Steven Mosher is the president of the Population Research Institute and the author of several prize-winning books about China, including Broken Earth: The Rural Chinese; Journey to the Forbidden China; China Misperceived: American Illusions and Chinese Reality; and A Mother’s Ordeal. He was expelled from China in 1980 as an “international spy” after writing a series of articles on human rights violations in the People’s Republic of China. Mosher has been closely involved with members of the Chinese democracy movement who found exile in the United States after the Tiananmen Square massacre. His latest book, Hegemon, examines the historical and ideological basis for China’s aspirations to dominate Asia and the world.

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. I speak three dialects of Chinese—Mandarin (the national language), Cantonese, and Fukienese or Taiwanese. 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. It was a unique opportunity. 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 rapidly from Third World poverty and become an international economic force to be reckoned with?

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 since 1980 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 onerous one-child policy.

On September 19, 2000, the US Senate voted in favor of Permanent Normal Trade Relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Senator Jesse Helms claimed that America has thrown away the leverage it once had with China. Do you agree with his assessment?

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.

How has the break-up of the Soviet-dominated Communist bloc in the last decade affected China? Has the PRC rejected the doctrine of dialectical materialism?

Mosher: China remains a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist state, both in terms of its theory of governance and its actual police state practices. The economic reform has meant a retreat from Marxist economic theory but not from Leninist political controls. The Chinese Communist Party now has a firmer grip on power than ever. There is a new middle class, but it shows little interest in politics, concentrating instead on the prospect of “getting rich,” as Deng Xiaoping bluntly put it. To display this carrot after using the bloody stick, Deng deliberately brought the Chinese economy to a boil following the Tiananmen demonstrations. It was a distraction, though, on a massive scale, and it worked.

Chinese students began demonstrating in Tiananmen Square in April 1989, and the following month, after martial law was imposed, a million people took to the streets of Beijing. Wasn’t that proof that democratic ideas were taking root as a result of China’s greater openness to the West?

Mosher: There is no automatic trend toward 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 demise of apartheid had far less to do with efforts by US companies to advance human rights in South Africa under the Sullivan principles than with the rise of a political movement led by Nelson Mandela. In 1994, the Clinton administration made what turned out to be an abortive attempt to encourage American businesses to develop a set of standards, comparable to the Sullivan principles, for promoting human rights in China. Yet American businesses in China are so intent on preserving good relations with those in power that they reacted with hostility even to those modest proposals.

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 were led by a generation of students who had been 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.

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 on 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.

Beijing conspicuously hosted the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995. Is the People’s Republic of China really a participant in international agreements?

Mosher: Beijing was allowed to host the Fourth World Conference on Women because of its clout within the UN system as a Permanent Member of the Security Council, which means it wields an effective veto over many UN actions. Beijing has signed a great number of international agreements—including the UN Charter on Human Rights—that it violates internally on a daily basis. Demands that China live up to its international obligations are met with complaints that the critic is “interfering with China’s sovereignty.”

Is it true, as some Western leaders claim, that China responds better to “quiet diplomacy” than to public criticism on the human rights front?

Mosher: The Clinton administration de-linked 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.”

Has Buddhism, itself, been persecuted by atheistic communism in China?

Mosher: After the Chinese Communist party came to power, its first reaction was to stamp out all religious activity on the Marxist grounds that this was the “opiate of the people.” When the Catholic Church in China, as well as other religious organizations, refused to simply disappear under this persecution, the state then sought to bring all religious activity under its direct control. Official associations were set up for Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, Muslims, and Tibetan Buddhists.

Soon after its founding, the People’s Republic of China proclaimed itself the champion of Third World nations. Now that it is enjoying relative prosperity, has it changed its policies with regard to poorer countries?

Mosher: Beijing has sometimes posed as the champion of the developing world, a posture it first adopted at the Bandung conference in 1955. But its interests were always fundamentally divergent from those of its Third World neighbors.

India had been the first “capitalist” country to recognize China in April 1950. Zhou Enlai’s visit to India in 1954 resulted in a joint communiqué based on China’s “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.” Nehru enthusiastically announced that relations between India and China henceforth would be governed by “mutual respect for territorial sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-intervention in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence.” These high-sounding principles were reaffirmed at subsequent conferences of Asian nations, and Nehru assumed the role of Zhou’s patron, trying to smooth over resentments caused by China’s past support for destabilizing guerilla movements throughout the region.

