Recently, around the Winter Solstice, the sun rises at its latest time of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Almost every morning, I have to “battle” with my two children, trying to get them out of bed while it’s still dark outside to make it to school for breakfast at 7:20. The process is exhausting, and I can’t help but think how difficult it is to raise two kids, let alone three or four. Little did I expect that while driving to school and listening to the radio, I would hear a news report about a “Chinese billionaire going to the US to have 100 children.” My blood pressure instantly spiked. Good grief, ordinary people struggle to raise two or three children, yet these individuals are having 100 at once.

A quick search of related news revealed that it’s not uncommon for wealthy Chinese individuals to go overseas to mass-produce “children.” Some have four or five, some seven or eight, some have already had over 100, and some even boast about having 200 at once to build a “family enterprise.” For example, Xu Bo, the founder of Duoyi Network, was exposed last month by his ex-girlfriend Tang Jing on Weibo, claiming he had already fathered 300 children through surrogacy. Duoyi Network officially denied the rumor, stating it wasn’t 300 but “only” over 100.

The Privileged Class Under Industrialized Surrogacy

Reading such news and recalling my own “hardships” in raising children evokes mixed feelings. Are these people having children? They’re essentially running a factory. Looking at these stories together, it’s easy to see the fundamental issue: this is no longer about “having more children” but about using capital to replicate human beings.

When ordinary people discuss reproduction, they talk about “whether to have a second child,” “whether they can afford it,” “who will take care of them,” and “how to calculate education costs.” These individuals, however, discuss “how many in a batch,” “which country is more efficient,” and “how to circumvent legal risks.” These are not even on the same plane.

The reason the US court found wealthy individuals’s over 100 children “unreasonable” wasn’t just due to the shocking number but because such a scale completely divorces itself from the possibility of normal family relationships. No matter how wealthy you are, can a single individual genuinely, consistently, and verifiably fulfill parental responsibilities for over a hundred minor children? From a legal perspective, this is highly questionable.

But what’s more alarming isn’t “how many he had” but how he achieved it.

Despite China’s explicit legal prohibition of commercial surrogacy, these individuals, through transnational operations, have turned assisted reproductive technologies—which should be strictly regulated by law—into a scalable “reproduction assembly line.”

Money has become a universal pass to bypass physiological limits, ethical boundaries, and legal prohibitions.

What is the result?

These children are born with “structural advantages” in nationality, taxation, identity, and even future immigration. Meanwhile, ordinary families, even when having a single child legally and compliantly, must “scramble” for school districts, household registration, social security, and educational resources.

This is no longer a “personal choice” but a direct plunder of social fairness.

Reproduction is inherently a right with natural limitations. To be a qualified parent, one must invest time, energy, emotion, and responsibility. One’s body, family, and life become bound to this commitment long-term. Precisely because it carries inherent costs, society tacitly accepts it as relatively fair.

When capital can circumvent all this—no need for pregnancy, no need for upbringing, no need for long-term companionship, just paying the bills—reproduction transforms from a “right” into a “privilege.”

Even more absurdly, some defend such behavior, arguing that “historically, the wealthy have always had more children” or “the wealthy having more children benefits the country.”

The biggest flaw in such arguments is that they deliberately ignore a key premise: times have changed.

The ancient societal ideal of “more children, more blessings” was largely constrained by low productivity, physiological conditions, medical limitations, and family structures. It was essentially about “more labor, more support,” with children being part of the family labor force and ethical community. Today’s transnational commercial surrogacy, however, breaks down the reproductive body into production stages and children into end products, with no family ethics in between, only the foul stench of money.

This is not a continuation of tradition but a complete rebellion against it.

From a macro perspective, such behavior also creates an extremely dangerous structural consequence: while the overall fertility rate declines, reproductive “capacity” and “quantity” become concentrated among a tiny minority of high-net-worth individuals.

Population is not simply a matter of “more or less” but a structural issue. When ordinary families dare not or are unwilling to have children, while a few can have unlimited numbers in batches, class boundaries will only become further solidified, even “hereditarized.”

Allowing this trend to continue essentially means accepting that society can allow money to determine who is qualified to extensively perpetuate their bloodline.

Once this step is taken, the notion of “equality before the law” becomes nothing but an empty slogan.

What Constitutes a Correct View of Reproduction?

When discussing reproduction, an unavoidable topic is the “view of reproduction.” However, many people tend to speak in abstract terms or conflate understandings of reproduction from different historical stages into a “bound volume,” aiming to “dissolve” current reproductive views and vent personal emotions.

