Broken Faith: Steven Mosher, Stanford, and China

...Indeed it is a usual propaganda tactic to list even disembodied "bourgeois ideas" (e.g., freedom or democracy) in close association with venality and common criminality, very much like placing fragrant food invariably next to rotting garbage...

...According to all accessible information, the charges of misconduct against Mosher are based almost exclusively on two sources--the denunciations of an ex-wife who had threatened to "ruin" Mosher when he asked for a divorce and the complaints of Peking officials, which became ever more elaborate with time...

...Yes, they had, but fear of paying a professional price for bucking the trend reportedly played a role in preventing exposure...

...Here is a foreigner who understands what it is to live in the Chinese peasant's shoes, or rather plastic sandals-and that understanding alone, without a trace of sentimentality, is moving...

...All the less prepared were we for our first, strong impression, which, aside from the excellence and freshness of the writing, was that of forthrightness--a blunt honesty, completely at odds with the image of personal deviousness projected by Mosher's Stanford accusers...

...These reasons were "deliberate disregard for the law of the host country and the instructions of its officials" and a "lack of candor" in dealing with his professors and the investigative committee...

...On the top floor he discovered a different atmosphere and a far better stocked restaurant which, while "decidedly greasy spoon" by American standards, was "a world away from the crowded dirty pandemonium below...

...Feuer concluded that "academics, curiously, may thrive on such blunders so long as they are congruent with the emotional currents of the Intellectual Elite...

...One looked forward with considerable curiosity, therefore, to the findings of a "blue ribbon panel" of three "nationally prominent scholars" appointed by Stanford University to investigate the case...

...Mosher, on the other hand, maintains that he has been legally advised not to disclose the information on his own, since this would amount to self-slander...

...Mosher's revelations of scenes in a forced-abortion clinic for village women have already received wide publicity, mainly for their sensational effect...

...The import of what Mosher learned from interviewing more than 100 villagers during the final weeks of his stay is therefore all the more thoughtprovoking--namely that these peasants were better nourished and clothed about half a century ago under a few opportunistic warlords than after three decades under Communist rule...

...Ought to be required reading for every citizen before they aregranted the right to vote," says Robert S t a n g e r , editor o f The Stanger Report...

...Dept AS, 12 Daniel Road Fairfield, New Jersey 07008 or call toll free 1-800-526-2554 (in N.J., 1-800-526-1128...

...The charges range from the attempted smuggling of precious coins and bestowing of lavish gifts on his research subjects to spying activities --all denied as false or distorted by Mosher, who contends that his expulsion was rather precipitated by departmental anger over publication of his article in Taiwan and under pressure by the Chinese authorities, who threatened to cancel the social science exchange program if he were not summarily dealt with...

...Mosher declares that "when the report is made public, as it ultimately will be, it will be clear that I have been the victim of an injustice...

...Many graduate students who went off in recent years to interview Chinese refugees in Hong Kong, armed in advance with hypotheses and fixed questionnaires, never realized that part of the research process was precisely to learn what questions to ask, or that the greater threat of bias came not from their respondents but from their own unexamined assumptions about "scientific" procedure...

...Mosher refers to the premise that had so long held him "captive" as "the paramount myth of the Chinese Revolution...

...It certainly doesn't change my impression of Margaret as a real heroine and a great figure...

...What then of those endangered innocents...

...Broken Earth presents the first installment of these findings and a chance to assess the scholar through his work...

...It should not be surprising that Mosher found many older peasants in Guangdong's fertile Pearl River Delta who looked back on the twenties and thirties, before the Japanese invasion, as a "golden age," although it is not really accurate to attribute that prosperity to the "benign leadership of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and the Kuomintang...

...one familiar with the recent history of American Sinology and anthropology there is something oddly wrong about it...

...According to Barnett, Mosher has "everything to lose" from dissemination of the document, which "provides persuasive evidence of misconduct...

...Unfortunately, much .of their work turned out to be false, based largely on the self-deception to which intellectuals bring such brilliant verbal and logical skills...

...The mistake is hidden in the bibliography, lost among the footnotes...

...Send check with order and we'll pay the postage...

...Since Mosher's research results are not in question, not fraudulent in any way--a refreshing accomplishment in itself--then surely only hard evidence of some grave personal crime could justify the extreme penalty of destroying a gifted young scholar's career...

...It's unsanitary and the food is no good.' 1 meekly followed her upstairs, but not before I checked out the impact of her message on its unintended audience...

...The answer is--none...

...What penalty was incurred for this disastrous failure of scholarship, which suggested, at the very least, a basic inadequacy of research method...

...One reason for the haunting unease evoked by the case is the concealment of an essential piece of information--a 47-page investigative committee report containing the evidence against Mosher and arguments concerning its credibility...

