Steven Westley Mosher is an American social scientist, anti-abortion activist, and president of the Population Research Institute, which opposes population control and abortion. In the early 1990s, he served as the director of the Claremont Institute's Asian Study Center, as well as a member of the US Commission on Broadcasting to China.
In 1979/80 Mosher became the first American scholar to conduct a full length study scrutinizing a Chinese Commune. He was given early access to China at the request of Jimmy Carter to Deng Xiaoping. He also traveled to Guizhou, then a somewhat remote and rarely visited part of China's southwest. Mosher is known in Chinese as Mao Sidi., 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 for 'lack of candor', after his 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. 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 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.
Mosher married Maggie So, a Hong Kong Chinese of Guangdong descent and they divorced in 1981. Still in the early 1980s, he married Hwang Hui Wa, an assistant professor of English and Chinese at Fu Hsing Technical College in Taiwan. Mosher, a convert to Roman Catholicism, lives in Virginia with his third wife Vera and as of 2012 he has nine children.
Selected bibliography
Steven Mosher has authored the following books as well as numerous articles and op-eds:
Broken Earth
Journey To The Forbidden China
China Misperceived: American Illusions and Chinese Reality
