Genetically Engineered People?

 Until recently, China had the tallest man, Bao Xishun at 7 ft 9, and the shortest man, He Pingping at 2 ft 5 who was made famous taking a picture with the woman with the longest legs, in the world. The tallest man is now Sultan Kosen standing at 8 ft 1. I sometimes wonder if China does some kind of experiments to create things like that the tallest and shortest.

Look at Yao Ming. There is already a conspiracy theory that Yao Ming was an experiment led by the Chinese government in an attempt to dominate in all the Olympic events. The boy's parents, after all, were retired basketball stars whose marriage the year before Yao was born had made them the tallest couple in China. So imposing was their size that ever since childhood, the two had been known simply as Da Yao and Da Fang—Big Yao and Big Fang. Still, the medical staff surely had never seen a newborn quite like this: the enormous legs, the broad, squarish cranium, the hands and feet so fully formed that they seemed to belong to a three-year-old. At more than 5 kg, he was nearly double the size of the average Chinese newborn. The name his parents gave him, from a Chinese character that unifies the sun and the moon, was Ming, meaning bright.

Rumor has it that this conspiracy started over two generations ago, when Chairman Mao Zedong exhorted his followers to funnel the nation's most genetically gifted youngsters into the emerging communist sports machine. Two generations of Yao Ming's forebears had been singled out by the government for their hulking physiques, and his mother and father had both been drafted into the sports system.Wang Chongguang, a retired Shanghai coach was quoted as saying, "We had been looking forward to the arrival of Yao Ming for three generations."

It would not surprise me if the tallest man on earth would again be someone from China.