Steven W Mosher

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. During the following year he earned an M.S. in Biological Oceanography, completing at the same time all the requirements for a doctorate except the dissertation. 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 Taiwan.

Mosher is proficient in the following languages, in addition to English: Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, German, Dutch, Taiwanese, Japanese.

Chinese name

Mosher is known in Chinese as Mao Sidi (Chinese: 毛思迪; pinyin: Máosīdí), giving him the same family name as the late Chairman Mao Zedong. Mainland Chinese communists complained about what they considered to be a misuse of Chairman Mao's surname by an American capitalist, but Mosher refused to change it. He remains known as Mao Sidi throughout the Chinese-speaking world.

Visit to China and expulsion from Stanford

In 1979 Mosher became the first American research student to conduct anthropological research in rural China after the Cultural Revolution. He was given early access to China at the request of Jimmy Carter to Deng Xiaoping. At the time he was married to a woman from Guangdong province, and for several months between 1979 and 1980 lived in rural Guangdong. He also traveled to Guizhou, then a somewhat remote and rarely visited part of China's southwest. In 1981 Mosher was denied re-entry to China by the Chinese government, which considered he had broken its laws and acted unethically.

Mosher was expelled from Stanford University's Ph.D program after publishing an article in Taiwan about his experiences in Guangdong. This expulsion occurred shortly before the publication of Broken Earth. The Chinese government was challenged by the contents of the book, which revealed among other things that forced abortions were common in that part of China as a part of the one-child policy. Chinese commentators say that Stanford University was put in an awkward situation because Mosher went to places he was not allowed to go. He also released photographs of Chinese women undergoing forced abortions with their faces exposed, a possible violation of personal privacy, according to standards of anthropological ethics. He was expelled from Stanford University due to "illegal and unethical conduct." The Mosher case became a cause célèbre in the academic world, for it was said that Stanford acted under pressure from the Chinese government, which threatened to withhold permission for future 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.

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 Kweichow (Guizhou) because it was en route to his destination of Szechwan (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; although Daniel M. Amos, then a doctoral student in anthropology at UCLA, successfully completed field research in Guangdong province between June 1980 and August 1981. Many other anthropologists from the United States were limited to three weeks' stay.

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 family planning programs.

Personal life

Mosher, a convert to Roman Catholicism, lives in Virginia with his wife, Vera, and has nine children.

Indeed, he had married a Taiwanese woman, 黃惠雅, on January 21, 1982 but divorced in July 1988. They have a son, Steven Huang Mosher (黃大信).