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“The Curious Case of China’s Feminist Eugenicists

Li Jun is an active feminist scholar and writer who also goes by the pen name Li Sipan.
What if there was a program allowing the government to go around collecting sperm from good-looking, smart, healthy men — celebrities, scientists, athletes, etc. — and put it in a bank where any woman could access it? The bank would be state-run, held to tight scientific and ethical standards, and provide a wide range of benefits for its single clients, including day care and health care. Would that be finally enough to stabilize China’s free-falling fertility rate?”
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“What if there was a program allowing the government to go around collecting sperm from good-looking, smart, healthy men — celebrities, scientists, athletes, etc. — and put it in a bank where any woman could access it? The bank would be state-run, held to tight scientific and ethical standards, and provide a wide range of benefits for its single clients, including day care and health care. Would that be finally enough to stabilize China’s free-falling fertility rate?

It may sound like the plot to some absurdist “Brave New World” knockoff, but in some corners of the Chinese internet, radical, self-proclaimed feminists are serious about what they call zigong daode — “uterine morality” — and they’re not willing to accept anything but the very best genetic material.

The earliest use of uterine morality I’ve found was in a 2013 thread on the Baidu Feminism Tieba forum titled, “Women Should Establish ‘Morals of the Uterus.’” In it, the author makes a modest proposal: “The uterus is a holy site of human evolution, not a toxic factory for churning out garbage or petulant kids. Because women bear this huge responsibility, they should establish a system of uterine morals. For instance, births should be ‘neither random nor rampant,’ and (women should) ‘bear and rear better children.’””

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1007117/the-curious-case-of-chinas-feminist-eugenicists#