Steven W. Mosher

Steven Westley Mosher[1] (born May 9, 1948[2]) is an American social scientist, anti-abortion activist, neoconservative, anti-communist, and president of the Population Research Institute (PRI), which opposes population control and abortion. In the early 1990s, he was the director of the Claremont Institute's Asian Study Center, as well as a member of the US Commission on Broadcasting to China.[3] He is the author of several books concerning China.

Biography

Mosher was born in 1948 to working-class parents in Scotia, California and spent his early years in Fresno, California. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in May 1968, and attended Nuclear Power School before being selected for the Seaman to Admiral program. He received a B.S. degree in Biological Oceanography from the University of Washington in 1971, graduating summa cum laude and receiving a commission as an ensign in the U.S. Navy. The following year he earned an M.S. in Biological Oceanography. For the next three years, he served with the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Far East, achieving the rank of Lieutenant. In early 1976, following his naval service, he enrolled in the Chinese language program of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, completing the two-year course of study in 9 months. Awarded a three-year National Science Foundation fellowship, he was admitted to the doctoral program in anthropology at Stanford University, earning an M.A. in East Asian Studies in 1977, and an M.A. in Anthropology in 1978, and carrying out anthropological fieldwork on rural communities in China.

Visit to China and expulsion from Stanford

In 1979/80 Mosher became the first American scholar to conduct a full-length study scrutinizing a Communist Chinese Commune.[3] He was given early access to China at the request of Jimmy Carter to Deng Xiaoping. He also traveled to Guizhou,[4] then a somewhat remote and rarely visited part of China's southwest. Mosher is known in Chinese as Mao Sidi.[2] (Chinese: 毛思迪; pinyin: Máosīdí),[5] In 1981 Mosher was accused of bribing officials, briefly detained and denied re-entry to China by the Chinese communist government, which considered he had broken its laws and acted unethically.[6]

Mosher was dismissed from Stanford University's Ph.D. program for 'lack of candor' over his use of data on China[1][7] after he published an article in Taiwan about his experiences in Guangdong. This expulsion occurred shortly before the publication of Broken Earth which revealed, among other things, that forced abortions were common in Guangdong as a part of the one-child policy. He also released photographs of Chinese women undergoing forced abortions. These photographs showed the faces of the women, a possible violation of personal privacy, according to standards of anthropological ethics.[8] Mosher's dismissal from the Ph.D. program became a cause célèbre in the academic world,[9] as some said[10] that Stanford acted under pressure from the Chinese government, which threatened to withhold permission for Stanford researchers to visit China. However, Stanford said that its concern was that Mosher's informants had been put in jeopardy and that this was contrary to anthropological ethics.[11]

According to Mosher's book, Journey to the Forbidden China, he had a travel permit signed by the proper authority (Section Chief Liu of the Canton Public Security Office) to go into the "forbidden area" of Guizhou because it was en route to his destination of Sichuan. Mosher gave a copy of the travel permit to the American Consulate before he met with the Chinese authorities to discuss the incident.

In the period after the Mosher controversy, it became much more difficult for American anthropologists to work in China. Many other anthropologists from the United States were limited to three weeks' stay.[12]

Activism

According to the Los Angeles Times, Mosher successfully lobbied the George W. Bush administration to withhold $34 to $40 million per year for seven years from the United Nations Population Fund, the largest international donor to contraceptive and family planning programs.[13] Mosher is president of the Population Research Institute and is also a member of the Committee on the Present Danger: China that is an American neoconservative[14] and anti-communist foreign policy interest group.[15]

Personal life

Mosher married Maggie So, a Hong Kong Chinese of Guangdong descent and they divorced in 1981.[16] Still in the early 1980s, he married Hwang Hui Wa, an assistant professor of English and Chinese at Fu Hsing Technical College in Taiwan.[16] Mosher, a convert to Roman Catholicism whose spiritual mentor was PRI founder Paul Marx (monk), lives in Virginia with his third wife Vera and as of 2012 he has nine children.[17]

Selected bibliography

Steven Mosher has authored the following books as well as numerous articles and op-eds:

