P'an Kuang-tan (1898-), sociologist, essayist, and propagandist for national betterment through eugenics. He was noted for his studies of family and clan genealogies.

Born in Paoshan, Kiangsu, P'an Kuang-tan was the son of P'an Hung-ting, a chin-shih who was a member of the Hanlin Academy. According to P'an Kuang-tan, his family "belonged half to the scholar class and half to the merchant class, though no member of the family had achieved high official rank or had become really wealthy." After receiving a traditional education in the Chinese classics, P'an entered Tsinghua College. Although he sustained an athletic injury which resulted in the amputation of one of his legs, his handicap did not prevent him from attaining an outstanding academic record. Upon graduation in 1922, he was awarded a Boxer Indemnity Fund scholarship for study in the United States. He enrolled at Dartmouth College, where he ranked seventh in his class, became a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and received a B.A. degree with honors in zoology in 1924. From Dartmouth, P'an proceeded to Columbia University, where he studied for two years. After receiving an M.A. degree in 1926, he returned to China to become a professor and director of studies at Wu-sung kuo-li cheng-chih ta-hsüeh [Wusung national university of political science] near Shanghai.

In the course of his scientific studies in the United States, P'an Kuang-tan had become interested in the possible applications of biological principles to the problems of human society. He spent much of his time during the next two decades refining and teaching the conceptsof eugenics and studying their influences on Chinese social history. In 1927 alone he published four books on the subject: Jen-wen shih-kuan [the humanist view of history], Jih-pen Te-i-chih min-tsu-hsing chih pi-chiao yen-chiu [a comparative study of the national traits of Japan and Germany], Yu-sheng yti k'ang-chan [eugenics and the will to resist], and Jen-wen sheng-wu-hsüeh lun-ts'ung [collected essays on a humanistic biology], which later was reissued as Yu-sheng kai-lun [general theory of eugenics] .

In 1928 P'an temporarily abandoned eugenics to write Feng Hsiao-cK ing chih fen-hsi [the psychoanalysis of Feng Hsiao-ch'ing], in which he sought to refute Bertrand Russell's charge that China lacked data for psychological analysis by doing a Freudian case study with the famous Ch'ing poet and musician as its subject. The following year, he published Chung-kuo chih chia-t'ing wen-Vi [Chinese family problems]. For this book he made a survey of readers of the magazine Hsueh-teng [lamp of learning] concerning their marriage and family status; the survey revealed that in Shanghai compromise patterns of marriage and family life were more common in the late 1920's than fully traditional or fully modern patterns. Also in 1929 he produced the "Chung-kuo chia-p'u-hsüeh luehshih" [a brief history of the study of Chinese clan records], which appeared in the Tung-fang tsa-chih {Eastern Miscellany) and which set forth P'an's views on the importance of the large corpus of genealogical material available in Chinese for Chinese social history. Two main arguments emerged in P'an's writings during this period and continued to dominate his work for two decades. The first concerned the necessity for bettering mankind, and the population of China in particular, through the improvement of biological inheritance; the second was the use of Chinese history, particularly family and clan genealogies, as evidence in support of eugenics. The combining of these two interests led to a number of highly interesting studies of Chinese social history which pioneered in the use of genealogical materials. P'an also wrote widely in the related fields of population and birth control, the role ofwomen in society, sex education, and "national health" (min-tsu chien-k'ang). In the period immediately following the successful completion of the Northern Expedition, there was much talk in a Spenglerian vein of the "health" or "sickness" of China in relation to Japan and the West. P'an equated "national health" with eugenics and argued that it could be achieved only if the population of China developed according to eugenic principles. He insisted that while "national vitality" (min-tsu huo-li) , another catchword of the day, might have metaphysical connotations for some, it also had definite scientific meaning with respect to the quality of the nation's genetic resources. China's strength as a nation, P'an held, would be tested in the coming struggle with Japan. P'an then translated and published several works by the British psychologist Havelock Ellis, including Hsing Vi chiao-yu [sex education] and Hsing ti tao-teh [sexual morality], both of which appeared in 1934.

During this period, P'an Kuang-tan became active in the Crescent Moon Society. His associates in this group included Hu Shih, Liang Shih-ch'iu, Wen I-to, and Hsu Chih-mo (qq.v.). He contributed articles to the Hsin-yueh tsa-chih [crescent moon monthly] and founded the Hsin-yüeh shu-tien [crescent moon book company], which published works by a number of leading authors before succumbing to financial difficulties. For a while, P'an also was editor of the Hsüeh-teng, the literary supplement to the Shanghai Shih-shih hsin-pao.

