Give Me Liberty or Give Me Academia --Interview with a "China Thumb"

Q: In the last several years, there have been innumerable books concerning China, either from mainland Chinese or China hands in the West. In regard to accusing the mainland of ignoring demands for human rights, is your book any different? What kind of message do you hope to communicate?

The population problem in the mainland is still very serious. （photo by Diago Chiu）

No social science jargon

A: There are certainly many good books about China. The difference between A Mother's Ordeal and other books like Wild Swans or Life and Death in Shanghai is that A Mother's Ordeal describes life in China as it is now. The one-child policy is continuing in China. When you read the book, you are reading life in China, things happening right now. Cheng Nien, for example, wrote about her experiences in the 50s and 60s during the Cultural Revolution.

I have been reviewing, researching and studying the one-child policy since its inception in 1979. I have wanted for the last 15 years to tell the story of the one-child policy and make it come alive, to make western and Chinese readers outside mainland China understand this policy in all of its different aspects and all of its ramifications. But I didn't want to write a book that used social science jargon, with a lot of statistics, because that is boring, quite frankly.

I wanted to put a human face on the story. I wanted to tell a one-person story, so I had to find that one person. I have interviewed hundreds of people over the years--doctors, nurses, women who have been forced to undergo abortions and sterilization. Their stories all tell part of the greater story of China's population control programs.

The story of the woman in A Mother's Ordeal, Chi An, tells all about the population control programs. I think by focusing on one particular aspect of life in China, the one-child policy, it brings the whole society, all the political and economic aspects, into a sharper focus. You really understand how this political system functions and how people inside the political system react to it.

I think the interesting part of A Mother's Ordeal is the way you are able to get inside of Chi An's head and really understand what she is thinking and feeling about the policy and her own actions. I used different techniques in writing this book. Normally, I would write in a third person all the way through. But I use the first person in this book. It is "I." I want to develop an intimate relationship between Chi An and the readers. Those are the differences.

A realistic record

Q: Because you write in the first person, almost everything is exclusively in the words of the protagonist. It seems that you believe to a high degree in every sentence that she says. How would you yourself judge the accuracy of her account?

A: When Chi An is speaking in the book, it is her speaking and her words. She turned out to be a very unusual individual in many ways, not only because of her experiences. She was forced to have an abortion herself, forced to sign a one-child agreement, ordered to get a second abortion when she refused later, and because she was a nurse she did the same things to other women.

So from her personal experiences, she was both a victimizer and a victim. She was both hunted by the system and she became a hunter for the system. That's one interesting thing about her.

You have to understand the motivation of the doctors and nurses, why they do all these things. Doctors--everywhere in the world, China is no exception--are trained to help people, save people's lives. Nurses are loving, caring people, and they want to help people who are injured or sick to recover their health. How can doctors and nurses in China be forced to do the things that happen everyday there? You can see from Chi An's situation, there is pressure that was brought to bear. This forces doctors and nurses to ignore the core of their consciences. Eventually, it became too much for Chi An, and she realized, "I have to get out of this work and the system by any means possible."

Chi An is not an outgoing, gregarious person. She is kind of quiet and shy. But, you know, quiet and shy people are often very keen observers. They are always observing things and recording things and remembering things. Chi An remembered conversations that took place 20 years ago.

When I sat down and talked to her and became her friend, she opened up to me. These wonderful stories began to come out one after the other. I was interviewing her in Chinese. So when she is speaking in the book, it is her speaking. I had to decide how much background to put in. I had to decide what the readers needed to know about Chinese culture, Chinese history, society, in order to understand her actions and her thoughts. So that was our collaboration.

She is a real figure. It is her face, her actions, her thoughts, her words, and I had to select things and fill in backgrounds. Just like a reporter, you don't simply write down everything you see and hear, because it would make no sense at all. You have to have a frame to put it in and you have to pick and choose among different things, so the whole picture makes some sort of sense to the eyes and to the mind.

Fundamentally flawed

Q: Some scholars maintain the argument that the one-child policy is not incorrect in view of the need for decreasing the population. The error lies in implementing it with coercive methods. What is your opinion on this?

A: I have a strong opinion on the subject, because I've been investigating it for 15 years since its beginning. I think the one-child policy is fundamentally flawed. It began in 1979 when China's paramount leader Deng Xiaoping ordered a severe population control program put in place. A famous quote of his was, "Use whatever means you must, but do it with the support of the Central Committee, and you have nothing to fear." If you give communist officials an order like that, you are basically ordering them to ignore human rights and simply use whatever means necessary to reduce the birth rate. So from the beginning this policy was inhuman, was a deliberate infringement on human rights.

This is a logical development from central planning. If you can produce tons of steel under state planning, why can't you produce babies the same way? After all, human beings have no inalienable rights. They enjoy no basic rights unless the government gives them these rights. This is the way of looking at people which China's political system has, not as human beings with rights, but as instruments of production.

If the point of controlling China's population is to reach zero population, then we know how to do that. We have many, many examples. All the Western countries, as well as Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea--all the developed countries are already below replacement rate. Now to replace yourself, to maintain the population, families have to average 2.2 children. All developed countries are below that. Why? Did they adopt a onechild policy? No, of course not.

What they did was modernize, industrialize, raise the level of education. When women join the work force and people move into the cities, couples naturally stop having babies.

