Social Darwinism in Maoist China

Mao Zedong, among many other Chinese Communist leaders, was influenced by Darwin and many other Darwinist authors such as Huxley and Hubert Spencer. Mao viewed, “Darwin, as presented by the German Darwinists, asthe foundation of Chinese scientific socialism”. The policies advocated by under Mao were reflective of Darwinist doctrine with his open support for "selection of the fittest" as a method to achieve world communism. Kenneth Hsü, a student in China during the 1940s, illustrated that, "we were victims of a cruel social ideology that assumes that competition among individuals, classes, nations, or races is the natural condition of life, and that it is also natural for the superior to dispossess the inferior." Hsü observed that Mao was convinced that humans would degenerate without the implication of natural selection. College students in China also supported Darwinism.

SOURCE: The Darwin Effect - Its Influence on Nazism, Eugenics, Racism, Communism, Capitalism and Sexism