In reality, there is a very simple criterion for judging whether a society’s view of reproduction is healthy: whether children are treated as an “end” or a “means.”

In traditional Chinese culture, there is indeed the saying “more children, more blessings,” but its premise has never been quantity but the structure of human relationships. Children are not for flaunting family size, nor are they for hedging risks, allocating assets, or evading taxes. The core of “continuing the family line” lies in “passing on” and “receiving,” not “manufacturing” and “stockpiling.”

Confucius said, “The first to make burial figures, did he not have descendants?” opposing precisely treating humans as objects to be manufactured and arranged. True “having descendants” is not about successful DNA replication but the natural continuation of responsibility, ethics, and emotion.

Modern rule-of-law societies merely articulate this principle more clearly in legal language.

For example, Article 1009 of the Civil Code explicitly states that activities related to human embryos and genes must not violate ethics and morality. The underlying logic of this provision is simply: humans are ends, not means.

Therefore, judging whether a reproductive method is legitimate doesn’t hinge on “whether it’s technically possible” but on whether children are treated as independent individuals, whether parents genuinely assume responsibilities of upbringing, education, and companionship, and whether the reproductive act serves the child’s interests, not the other way around.

In the “industrialized reproduction” model of wealthy individuals, these questions hardly receive positive answers.

What does having over a hundred children mean? It means that from the moment of birth, the vast majority of children are destined to receive extremely diluted paternal love, nominal guardianship, and outsourced upbringing. This isn’t about “being able to afford it” but never intending to raise them personally.

The “principle of the best interests of the child” emphasized in the Law on the Protection of Minors precisely requires stable relationships, long-term companionship, and a predictable growth environment. In this mass-replication reproduction model, this principle is almost certainly unenforceable.

Further down lies the issue of equality in reproductive rights.

In recent years, the state has encouraged reproduction by offering subsidies, deductions, and policies, essentially attempting to reduce the compliant reproductive costs for ordinary families, not to create new privileged channels. However, when some individuals can use wealth and transnational rules to “legally outsource” domestically prohibited behaviors, the inevitable result is ordinary families meticulously calculating within the rules on one side, and a minority expanding infinitely above the rules on the other.

This directly destroys the most basic trust in a society’s rules.

Once reproductive rights become “expansion rights for the wealthy,” all those who abide by the rules and live step-by-step become de facto “the punished.”

This is the true source of my anger upon hearing this news.

Why Egg Selling and Surrogacy Must Be Strictly Prohibited

A few years ago, I was involved in cases related to cracking down on “egg selling and surrogacy” through my work. Honestly, at that stage, I wasn’t entirely without doubts about such an almost “one-size-fits-all” regulatory approach.

The reason is practical. I have a real-life example close to me: a married couple, stable relationship, but the wife was unfortunately diagnosed with Takayasu arteritis. This disease is difficult to cure, requiring long-term medication, and pregnancy could potentially trigger severe complications, even life-threatening. The doctor advised against having children. However, the couple genuinely wanted a child. Some privately suggested that commercial surrogacy abroad is mature, “technically feasible,” and “just a matter of money.” Ultimately, the couple didn’t take that step. Partly because, as public servants, they were aware it’s a legal red line; more importantly, they couldn’t cross the ethical and moral threshold themselves.

This example made me gradually realize something: the law’s “principled prohibition” of egg selling and surrogacy isn’t because legislators are insensitive to human circumstances, but because they understand all too well that making exceptions for “sympathetic individual cases” would quickly breach the entire system.

Because in reality, the law never faces only that “most sympathetic individual case”; it faces the systemic consequences amplified by capital, markets, and human nature.

It was through participating in specific cases and encountering more real situations that I truly understood why egg selling and surrogacy must be strictly prohibited in China. The fundamental reason isn’t “moral purism” but that it inevitably and systematically undermines three foundational structures: human dignity, family ethics, and the legal order itself.

First, it directly turns humans into tradable “means of production.”

In the commercial surrogacy model, eggs, wombs, embryos, and children are all broken down into “resource packages” that can be priced, selected, and combined. This includes the egg provider’s appearance, education, height; the surrogate mother’s age, physical condition; the fetus’s gender, number; even the country of birth.

This is no longer “assisted reproduction” but industrialized custom life services.

The reason Articles 990 and 1003 of the Civil Code repeatedly emphasize human dignity and bodily rights is precisely to prevent such occurrences: human bodies and lives cannot be treated as objects of transaction, let alone as production tools.

In reality, egg sellers often endure health risks from high-intensity ovulation stimulation (like ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome), low-price sales under information asymmetry, and long-term health consequences with no care after the one-time “transaction” is complete. So-called “voluntariness” is often a forced choice under economic pressure.

