Abstract

The American-trained evolutionary biologist, sociologist and eugenicist Quentin Pan (Pan Guangdan 潘光旦, 1899-1967) was a founding editor of and regular contributor to The China Critic. A prolific scholar whose collected works number some fourteen volumes, Pan was a pioneer in the fields of sociology, ethnology and anthropology, and his name is familiar to many scholars of modern China. Pan repeatedly appears in histories of social and human sciences in China, though a full English-language study of him has yet to be written.[2] This study introduces Pan's life and work, in tandem with a close reading of a selection of articles that he wrote for The China Critic in the late 1920s and early 1930s. These articles offer an excellent point of entry into Pan's ideas on population and eugenics, his polemics on family and marriage, and his intellectual positioning and self-fashioning.