explores the debates among Chinese scholars, including American-
trained zoologist/eugenicist Pan Guangdang (1899-1967), Japanese-
trained socialist eugenicist Zhou Jianren (1888-1984), and American-
trained sociologist Sun Benwen (1892-1979) in the mid 1920s. This chapter 
also examines Japanese legislative efforts to segregate and control lepers, 
the sufferers of non-hereditary disease, in the name of eugenics, together 
with arguments that were compatible with Lamarckism in the popular 
writings of the German-inspired journalist Ikeda Shigenori (1892-1966) 
and Japan’s leading eugenicist Nagai Hisomu (1876-1957). The author 
argues that Lamarckian ideas, in which acquired characteristics were 
considered heritable, did play a substantial role in the eugenics move-
ments in Japan and China (p. 62). Unlike biologically deterministic Men-
delism, Lamarckism offered a possibility of racial improvement through 
social reform and education even for the races deemed “inferior” in the 
eyes of Western Social Darwinists. 
Chapter Four, “Birth Control or Sex Control?: Politics of Knowledge 
and Reproduction” illuminates the entry of women as a subject in the 
eugenics debates around the time Margaret Sanger visited both Japan 
and China in 1922 as women began to be perceived as the preservers of 
the nation and race based on their role in reproducing and educating 
children. On the “performative” level, Chung compares two female gy-
naecologists: Yoshioka Yayoi (1871-1959), who founded a Japanese col-
lege for women doctors, and Marion Yang (1891-1983), who was instru-
mental in creating a program for training modern midwives. Interest-
ingly, Chung finds the marked contrast that while Yoshioka was opposed 
to it, Yang was supportive of birth control. 
Chapter Five highlights the differing social constructions of 
race/ethnicity in the second Sino-Japanese War, which was understood 
as a war of population by Japanese and Chinese eugenicists. Chung 
shows the Japanese dilemma of pushing the identity of Japan as a racial 
body of the pure-blooded Yamato minzoku while managing a multi-ethnic 
Japanese empire. Examining the 1941 Ministry of Health and Welfare 
document, the “Outlines of Establishment of Population Policy,” together 
105 Reviews 
with the Ministry’s key eugenicist Furuya 1  Yoshio’s (1890-1974) book 
entitled National Land, Population and Blood, Chung finds the Japanese 
vision of “a three-dimensional conical body in which the top center and 
core circle would be the emperor and his lineage, the inner circle the Ya-
mato race as a unilinear patriarchal nation, and the outer circle pan-
Asianism culturally and territorially binding together the Japanese colo-
nies and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” (p. 151). Chung also 
points out a hierarchical emphasis: while in the metropolis both quality 
and quantity were stressed, in the overseas colonies the quality approach 
was conspicuously missing. Regarding China, Chung summarizes vari-
ous discussions relating to population, including that of the Population 
Policy Research Committee in the Social Ministry in the Executive Yuan 
in the early 1940s. In May 1945, the Nationalist Party adopted the plan 
drafted by this Committee as the Guideline of National Population Pol-
icy. It incorporated eugenic principles. To improve population quality, it 
listed such things as premarital examination, venereal-disease preven-
tion, and the separation or sterilization of hereditarily defective people. 
To ensure population growth, the policy prohibited abortion and infanti-
cide, and promoted 'reforms' at frontier areas. Contrary to the Japanese 
Ministry of Health and Welfare preference for 'pure-blooded' ethnic iden-
tity, Chinese officials encouraged interracial and inter-ethnic marriage in 
order to strengthen national unity and support future conscription. 
These three substantial chapters are followed by a brief Conclusion 
and a slightly longer Epilogue.  The conclusion stresses the disparity bet-
ween the good intentions and evil consequences of science in eugenic 
movements. 
The scope of this study is impressive in its originality, depth and 
scope. The author is comfortable doing research in not only her native 
Chinese but also in English and Japanese.  This linguistic competence has 
made it possible to produce a ground-breaking study comparing similar 
and inter-related issues in the two countries while situating the subject in 
a global context. The Chinese and Japanese adopted eugenic ideas that 
originated from Britain, Germany and the United States. East Asian 
advocates of eugenics shared certain translated terminology, reinter-
preted the ideas to fit or reject their local traditions and responded to 
changing historical conditions. Chung is particularly successful in shed-
ding light on their shared concerns, and such mediators of transnational 
eugenics as Chinese graduate of Tokyo University Zhou Jianren and 
Japanese physiologist Nagai Hisomu, who taught in Taiwan and China 
after his retirement. Chapter Five which deals with the two countries’ 
                                                 