As for children, from the embryonic stage, they are treated as “commodities,” which structurally negates the “human dignity” and “principle of the best interests of the child” emphasized in the Law on the Protection of Minors.

Second, it creates unresolvable kinship relationships and legal chaos.

In natural reproduction or legal assisted reproduction, parent-child relationships are relatively clear: who are the parents, who bears upbringing obligations, who enjoys inheritance rights—all are evident. Even in cases like the recent Wahaha family’s illegitimate child property dispute, there was a clear parent-child relationship.

But once commercial surrogacy is involved, problems multiply exponentially: Is the egg provider considered a mother? Does the surrogate mother have maternal rights? Are the surrogate mother’s other children considered siblings? What if the commissioning party backs out or goes bankrupt? The child is born abroad—which country’s laws apply? etc.

Although Article 1071 of the Civil Code states that children born out of wedlock enjoy equal rights, undoubtedly, the basis of such rights is first clarifying who the legal “parents” are.

This is also why even US courts hesitate to easily confirm paternity for wealthy individuals’s over 100 children. It’s not the court’s “moral purism” but that such scale and mode have exceeded the scope any normal guardianship relationship can bear.

Once disputes arise, children may become victims in a legal vacuum, with no one truly responsible for their entire lives. Perhaps only a stopgap measure like “socialized upbringing” could address it, but undoubtedly, that uniform upbringing method is not what anyone desires.

Third, it systematically exploits women and young children.

The most common slogan of commercial surrogacy is, “This is a woman’s autonomous choice regarding her own body.” But the problem is, when this method is built upon vast wealth disparities and information asymmetry, it ceases to be freedom and becomes structural exploitation.

In reality, the surrogacy industry often exhibits a clear class distribution: commissioning parties are typically the wealthy, while egg and womb providers are usually economically disadvantaged women. Especially in transnational surrogacy, it often involves one-sided exploitation of women from developing countries by Western developed nations. In such an “industry,” who bears the risks, who deals with the consequences, and who is most likely to be “disappeared” in disputes are self-evident.

Precisely for this reason, as early as 2001, the former Ministry of Health issued the “Measures for the Administration of Human Assisted Reproductive Technology,” explicitly prohibiting any form of commercial surrogacy. Legislators understood very well that once “paid exceptions” are allowed, the entire system would be quickly breached by capital. The lesson from the post-1990s abuse of B-ultrasound for fetal gender detection, leading to imbalanced sex ratios at birth, is profoundly instructive.

Ultimately, These wealthy individuals Are Challenging the Bottom Line of Human Civilization

Peeling back the layers of these issues reveals a common thread: what wealthy individuals are truly doing isn’t just “having more children” but attempting to use capital to rewrite society’s fundamental understanding of “human beings.”

In their logic, reproduction is no longer an act with inherent responsibilities and ethical constraints but an engineering project that can be outsourced, scaled, and infinitely replicated. Children are no longer individual lives requiring long-term companionship and investment but results “produced” in batches. Women’s bodies are broken down into priced, deployable reproductive resources.

This is no longer a matter of personal morality but a direct collision with the civilizational consensus of human society.

The reason modern society can maintain basic order is never about “whether it’s technically possible” but about consistently acknowledging several inviolable bottom lines: humans are not tools, life cannot be bought or sold, and reproduction cannot exist detached from responsibility. From this perspective, These wealthy individuals, along with He Jiankui from Southern University of Science and Technology who conducted gene-editing on babies years ago, are birds of a feather.

Once these bottom lines are broken, societal operational logic will quickly slide toward the law of the jungle: whoever has money can configure more life; whoever is vulnerable is more easily drawn into risks, consumed, and replaced.

This is why the law must adopt a principled prohibition against egg selling and surrogacy and maintain high vigilance against such “industrialized reproduction.” If even the bottom line that “humans cannot be treated as means of production” cannot be upheld, notions of fairness, order, and rights protection become empty words.

Wealthy individuals and others operating overseas may seem clever, but it’s actually dangerous. What they challenge isn’t just the laws of a particular country but the ethical consensus painstakingly built by human society over a long history. This news report itself is telling: it first broke in the Wall Street Journal, followed by global media condemnation. Even in Western societies that most emphasize “democracy and freedom,” while there might be room for discussion regarding surrogacy for one or two children due to reproductive barriers, such mass production of hundreds of children is unequivocally rejected. Because this is no longer a debate about the boundaries of freedom but a bottom-line issue that any civilized society must collectively defend.