In 1930 P'an was appointed professor of sociology at Tsinghua, and in 1936 he became dean of faculty. He held these posts until 1946, serving out the war years at Southwest Associated University in Kunming. During this period, P'an published two notable books. Tu-shu wen-Vi [thoughts on reading], published in 1930, was a collection of P'an's essays; Chung-kuo ling-jen hsüeh-yuan chih yen-chiu [blood kinship among Chinese actors], published in 1941, analyzed the transmission of theatrical talent through the study of the family records of several famous acting families and purported to show that the large number of famous actors produced by a very few families was the result of preserving desirable genetic qualities. However, P'an avoided the worst extremes of the eugenics school by stressing social environment and biological inheritance equally. As the Second World War drew to a close, P'an Kuang-tan began to take a greater interest in the immediate political and social future of China than in the distant prospects envisioned by eugenic theory. At Kunming, he often addressed student groups on political topics, and he wrote a number of essays in which he criticized the political and educational policies of the National Government. After Wen I-to (q.v.) was shot on 15 July 1946, P'an was among the intellectuals who took refuge in the United States consulate at Kunming. Soon afterwards, he published his own plan for the development of a new China, Tzu-yu chih lu [the road to freedom]. In this book P'an expressed his urgent concern for the realization of democracy, which he characterized as hsien-jen cheng-chih [government by virtuous men]. Contrasting such Chinese traits as passivity with those of the English and the Americans which he deemed conducive to the growth of liberty, P'an argued that democracy could only be developed in China through the adaption of its principles to the conditions and characteristics of Chinese life. Late in 1946 P'an Kuang-tan returned to Peiping to become director of the Tsinghua University library. The following year, he published two of his most important works. The first, "K'o-chu yü she-hui liu-tung" [the examination system and social mobility], was written jointly with Fei Hsiao-t'ung (q.v.) for publication in the magazine She-hui k'o-hsüeh [social science]. It challenged traditional opinion by arguing that the Ch'ing examination system was a narrow way, not a wide road, of mobility for men of non-official background. It also revealed that successful candidates in the examinations tended to come from cities and towns in provinces with a high rate of absentee landlordism rather than from rural areas in provinces with a high rate of peasant proprietorship. The second notable work published by P'an in 1947 was Aling-Cti ing liang-tai Chiahsing ti wang-tsu [the leading clans of Chiahsing during the Ming and Ch'ing periods]. This study indicated that once a clan gained prominence, it tended to retain its influential status for several generations. During this period, P'an also collaborated with Fei Hsiao-t'ung in editing two collections of Fei's essays : Jen-hsing yü chi-cKi [human nature and the machine] of 1946 and Sheng-yü chih-tu [systems of child rearing] of 1947.

Both "K'o-chu yü she-hui liu-tung" and Ming-Ch'ing liang-tai Chia-hsing ti wang-tsu were read—and probably were intended to be read — as covert criticism of the ruling Kuomintang elite and of China's social structure as a whole. It surprised no one, therefore, that P'an Kuangtan elected to remain in China when the Chinese Communists took control of the mainland in 1 949 . Shortly after the fall of Peiping in January 1949, P'an was appointed a member of the university affairs committee of the newly established Peiping municipal military control commission. With the establishment of the Central People's Government, he became a member of the Government Administration Council's culture and education committee. In December 1949 he represented the China Democratic League at the second session of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

At a mass meeting held in Peking during the Korean conflict P'an declared that the aim of the United States was "to turn Chinese into both spiritual and material parasites of the American way of life . . . and thus to destroy China's culture." He also castigated American friendship for Chinese as being nothing more than a mask for "cultural aggression." About this time, P'an rejected his ideas about democracy and eugenics, confessing that he had overemphasized members of "the feudal elite" in his studies. He made a full confession of his errors in Su-nan Vu-ti kai-ko fang-wen-chi [an account of a tour of inspection of land reform in southern Kiangsu], written in collaboration with Ch'uan Wei-t'ien and published in 1952. He interpolated a long list of ideological inadequacies and offenses into an account of the land reform then being carried out in the T'aihu region of Kiangsu, confessing that because his family had lived in towns for the past 16 generations as scholars or merchants, his ancestors had known nothing about the conditions of peasant life. He himself had left home at the age of 13 and thereafter had lived in Peking, Shanghai, Kunming, or foreign cities. He therefore welcomed the opportunity to gain a better understanding of peasant life by touring Kiangsu. In 1954 P'an became a member of the national committee of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association. In 1957 he was sent to observe the T'u-chia, a non-Chinese minority group living in western Hunan. P'an's assignment was to make recommendations for the handling of the minorities problem as a whole on the basis of his study of the T'u-chia. His recommendation that autonomous chou [districts] be set up for each minority group led to his condemnation as a rightist in 1958 along with such other members of the minority peoples department of the Chinese Academy of Sciences as Lei Haitsung (q.v.). P'an was charged with deciding the minorities question solely on the basis of sociological theory "with not one reference to Marxism and without taking notice of the present needs and desires of the people." This criticism notwithstanding, P'an was appointed deputy director of the department of history in the Chung-kuo min-tsu hsüeh-yuan [academy for the study of minority peoples]. He was elected to the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in April 1959, and the order designating him a rightist was rescinded in September of that year.