1 Actually his last name is pronounced “Koya,” not “Furuya.” 
106 EASTM 31 (2010) 
intensified discussions of population policy, in which eugenics figured 
prominently, in the midst of the same war in which Japan was trying to 
take over China, offers a new cultural way of looking at Sino-Japanese 
relations dominated by political, military, and economic historical ap-
proaches. 
The study’s originality and scope create some challenges as well. Con-
cerning her ambitious conceptual approach, although the author explains 
her “comparativism,” she does not offer adequate definitions for other 
theoretical jargon, such as “simultaneity,” “nonsynchronism,” “tempo-
ralities,” “intersubjectivity,” and the “performative,” which, I believe, are 
essential for readers to appreciate fully the intellectual contributions of 
the book. In terms of the wide range of coverage, there is a problem of the 
target readership. This book may be difficult to follow for East Asianists 
who are unfamiliar with the history of science related to eugenics. For 
example, inspired by Nancy L. Stepan, Chung defines Lamarckism by 
locating it in the French/Latin American traditions of improving off-
spring through better prenatal and infant care, and public hygiene cam-
paigns against alcoholism, tuberculosis and venereal disease. In fact, this 
was often observable even in the Anglo-American eugenics movements. 
Indeed, historian Daniel Kevles calls the advocates of such movements, 
“reform eugenicists” as opposed to “mainline eugenicists.” Though 
Chung does not discuss the relationships between reform eugenics and 
mainline eugenics, it seems compatible with that of Chung’s Lamarckism 
and Mendelism.2 Additional explanations of differences and similarities 
among Latin Lamarckism and Anglo-American reform eugenics would 
have been helpful in better-situating, for instance, Margaret Sanger (1879-
1966), the American birth control activist who visited Japan and China in 
1922, and her impact on East Asian eugenic thinking in Chung’s study.  
Likewise, this study assumes prior knowledge in East Asian history. In 
Chapter Five, Chung discusses the population policies of Sun Yat-sen 
(1866-1925), Chiang Kai-shek (1877-1975) and Mao Zedong (1893-1976), 
together with the ideas of various population theorists. I wonder if non-
China specialists interested in global eugenics movements can differenti-
ate their ideological, political, and diplomatic contexts and different de-
grees of influences. This book would have benefitted from expanding the 
introduction and conclusion to offer definitions of the conceptual terms to 
support the author’s theoretical framework and meaningful analyses 
                                                 
