"In its cultural form, the Hua–Yi distinction assumed Chinese cultural superiority, but also implied that outsiders could become Chinese by adopting Chinese values and customs."
What it means is Chinese identity is tied to culture, rather than tied to the actual physical body.
The author's article's point amounts to: "The smartest Chinese tend to be more successful and can afford more children, and this is eugenics."
>'The author's article's point amounts to: "The smartest Chinese tend to be more successful and can afford more children, and this is eugenics."'
Agreed, and it sounds like the author has an axe to grind for some odd reason. It's not eugenics that he's attacking only, note the implicit blame of "Darwinians" and "Galtonians" as being a cause for these policies.
<quote>The author's article's point amounts to: "The smartest Chinese tend to be more successful and can afford more children, and this is eugenics."</quote>
While in reality the countryside folks (less density) can have more children than urban dwellers (typically one child).
>>Would also like to hear opinions on the author's claim that IQ could be increased 10-15 points on average, per generation.
The same could be true if we just killed low-IQ people, which would be horrific in practice and spirit.
I'm also not sure I particularly care for the "smart" people I know more than the "less smart." This is even more true for the "smart" people I don't know who seem to be making this world worse for all of us. I would pick those "smart" people to be culled, if I had to choose.
You don't have to kill them, you just stop them from reproducing. It is cheaper and easier (in the horrific brave new world sense) to just sterilize anyone below a desired IQ threshold and let them act as worker class. Because by the time you can accurately gage adult IQ you would have already invested a lot of resources into the child.
The whole premise is that "like produces like", which of course is nonsense. Dumb people have brilliant kids, ugly people produce beautiful children, and so on and so forth.
3. However - you are right in one respect. There is usually a 'pull to the mean'. That means that children of exceptional people tend to be closer to the average, thus they are not as gifted as the exceptional parent.
Would an individual have been chosen for sterilization if:
1) He was born with a markedly pointy head, which caused much consternation to his parents and relatives.
2) Was developmentally backward. Notably, he failed to acquire language skills for a significant period during his early childhood.
3) He was educationally subnormal, showing signs of what would now be diagnosed as ADHD,and drugged into a stupor.
4) Was bone lazy. I believe that 'schweinehunde' was the informal term used at the time for this condition.
5) Was disobedient and rebellious, or one of those 'malcontents' that perennially threaten to upset the applecart of society (the term 'hooligan' enjoyed a brief vogue for describing this condition).
6) Was Jewish. The eugenics movement designated Jews for mass sterilization, along with Blacks, Poles and the 'bloody Irish' (but then again, these were the same dolts who thought that sterilizing homosexuals would somehow serve to 'keep the race pure').
Albert Einstein was a prime candidate for this preemptive culling.
If anything, Jews (or more precisely Ashkenazi) are a poster child for eugenics - since really that's what they went through in the middle ages, which is used to explain their enormous achievement (see http://www.economist.com/node/4032638)
I'd be interested in any perspective at all other than the author's, as he does not support his claims with anything other than general "it's widely understood" hand waving nonsense.
You seem to have missed the author's explanation of how they could get 10-15 IQ points per generation:
"Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation."
Once we've found which genes produce a 10-15 IQ point difference (and that's a big "once"!), we select for those genes, and get a 10-15 point boost in the next generation. Eventually, assuming an ongoing eugenics program, we get a strain that breeds true for those characteristics, and the 10-15 point gain becomes permanent. What makes you (or the author) assume that every generation we're going to find another set of genes that will produce another 10-15 point boost?
I don't think you even need to think of it on the level of genes (because most of the time, chromosomes are inherited whole (barring crossing over)). So you'd just be picking the best combinations of random selection of chromosomes contributed by the parents.
It's like being able to roll 100 times and picking the best one in D&D character creation. The improvement might not be able to be done infinitely, but could at least get us to everyone having IQ 130, which would mean a reduction in all the problems associated with lower IQ. (Crime, poverty, lack of educational achievement, bad health)
i.e. a father has two variants of chromosome 6, one good and one great. Why not make sure that his kids just "by chance" get the great one? There will be lots of tradeoffs, but it'd always be better to occasionally step in and make a choice than to always accept randomness.
Would also like to hear opinions on the author's claim that IQ could be increased 10-15 points on average, per generation. Sounds very unlikely to me.