Oh, I just revel in the FEAR OF CHINA.

So, I'm reading latest issue of The Futurist (as I do for work and pleasure). The cover of the May/June 2006 issue has a big picture of a cute baby on it with the headline: Designing Babies: a Eugenics Race with China?

This is a little more interesting (kookier, and more baby-related) than the recent stories in other media about car imports. The history of eugenics is one of the things that fascinate me, too. It's a spooky word that most folks associate with the Nazi quest for the Master Race, but it actually has roots in America in the first half of the 20th century, where we (I use that first-person plural loosely) had laws about sterilizing psychiatric patients, Native Americans and all sorts of other odd little groups that didn't fit the Californian ideal of mainstream.

So, racially diverse families, it can happen here.

Flip, flip, flip to the story itself.

Author Eric G. Swedin, an "information systems and technology" professor, writes: "…[W]ithin the next two decades, we will likely see human beings born with enhanced genetic characteristics in China, and competitive nations such as the United States are unlikely to allow a 'smart-baby gap' to emerge."

He says this idea came from thinking about two questions: essentially, 1. what can genetic engineering really do, and 2. why is China the place most likely to do it.

On question one, he says, "Scientists have already made 'designer babies' through the use of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, where embryos still in the test tube are checked for genetic diseases such as Down's syndrome, Tay-Sachs disease, cystic fibrosis, or sickle-cell disease. This technique has also been used to check for immunological compatibility when parents are trying to have another child in order to save an existing child in need of a bone-marrow donation." Beyond that, it's just a long series of baby steps tweaking particular gene combinations in different ways, gradually goosing up probabilities of giving birth to geniuses and super-athletes.

Question two gets more interesting. Genetics was studied in China in the 1920s, then went the way of all intellectual pursuits during the Cultural Revolution, but now is taking off again. They're dumping 1.3 percent of their hefty GDP into genetics, genomic research and related fields. They want to play. And the rules of their game (the bioethics thing) are based on Confucian ideals, which include the (here, very contentious) idea that life begins at birth, not conception.

This is how China wound up passing the 1995 Maternal and Infant Health Law, which made prenatal testing mandatory and compelled doctors to advise couples whether their genes made for a good marriage, and whether they should (ahem) think strongly about aborting any potential fetus due to genetic abnormalities.

In Swedin's words, "The intent of the 1995 Maternal and Infant Health Law is to remove birth defects from the population…. [F]or purposes of comparison, a study in the United States and Britain found that 3%-5% of all live births have some sort of genetic disorder. It is reasonable to assume that a similar proportion of Chinese births have been prevented due to Chinese policies, though not all birth defects can at present be detected before birth."

From there, he kicks into full-on science fiction mode, predicting a patriotic race within the next 20 years to keep Merican kids up with the Chinese. This could eventually lead to a kind of neo-feudalism, with a genetically altered "aristocracy" who're stronger, brighter, less disease-prone and maybe, after a few generations, possessing a few other genetic bonuses. He doesn't actually mention the X-men (Children of the Atom!), but the vibe is there.