Journey To The Forbidden China

Synopsis

Mosher travels throughout Southern China from Canton and visits several provinces to witness first hand the stark, desolate countryside isolated from the rest of the world. The countryside of Guangxi province is visited by Mosher and his guide first, where he documents the experiences of an ethnic minority, the Chuang in their mostly autonomous region. The author continues to write of his experiences traveling down a "Class Four Highway" (a dirt road) to Kweichow province.

Kweichow province is a mountainous region with a sparse population grubbing out an existence in the barren land using new world crops of maize and sweet potatoes. The province was only settled in the 16th century after the introduction of said new world crops, crops that are hardy enough to survive the soil and the short growing season. Mosher finds evidence of malnutrition and recurring bouts of famine in the province remain common.

What is striking about the rural Chinese life is that the people in such villages lack access to schooling, healthcare, radio or television, and even are untouched by basic amenities such as fertilizer, electricity, running water, or modern agricultural tools. The villagers are unresponsive to the Chinese Communist Revolution as well as its rhetoric of a revolution fought for and by the peasants. The only contact with the government in Peking is through the party cadres and the CPC's version of the KGB, the Chinese Communist Party's secret police.

Mosher's travels are halted by an encounter with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, who detain him on the basis that he never received permission from Canton Municipal Public Security to operate a motor vehicle and travel to and through Chungking, Chengtu, Nanking, Soochow, and Peking in addition to Kweichow province.

The Canton Municipal Public Security office had in fact issued Mosher a permit to travel by motor vehicle through the aforementioned provinces and back to Canton. Mosher successfully was able to visit and take notes on the people of Guangdong, Guangxi, and Kweichou before being apprehended by the Ministry of Public Security. The Public Security cadres question Mosher and inform him that Kweichou province is off limits and that foreigners are restricted from traveling in the province due to the presence of military bases. The author believes that it is because Kweichou is the poorest province in all of China, and the totalitarian government did not want a cultural anthropologist reporting on the abject poverty of the province and the failures of the Chinese Communist Party in addition to the reporting Mosher did on the forced abortions and sterilizations of Chinese peasant women who went over the government mandated limit of 1 to 2 children.

Mosher is told to write a 'confession' of his misdeeds but he throws the Public Security cadres off his trail by writing a defense in the English language rather than Chinese, despite easily being able to write in Chinese characters. Mosher is then put on a train back to Canton where he edits his notes and reflects on the state of the rural Chinese people and the associated effects of the Communist Party on their lives.

Controversy

Mosher was a graduate anthropology student at Stanford University when he made his trips to China, which formed the basis of his books Broken Earth: The Rural Chinese and Journey to the Forbidden China. He was the first American that was allowed to freely travel throughout China via motor vehicle for extensive anthropological research. However, during the course of his research Mosher was expelled from Stanford's PhD program for "unethical conduct", a move that New York Times book critic Bryan Johnson felt may have been due to Peking pressuring Stanford to expel Mosher for controversial views held in Broken Earth. Stanford professor Clifford R. Barnett responded to this statement in a letter to the editor where he claimed that Mosher had been expelled prior to the publication of Broken Earth and that "the investigation of his behavior while doing his student fieldwork was initiated more than one and a half years before, on Oct. 1, 1981". Mosher unsuccessfully contested the expulsion, stating that the decision to uphold the suspension "is particularly disconcerting to me because I was exonerated on many points of fact and some of the charges against me."

Reception

Critical reception for Journey To The Forbidden China has been mostly positive. The New York Times praised the work as "an impressive and compelling piece of testimony." Foreign Affairs also praised the book, which they felt was "One of the most revealing books on contemporary China yet published".

In contrast, the Los Angeles Times gave a mixed review and wrote "The value of reading a book like this is the sense it gives of the huge obstacles in the way of really bettering the lot of China's billion people. On the minus side, however, the author does not seem interested at all in noting the vast progress that has been made in the five years since he left. Mosher's China of blacks and whites often seems as monochromatic as that of the communists he denounces."