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Steven W. Mosher is a writer who publishes on China and speaks both Mandarin and Cantonese. He is the president of the Population Research Institute in Virginia, a pro-life organization with connections to Human Life International (both were started by Father Paul Marx). He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as "Broken Earth: The Rural Chinese" (1983), A Mother's Ordeal, and Hegemon.

In 1979 Mosher became the first American research student to conduct anthropological research in rural China after the Cultural Revolution. 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, a remote and unvisited part of China. 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 on his experiences in Guangdong, and shortly before the publication of Broken Earth. The Chinese government was angry and embarrassed at 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 commenters say that Stanford was put in an awkward situation because Mosher went to places he was not allowed to go. He also released photographs of Chinese women having abortions with their faces exposed, a violation of informant privacy in 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.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Steven W. Mosher", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0