You conducted a two-year field study in the mainland village of Xinchai. How did that come about?
Mosher: I was trained as an anthropologist at Stanford University. Actually, from the beginning my studies concentrated upon China, its languages and its people. When China opened up in 1979, I was selected to be the first American social scientist to live and work in China’s villages since the Communist takeover in 1949. I was in China when the one-child policy was put into place. I saw women in the second- and third-trimester of pregnancy forcibly aborted.
In the two decades since then, hasn’t the People’s Republic of China emerged from Third World poverty?
Mosher: China is in the middle of the greatest economic take-off in world history. If it were occurring in a country which respected human rights and had instituted popular sovereignty, we could all applaud this development. But China remains a one-party dictatorship, eager to perpetuate its rule and to aggrandize its power, both at home and abroad. Thus China’s rise to economic superpower poses problems for all of us.
Hasn't the decentralization of Communist China's economy brought about unprecedented freedoms?
Mosher: China’s economy remains far more centralized than most people realize. Despite the much-vaunted economic reforms, China’s steel industry, its coal industry, its heavy industry sector in general, remains in the hands of the state. While factories that produce consumer goods are now often in private hands, this does not mean that the workers in such factories, for example, are free to form labor unions, or that women in such factories are free from the one-child policy.
If not economic, then what are Communist China's reasons for continuing its one-child policy? What have been some of the consequences for Chinese citizens and society on the mainland?
Mosher: The one-child policy can be viewed as a means of social control. While economic controls have loosened, controls of reproductive behavior have tightened up. It’s a way of maintaining the muscular rigor of the system.
The social consequences of the one-child policy are already severe. First, it is causing the Chinese population to age more rapidly than any human population has ever aged. The elderly, traditionally respected in Chinese society, are now faced with the prospect of euthanasia by a government which has no compunction whatsoever about such acts. Another consequence of the one-child policy is that boys outnumber girls by 120 to 100. Many little girls have been eliminated by sex-selective abortions, or by female infanticide, or by abandonment.
On September 19, 2000, the U.S. Senate voted in favor of permanent Normal Trade Relations with the People's Republic of China (PRC). How did you view this development?
Mosher: The Permanent Normal Trade Relations vote was a great disappointment to me. In 1999, when the PRC received its annual extension of Most Favored Nation status for another year, many congressmen made bold proclamations. Yes, they could vote for renewing Normal Trade Relations (NTR) with China for one year, but they would absolutely resist the idea of granting permanent NTR, because that would give Beijing, in effect, a free ride on human rights. In the end, the vote was 85 to 15 in the Senate to do just this – without conditions. We have given China what it most prizes – Permanent Normal Trade Relations – without extracting any human rights concessions or commitments in return.
Yet some Western leaders claim that China responds better to “quiet diplomacy” than to public criticism on the human rights front.
Mosher: The Clinton administration delinked human rights and trade on that assumption. In response, Beijing released a couple of well-known dissidents, then quietly carried out a nationwide crackdown that has left most of the country’s other dissidents either in jail or under house arrest. Christian leaders continue to be arrested. Even the leaders of the nonpolitical Falun Gong, a Buddhist exercise group, now find themselves in jail. Their crime: asking to be legally recognized as an “association.”
On January 22, 2001 President George W. Bush reinstated the “Mexico City Policy” prohibiting U.S. funding of international programs providing abortions. Does this modify any previous American aid program to China?
Mosher: The newly reinstituted Mexico City policy would not affect funding to the UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund), which is heavily involved in China’s one-child policy. However, the new director of USAID, who now reports to Colin Powell, should recommend a cutoff in funding to the UNFPA on the grounds that its involvement in China violates the Kemp-Kasten Amendment. This forbids any U.S. funds from going to any country or organization that participates in the support or management of a program of forced abortion or sterilization.
What was accomplished by the huge demonstrations on Tiananmen Square in Spring 1989? Even though they ended tragically in violence, weren’t they a sign that democratic ideas were taking root as a result of China's greater openness to the West?
Mosher: There is no automatic trend towards democracy in China, or anywhere else in Asia for that matter. In fact, oppression can, and does, coexist quite comfortably with capitalism. The Republic of South Africa, for instance, practiced apartheid for many decades, despite having a free-market economy and adhering to international law and a rules-based trading system.
The hope that Tiananmen Square was the beginning of the end of Communist rule in China has not borne fruit. In the late eighties, Communism around the globe seemed to be in retreat. But the brutal crackdown that followed the 1989 demonstrations in Beijing completely crushed the dissident movement within China. In the years since, a few brave individuals have spoken out from time to time, but no organized opposition exists, or is allowed to exist.
The demonstrations in 1989 had been led by a generation of students who were born during the Cultural Revolution. They grew up cynical about the Communist Party and its leaders and were attracted to America’s democratic ideals. The present generation of students is the product of a very different experience. They came of age during a period of political stability and double-digit increases in per-capita income. This generation of the economic reform is very nationalistic.
(Look for Part 2 of Michael Miller's interview with PRI's Steven Mosher in tomorrow's Edge.)