2 See Chung, p. 98; Nancy L. Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and 
Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), and Daniel J. 
Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley: 
University of California Press, 1985), pp. 173-175. 
107 Reviews 
tightly linked to that framework. It would also have been desirable to 
expand Chapter Two in order to provide further historical and scientific 
background instead of burying the information in the subsequent narra-
tive. A glossary of terms and individuals as well as a chronological table 
would have been helpful to cater to the needs of the book’s audience, 
who come from disparate disciplines. 
I find another challenge in the author’s grand scheme. As the intro-
duction makes clear, this book is based on her dissertation, “Struggle for 
National Survival: Chinese Eugenics in a Transnational Context, 1896-
1945” (University of Chicago, 1999). The title change seems to suggest the 
author’s intention to make the book less Sino-centered than the original. 
However, I feel her book is still anchored in Chinese history. First, I find 
Yoshioka Yayoi to be insignificant in the history of eugenics movements 
in Japan, even though Marion Yang and Yoshioka make a good compari-
son as pioneer female gynaecologists, and a good contrast regarding their 
attitudes toward birth control. As acknowledged by Chung, Yoshioka 
was listed as a member of the Racial Hygiene Association in the 1930s (p. 
120), but beyond that token membership, she was never an active advo-
cate of eugenic ideas. That may be why Chung ends up discussing Yoshi-
oka’s motive to become a doctor and her opposition to birth control with-
out providing crucial information about her eugenic ideas. In Japan, 
many women, including birth-control activists, were more intensely in-
volved in eugenics activism. There could have been a better pairing than 
Yang and Yoshioka if the purpose of the book is to examine eugenic 
ideas. The second example of Chung’s Sino-centeredness is her conspicu-
ous omission of discussion of the Japanese National Eugenics Law, which 
was passed in 1940, in her chapter on wartime eugenics population policy 
discourse. At the very center of population policy-making in wartime 
Japan, there stood this law, which deserves more substantial discussion 
than a few mere mentions on pp. 139, 144 and 162. (The author’s calling 
of this law the “National Eugenics Bill” even after the 1940 enactment is 
puzzling. See p. 139, 162, 173.) In addition, there is also an issue of the-
matic compartmentalization. After reading her rich examples of Lar-
marckian and Mendelian interpretations of heredity in various eugenics 
theorists in Chapter Three, some readers will be eager to find Chung’s 
follow-up observations linking the two evolutionary views to the pure-
blooded and miscegenation eugenics arguments during the Second Sino-
Japanese War in Chapter Five. Nancy Stepan’s Lamarckian eugenics had 
much to do with the Brazilian anxiety about “mongrel” races perceived of 
as inferior to white pure-blooded races.3 Having illustrated a neat con-
                                                 
3 Stepan, pp. 162-170. 
108 EASTM 31 (2010) 
trast in each chapter, sometimes Chung seems reluctant to bridge related 
issues between chapters. All in all, these examples illustrate some chal-
lenging aspects of comparativism.  Finally, the conclusion seems somew-
hat detached from her earlier empirical discussion focusing on ideas and 
policies among intellectuals and policymakers, but not on the implemen-
tation of such ideas and policies per se. To illustrate the “evil” conse-
quences of the well-intended “science“, however, Chung abruptly refers 
to Japanese “fascist atrocities“ and eugenic racial exclusion (p. 171).  In 
addition, the conclusion could have highlighted her arguments and con-
tributions to scholarship, explaining the significance of her findings based 
on the concepts introduced in the introduction.  For example, Chung’s 
Chapter Five is more nuanced than the general assumption linking 
Japanese acts of violence and eugenics, shedding light on Japanese eu-
genicists’ ambivalence toward inclusiveness and exclusiveness during the 
war.  As Chung correctly observes, Japan had multiple and conflicting 
national identities: Japan was in, outside of and above Asia (p. 147). 
In sum, this book is a pioneering study complicating East Asian 
eugenics history by going beyond conventional single-nation studies. Her 
novel trans-national approach is promising, especially in offering a new 
cultural way of investigating Sino-Japanese relations. It also poses vari-
ous challenges in how to handle widely different readers, and how to 
manage the balance of comparativism and compartmentalization in the-
matic chapter organization. 
The book’s epilogue lists the author’s future research agendas, includ-
ing the fascinating topic of the postwar debates on Lysenkoism in China 
and Japan. I expect the author to further refine the important analytical 
framework developed in this book. 
 


Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, Struggle for National Survival: Eugenics in Sino-Japanese Contexts, 1896-1945

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Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, Struggle for National Survival: Eugenics in Sino-Japanese Contexts, 1896-1945

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