...Is there such evidence...

...His extraordinary command of the Cantonese dialect gave him entree in the southern province of Guangdong, where Mandarin, the standard spoken language studied by most specialists, is a foreign tongue associated with the alien North--which to a Cantonese means all the rest of China north of Guangdong...

...If we dwell on these scandalous developments in the two major disciplines within which the Mosher drama now unfolds, it is not in order to diminish by placing in "larger perspective" any wrongdoing on his part--if, indeed, a wrong has been done...

...Is the validity of Mosher's research findings really beside the point...

...We are not about to engage here in investigative reportage or to speculate about anything we have not personally seen...

...Once it came out that Steven Mosher was not a researcher of the predictable "sympathetic" variety--the sort who have the tact to restrict or censor themselves in deference to official sensitivit i e s - b u t rather an independentminded scholar with considerable initiative besides, it was inevitable for the authorities to become alarmed, for the last thing that Peking wishes to permit is real empirical research in the villages of China...

...For if, as Science states, the Margaret Mead controversy may strengthen the hand of those who call for more rigorous datachecking, there are still others who are quite untroubled by such "detail," for instance the scholar who reacted to Freeman's devastating book with the words, "What he says in it is probably true, but so what...

...Anyone who seeks to disprove it can never be "scientifically" definitive enough, whereas the premise itself has not been proved by any similar standards and indeed may be unprovable...

...It would be a tossup as to which of these sources was the more biased...

...The powerful Zeitgeist that Mead's Samoan myth fed was, in Freeman's view, the acceptance of cultural relativism, the wish to believe that "human cultures are not open to any kind of critical evaluation," and more popularly the credo that " i f it feels good, do it...

...And again, in this context, we raise the question: Is the validity of Mosher's research findings irrelevant...

...A number of years ago Lewis Feuer pointed to the-peculiar unaccountability of social scientists for their own errors, especially those social scientists with great influence, whom he called the "Intellectual Elite...

...In China, as in the USSR, it is not the meek but the mediocre who inherit the earth...

...Give him or her some facts to fight back with, a copy of WHY DIDN'T SOMEBODY TELL US...

...In addition, he went to China during an interim of "thaw" in 1979-80, after the Maoist terror was broken and just before a new tightening of social controls began...

...With the heightened class one of whom shrugged, with an Uncle Tom-like acceptance of their lot, 'We peasants don't know how to eat in a place like this.' " Unlike some essentially journalistic narratives, Broken Earth never flattens into a string of anecdotes or random shallow impressions...

...While before the revolution peasants were told how much better off they would be after they were 'liberated,' they were now told how much worse off they had been before...

...He penetrates more deeply the psychology of the local cadres, the nature of their control over people and the ways in which these crude petty officials manipulate the entire system to ensure their own survival...

...It is doubtful that another foreigner will soon again have his opportunity to penetrate the rural scene...

...It is rather to provide a proper measure for Stanford's action against Mosher...

...Burned out in the past [those who are traumatized] are kept in that wasted state by the endless cycle of campaigns, which continuously provoke them into a paralyzing insecurity...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 17...

...On the one occasion that he attempted to eat in the lower teahouse he was "literally pushed upstairs by a matronly attendant, who told me in a booming voice, which could be clearly heard despite the din of conversation and scraping chairs, that 'you don't want to eat down here...

...No mention has yet been made, however, of his sensitive rendering of these scenes...

...His discussion of the mix of traditional and Communist sexual mores in _9 the village captures its paradoxical aspects--the outward primness and "private naturalness," the "public repression" and "covert expression...

...Perhaps they also do not know that it is characteristic for Party officials to attempt to discredit through personal vilification anyone posing such a threat...

...We refer to the case of Steven Westley Mosher, the doctoral candidate who in February 1983 was expelled by Stanford University's department of anthropology for "illegal and unethical" conduct during previous field work in the People's Republic of China...

...It is perhaps here that the true murkiness of the Mosher case begins...

...I t should be recalled that since 1976, when China began to reveal some of the realities of life under Maoist rule, the discipline of Sinology has gone through a serious, if not greatly publicized, crisis...

...Miriam London is a researcher in Chinese and Soviet studies...

...Mosher can compress a great deal in one good, accurate line--for example, when he describes the fate of the former Red Guards who were rusticated to the villages: " I f the first act of the Cultural Revolution had been a vivid, exciting drama of Reds and revolution, the second was a dark still life of young urbanites frozen as peasants...

...He stressed that the departmental committee had no objections to the factual content of the article, nor did it impugn Mosher's research findings as published in his book...

...His exploring in this case, however, lacks psychological depth, and in his broader generalizations about the predominantly practical attitudes toward love and marriage, Mosher appears to have missed a definite leaning toward romantic love in many young Chinese, possibly because this trend is least discernible on the rural scene...

...The peasants unconcernedly continued eating and chatting after an announcement that would have had most Americans bolting from the teahouse...

...Southern China during most of those years was under the de facto control of about half a dozen warlords, who were, however, at times benign and even paternalistic...

...It was just this sort of "anthropological exotica" that Mosher decided to put aside for a while as he sifted through the mass of notes he had accumulated by the end of his field work--"well over 100 notebooks in all"--and "discovered that they contained another story as w e l l . . , a tale of what it is like to live 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 central message while the statistical analyses and other forms of "data processing" often required for legitimacy in the social sciences may have at most supplementary value...

...Undoubtedly, this before-and-after dichotomy of old Soviet vintage got a fresh start in Chinese Communist propaganda, which, as Mosher writes, depicted "the establishment of the [People's Republic] as marking a kind of Manichean divide between the forces of light and darkness, good and evil...

...Need help moiling from onl:erprime~ Hero It Iml Do you have a child or grandchild who's being snowed under by communist and socialist viewpoints...

...The last Western anthropologist to visit China whose work receives respectful mention in scholarly footnotes spent only five days in a Jiangsu Province village, which did not prevent him, however, from producing a monograph replete with charts and other impressively systematized data, borrowing heavily from a much earlier report of the same village...

...Can one compare open situations, freely and intimately observed, with closed or restricted ones, often deliberately contrived to deceive...

...The peasants described in Broken Earth seem indistinguishable from those we once knew and whose stories enrich our research files--those "unrepresentative" refugees from various Chinese provinces who once sat patiently through long interviews in Hong Kong and Taipei hotel rooms explaining the harsh realities of their lives back home, at the very time that the myth of Maoist agricultural successes became triumphant in the West...

...At the same time, Barnett has stated in television and radio interviews that Mosher was free to reveal its contents whenever he wished and, indeed, appeared to challenge him to do so...

...Confirmation of truth sometimes comes in a small, plain way, like a nod in recognition of the utterly familiar...

...This premise, which will come as news to no one, was essentially that, whatever else one might say, the peasantry, or almost 80 percent of China's population, lived better after the revolution than before...

...Toward the end of his stay in China, Mosher began for the first time to examine critically a premise that he had arrived with and continued to take for granted, "even "as the grim and barren landscape of real life was coming into view all around...

...But, most important, he was able to spend a good year in the field, time enough for the essential Cultural "immersion" to take place and, as Mosher himself discovered toward the end of his stay, to see through his own preconceptions and begin at last to ask the' 'right questions...

...During a WOR radio interview in the fall of 1983, Clifford Barnett disclaimed any connection between Mosher's expulsion and the prior publication in Taiwan of an article on forced abortion, drawn from a chapter of Broken Earth...

...Steven Mosher's experience as an anthropologist in the People's Republic was rare in several respects...

...In short, according to Barnett, Mosher's personal conduct, not his research, was in question...

...Among other elites or professions-engineering, law, or medicine," he wrote, "mistakes of high magnitude would undermine the practitioner's standing...

...Steven Mosher's challenge of a "received truth," currently still part of academic folklore, must be counted as another mark of honesty and courage...

...What will be his reward...

...A Chinese who read Broken Earth remarked, "There is nothing in it that one didn't already know...

...The Free Press/Macmillan, $17.95...

...Another more insidious reason for Mead's immunity, however, has been a "relaxed" attitude among the Intellectual Elite generally toward plain accuracy of fact, truth without quotation marks...

...In July of last year, the panel upheld the decision against Mosher, but for reasons that, far from dispelling all doubt, actually heightened it...

...Single copies $12.95...

...It's the story of where free enterprise, socialism, and communism came from and the differences between them...

...He writes especially well about the peasant, managing an observer's distance and a human closeness at the same time...

...Had the errors of Mead's work not been discovered in the field earlier...

...The public record alone, however, justifies that we raise a few sharp questions and make a number of plain statements--all the more so in view of the recent publication of Steven Mosher's first book, Broken Earth, * based on his controversial field work in China...

...These efforts, I was to find out, had not convinced the peasants so much as they had made them very cautious about voicing views at odds with the official line...

...By John L. Beckley, Publisher of The Economics Press, former business editor of Newsweek, A commonsense economic lesson in plain English, simple enough for youngsters yet compelling for all...

...The reference to lack of candor is too vague to be illuminating, but what appears to be the primary reason for the panel's decision--the flouting of Chinese law--suggests more about the panel members' innocence than about Mosher's sins...

...Anyone who wants to know where the peasant stands in the "new" society should accompany Mosher on his visit to a rural teahouse of the drab "new proletarian style," which turned out to be "not one teahouse, but two: a lower teahouse on the first two floors for peasants, and an upper teahouse on the top floor for local officials...

...No career was damaged, no academic reputation suffered, and no Expert ceased to be an Expert...

...Ta-ling Lee is professor o f history at Southern Connecticut State University...

...What then is one to make of the panel's decision...

...Many formerly highly rated articles and books, particularly in the area of Mosher's research, the Chinese rural economy, became instantly obsolete, their assumptions shown up as foolish and their coiaclusions overturned...

...We may add that the bad times many peasants throughout China today fearfully recall are not the days before the Communist takeover in 1949, but the famine years of 1960-62 following Mao's Great Leap Forward...

...Please ask for Dept...

...Why not speculate, instead, and with greater cause, whether China might not have been far better off in every respect today if the bad old regime had been permitted to evolve in its own way, buffeted and pressured by internal and external agents of change...

...Not so among the intellectuals...

...Our peasant-informants would have said the same...

...Our second major impression, upon completion of the book, is offered against the background of our own twenty-year research preoccupation with the peasantry and rural life in China: With the exception of a few sweeping generalizations about Chinese traditional culture in the past, the book rings completely true...

...But it is namely all these things in the book taken for granted by native Chinese that most Westerners still do not know...

...With the passage of decades, moreover, such comparisons, which remain artificially static outside the flow of history, become increasingly absurd...

...On the two occasions that Mosher invited peasant friends to lunch in the upper teahouse--this was not forbidden but just not done-"their presence occasioned amused stares from the cadres at adjoining tables, as well as evident disdain from the waitress...

...Similarly, after an encounter with a strange hermit, a self-exiled urban doctor who had been a prime target for persecution during the Cultural Revolution and suffered incurable psychic wounds, he sums up: What kept such wounds "from healing properly was not just a suppurating bitterness towards the past but the unnerving uncertainty of the future...

...Whatever one's views on abortion or birth control, as one follows Mosher through the clinic and finally reaches the operating table where a woman with exposed, swollen belly is being readied for surgery--her fetus having already been put to death by what the peasant women all called, accurately enough, a "poison s h o t " - it is impossible not to feel that one is witnessing an act of ultimate human violation, akin to rape and the experiments of the Nazi doctors...

...In 1983, Simon Leys, reflecting on the most recent "China Expert" fiasco, was more trenchant: "We dismiss the technicians who fail to mend our cars or leaky bathroom faucets, but whenever the political reality belies the analyses of the Experts, we dismiss the reality...

...In anthropology certain "emotional currents" undoubtedly helped keep Margaret Mead's fictions about Samoa THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 15 afloat for more than half a century, before a determined Australian scholar, Derek Freeman, shook the American anthropological establishment by declaring the queen to be naked...

...These assertions were clearly intended to counter strong suspicions that Mosher's academic freedom had been violated...

...To put the picture right side up: It is impossible to conduct social science research in China according to Western standards without "breaking the law...

...In view of the controversy, it was only human of us as reviewers to approach the book more coldly and warily than would seem necessary...

...A simple enough distinction--but to any*Broken Earth: The Rural Chinese...

...What is surprising about the premise challenged by Mosher is the manner of its acceptance by many Western scholars...

...The Intellectual Elite is least answerable for its mistakes, which tends to corrupt it...

...Some of the authors of this literature had sojourned in China--a privilege that the Mao regime extended to very few-where their conduct was undoubtedly exemplary...

...Indeed, a number of the discredited works continued to be included on academic reading lists, apparently for their redeeming social value...

...Department Chairman Clifford R. Barnett maintains that the release of this report, the ostensible basis for Mosher's dismissal, was withheld because the disclosures could "endanger innocent persons...

...Write The Economics Press, Inc...

...Feuer used as an example "an eminent scholar in Asian affairs," who "had a notable record for misperceiving social realities in the Far East," but whose "reputation as an expert," even after one especially gross blunder, remained undiminished...

...sometimes in unwholesome ways," and the occasional burst of savage village cruelty toward a sexual offender...

...His narration of one day in the life of a young matron, Gin San, tells more about the "quality of life" and the status of women in a Chinese village than many a pretentious academic article, not to speak of the quaintly fake accounts of sundry naive and not-sonaive sec-gooders...

...A multilayered understanding characterizes even brief treatment of many phenomena in the not-so-tranquil Guangdong countryside...

...Apparently, these good scholars have lost sight of the fact that the host country, in this case, is not, say, England, but the People's Republic of China, where the "socialist legal system," to the extent that it exists, is ambiguous and unstable even by Soviet standards and operates ad hoc whenever the Party perceives a special threat to its interests...