We know how to control population growth. What you do is encourage economic development. What happened in China? Did they encourage economic development? No. In 1949 they went to central planning. They expropriated all capitalist enterprises in China. They forced peasants into People's Communes. And what happened? Economic development slowed way down.

If China had done the same things that Taiwan did, per capita income in mainland China would be US$10,000 a year. We wouldn't talk about the mainland as being an over-populated country, we would say, "The People's Republic of China has an economy two times larger than the United States. It's a wealthy country with a large population." Because when we talk about over-population, what we really mean is under-development. As soon as a country develops, the population question disappears.

Besides, China's economic development is proceeding very rapidly, and we know what that means: With urbanization, industrialization and modernization, people naturally choose to have fewer babies. There is no need to coerce them.

Making a choice for the child

Q: After Chi An became pregnant with her second child in the United States, she was unwilling to have an abortion there, and she was afraid that when she returned to mainland China she would be forced to abort. With your help, she received political asylum and stayed in the US. In fact, she never incurred any direct oppression. Why was her application successful?

A: When Chi An applied for political asylum on the grounds that she was fleeing forced abortion, there was no precedent. The law on political asylum is very clear in the United Stated, and it said in order to obtain political asylum you must have a well founded fear of persecution on the grounds of your religious beliefs, political beliefs, or you must be a member of a persecuted minority, ethnic or social group.

The fact is, the immigration and naturalization service of the United States argued that the political asylum law didn't apply to Chi An, because the onechild policy was merely a social policy and applied uniformly across China. So Chi An and her husband were not considered to be persecuted. They were just disobeying the law.

She would not have become pregnant thinking she could get political asylum, because no one in U.S. history had ever gotten political asylum on those grounds. The result was she was denied political asylum and they faced deportation. It was only because the attorney general of the U.S. government himself chose to make an exception in their case and granted them asylum that they were able to stay.

When the attorney general granted her political asylum, he also announced a change in the U.S. asylum policy. It said any Chinese who is forced to undergo abortion and sterilization may be considered for political asylum.

In 1992, the INS said we're going to have hundreds of thousands of Chinese coming to the US and applying for political asylum saying they are fleeing the one-child policy. But the reality is in 1992 the US government granted 600 Chinese from the mainland political asylum; of the 600, 192 received political asylum on the grounds that they were fleeing forced abortion or sterilization.

That's not a huge number. The numbers are not important, but what it does is send a signal to Beijing that the US finds the policy of forced abortion to be a violation of human rights.

Falling in love with China

Q: Many Western experts on China have had nearly the same experience as you.Before they actually visit China, they believe it to be almost an idyllic state; once they enter the borders of the land and investigate for themselves, they discover that it has more than a few problems. Why is that?

A: In 1980 villagers first began to tell me that life in the People's Communes was not good, and life had been better in the 1920s before the Japanese invasion. Everyone who was old enough to remember the 1920s said that it was a golden age. They had better clothes to wear, more food to eat, and they built many new houses.

When I first told other China watchers that from 1930 to 1980 there had been no progress in China, no one believed me. These China watchers were convinced that there had been tremendous progress in China, because of the People's Communes. After all, Beijing had told them so. By mid-1980 after many China watchers had gone themselves to China, they began to realize that what I had said so early was correct.

Then there was the one-child policy. In 1981 said that the Chinese government was forcing women to accept abortion and sterilization, that the program was incredibly inhuman. Everyone said, No, that can not be happening. Now everyone admits that it is national policy, that these abuses occur throughout China, and Beijing is responsible for the policy.

The peculiar thing about China is that you become a China watcher because you fall in love with China, and you fall in love with Chinese people and Chinese civilization. That's not true of Japanologists for the most part. It is not true of people who study the former Soviet Union.

The Russians used to complain, why do all the American China watchers love China and all the American Sovietologists hate the Soviet Union?

There are many societies, cultures and ethnic roots, but there are only two civilizations in the world. There is Western Civilization, which has its root in ancient Greece and Rome through Christendom in the middle age to the present. And there is Chinese Civilization. It is the tremendous attractiveness of this great alternative civilization.

Out of academia and into freedom

Q: You yourself can be said to be oppressed by the Chinese communists, because American academicians sometimes have no choice but to capitulate to the demands of Beijing. What influence can you exert by means of your writings?

A: I think the government of mainland China is indifferent to the opinions of its own people, but it is very sensitive to what the outside world, especially the United States, says about it. My hope is that by my bringing human rights abuses in mainland China to the attention of the world, the Beijing regime will take steps to stop the worst abuses.

From the beginning going back to 1979 and 1980, my goal was simply to write accurately and truthfully about what I saw in China and to help women and infants in China. I could not do that in Stanford University.

It's a great irony. Beijing wanted to shut me up, and force me out of academia. It accomplished exactly the opposite. By forcing me to leave Stanford University, they gave me the freedom to think, research and write. So I have written and published a lot more than I otherwise would have.

If they had simply let me alone, I would have gotten my PhD and taught classes. I may have written a book or two. But because I would want to go to China, I wouldn't be very critical, because I would want to keep those research ties. But they gave me the freedom to speak the truth and I try to take full advantage of it.

[Picture Caption]

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This is Steven Mosher, author of A Mother's Ordeal (photo by Cheng Yuan-ching)

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The population problem in the mainland is still very serious. (photo by Diago Chiu)