  • Broken Earth: The Rural Chinese. Free Press imprint of Simon & Schuster (1984), ISBN 978-0-02-921720-7
  • Journey To The Forbidden China (1985)
  • China Misperceived: American Illusions and Chinese Reality (1990)
  • A Mother's Ordeal: One Woman's Fight Against China's One Child Policy (1993)
  • Hegemon: China's Plan to Dominate Asia and the World. Encounter Books (2002), ISBN 978-1-893554-08-5
  • Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits (2008)
  • Growing Chinese Power—to What End (with Chuck DeVore). Human Events / Eagle Publishing, Inc. (2012) [18]
  • China Attacks. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform / Kindle Direct Publishing; 3rd edition (2013), ISBN 978-1-4819-7380-9
  • Bully of Asia: Why ′China's Dream′ Is the New Threat to World Order. Regnery Publishing (2017), ISBN 978-1-62157-696-9
  • The Politically Incorrect Guide to Pandemics. Regnery Publishing (2022), ISBN 1-68451-277-8 ISBN 978-1-68451-277-5

References
  1. Turner, Wallace (February 26, 1983). "Stanford ousts Ph.D. candidate over his use of data on China". The New York Times. Retrieved April 29, 2020. The Chinese have cut off scholars' access to rural areas since they started criticizing the behavior of the graduate student, Steven Westley Mosher, 34 years old.
  2. "Mosher, Steven W." LC Name Authority File. Library of Congress. Retrieved July 14, 2015.
  3. The Commission on Broadcasting to the People's Republic of China (Report) (Department of State Publication 9997 ed.). US State Department. September 1992. pp. Appendix 2. S 1.2:C 73/1.
  4. Frank Gibney, book review in Los Angeles Times , 6 October 1985
  5. "毛思迪 (Mosher, Steven W.)". Worldcat Identities. Retrieved 2015-07-14.
  6. Harding, Harry (26 July 2000). A Fragile Relationship: The United States and China since 1972. Brookings Institution Press. p. 126. ISBN 978-0-8157-9147-8. Retrieved 10 June 2021.
  7. Butterfield, Fox (1985-10-02). "Stanford President Upholds Doctoral Student's Expulsion". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-02-25.
  8. Horowitz, Irving Louis, "Struggling for the Soul of Social science," article in Society, Vol. 20, No. 5, pp. 4–15
  9. Nicolas Rothwell, publ. in Quadrant, Australia, 1984, p. 92
  10. Antonia Finnane, "Daughters, Sons, and Human Rights in China", article in Human Rights and Gender Politics: Asia-Pacific Perspectives, ed. Anne-Marie Hilsdon, publ. Routledge/Taylor and Francis, London, 2000, p. 93
  11. Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology, ed. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, publ. AltaMira Press, Oxford, p. 163
  12. Stevan Harrell in Fieldwork Connections, ed. Ayi Bamo, Stevan Harrell, Lunzy Ma, publ. Univ. of Washington Press, 2007, p. 27
  13. Weiss, Kenneth R. (July 22, 2012). "Fertility rates fall, but global population explosion goes on". Los Angeles Times.
  14. Bronner, Stephen Eric (2005). Blood in the sand: imperial fantasies, right-wing ambitions, and the erosion of American democracy. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-7168-7. OCLC 65562600.
  15. Strong, Matthew (July 9, 2019). "US expert predicts China's Communist government will self-destruct. The end result will be the same whether China chooses trade reforms or isolation: Mosher". Taiwan News. Retrieved April 28, 2020.
  16. Turner, Wallace (February 26, 1983). "Stanford ousts Ph.D. candidate over his use of data on China". New York Times. Retrieved June 3, 2014.
  17. Frawley Desmond, Joan (January 20, 2012). "Steve Mosher: A Vision of "Hell" Brought Him to the Church". National Catholic Register. Retrieved April 29, 2020.
  18. Mosher, Steven W.; DeVore, Chuck (2012). "Growing Chinese Power—to What End." Human Events. Retrieved on March 13, 2022.
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