Steven W. Mosher

Steven Westley Mosher (born May 9, 1948) 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.
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. 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 communist government, which considered he had broken its laws and acted unethically.
Mosher was dismissed from Stanford University's Ph.D program for 'lack of candor' over his use of data on China after he published 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. Mosher's dismissal from the Ph.D program 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 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.
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. 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 and anti-communist foreign policy interest group.
Personal life.
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: