Steven W. Mosher is the anthropologist whose report on life in rural China caused the Red Chinese government to complain to Stanford, whereupon that bastion of academic freedom expelled him from its Ph.D. program in a secret session [AtE Apr 83]. His recent book Broken Earth (Macmillan 1983; $19.95 ppd. from Palo Alto Book Serv., 200 Calif. Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94306) is not his Ph.D. thesis, but nevertheless proof that he stands high above the many PhD's who obtained their degree for "synthesized" theories and pedestrian field work.
Mosher speaks Chinese: not just Mandarin Chinese like other China scholars, but the dialect spoken in Guandong province where he lived and worked among the peasants of a Chinese rural community
¾a unique testimony from a country that (like all Communist countries) sequesters foreigners on Potemkin-village tours and persecutes its own citizens for unauthorized contacts with foreigners, even if the contact was insignificant, accidental or inescapable. Many other symptoms, too, are those found in the Soviet Empire: the double life of celebrating the regime in public and cursing it in private; the comparative unimportance of money (nothing to buy); the corruption; the privileged groups; the underground free market; and many more. But then there are the specifically Red Chinese items such as the Cultural Revolution, the infanticides and forced abortions¾including abortions on women 7 ½ months pregnant (by Cesarian section), replete with photograph showing the lack of elementary medical facilities.It is a book that will make you proud of having Red China as a partner with Most Favored Nation status, of the China Card policy of playing up one crook against another, and of Reagan's betrayal of Taiwan.
It also throws some light on Stanford University, whose president Donald Kennedy (an ex-FDA bureaucrat) and activist faculty harass the Hoover Institution and pose arrogant conditions on accepting a presidential (Reagan's) archive and library. If they tolerate a propagandist like Ehrlich as professor while expelling a scholar like Mosher, it is time you remembered Stanford when you Stop Giving to the College of Your Choice.
|
Vol. 12, No. 4
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 12, No. 4 Date: November 29, 2004 01:03 PM (For actual publication date see newsletter.) Title: Good riddance
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
|