Nehru was mesmerized by the Five Principles and the “Bandung Spirit.” On the very day that the Indian delegation at the United Nations was arguing to admit Communist China to the General Assembly, People’s Liberation Army troops began pouring across the border into India. They marched south and seized two important mountain passes that guard approaches to Sikkim and India.

History has proven that China was acting then, and has acted since, more in accordance with an ancient Chinese diplomatic principle, yuan chiao chin kung, meaning “to appease distant countries while attacking those nearby.”

With the Cold War a thing of the past, why does mainland China still view the Western world with suspicion?

Mosher: China has deep grievances against the West, relating to the century and a half of Western domination over a region that, according to China, properly belongs within its own sphere of influence.

China is particularly impatient to rid Asia of Americans. Most often this is muted, but occasionally it comes through loud and clear. In February 1995, a US carrier task force was ordered to steam up the coast of North Korea into the Bohai Gulf as a warning to Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons program. This show of American naval might so close to its own shores angered Beijing. It ordered a submarine from the Qingdao naval base to attempt to close on the task force. As soon as it entered the Gulf the sub was detected; it was shadowed and harassed until it retreated to its home port. Furious Chinese officials issued a threat: If such an incident occurred again, orders would be given to the PLA Navy to open fire.

Besides such confrontations in a region that used to consist entirely of tributary states, China’s resentment is further fueled by wild fantasies about American omnipotence and malice. The PRC military and political elite not only give credence to such notions; they propagate them.

Why did you choose the title Hegemon for your new book?

Mosher: China’s reach for hegemony —for total domination of its known world —began over 2,000 years ago. For more than two millennia the Middle Kingdom was the center of the universe —a huge, self-satisifed continent of people whose elite, wealthy, and cultured had only disdain for the barbarians living on its periphery. Smugly convinced of their country’s cultural and military superiority, China’s leaders wanted little from the rest of the world except its deference.

China’s present plans for expansion are based on its history. The elite in the People’s Republic of China look at real maps of historical Chinese empires in order to trace the form of things to come. The Qing dynasty during its 18th-century expansionist phase, when China reached its greatest territorial extent, functions as a sort of meta-map. At that time the Celestial Empire ruled a vast territory stretching from the Russian Far East across southern Siberia to Lake Baikal, then southward across Kazakhstan, eastward along the Himalayas, Northern Burma, Laos, and Vietnam. Korea, Nepal, and all of peninsular Southeast Asia acknowledged Chinese suzerainty and paid tribute.

It is this map that springs unbidden to the Chinese mind when the shape of a future “Greater China” is discussed. And it is this same map that fires the imaginations of China’s present generation of leaders.

Is this view of China’s destiny shared by Chinese intellectuals and students today?

Mosher: The Chinese Communist Party is promoting patriotism as the glue to hold China together. The New Patriotism is contained within a 1994 Party directive. The Party ordered, “Patriotic Education shall run through the whole education process from kindergarten to university . . . and must penetrate classroom teaching of all related subjects.” Of course, PRC history textbooks have always stoked nationalist fervor and xenophobia. Now, though, these same attitudes were inserted into everything from beginning readers to junior high school social science textbooks to high school political education classes. The resulting K-through-college curriculum has been custom designed to breed young patriots.

In recent decades, presumably, the PRC has been modernizing its armed forces as well.

Mosher: China’s military power is growing apace. Xenophobia and nostalgia for a lost empire would be of only academic interest in the case of Syria or Cambodia, but the People’s Republic is no paper tiger. Already the dominant economic power in continental Asia, it is rapidly building up a first-rate military machine. China’s military spending is increasing at a double-digit clip, enabling the People’s Liberation Army to expand rapidly its arsenal of state-of-the-art nuclear and conventional weapons.

This growth is especially alarming in view of decreasing American (and French and German and Russian, etc.) military budgets and the absence of a credible military threat to China’s territory. China is the only major country in the world that is currently undertaking a major military expansion.

Does China’s increasing military might pose a national security issue for the United States?

Mosher: Chinese espionage in this country far exceeds anything attempted by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and it is successful largely because it is “non-traditional” espionage. Chinese launches of American commercial satellites, for example, provided an opportunity for the Chinese to test—and improve—the capabilities of their Long March ICBMs. Following a launch failure, leading to the loss of an Intelsat communications satellite, two American companies, Loral and Hughes, provided information to the Chinese on how to improve the reliability of their missiles.

A shocked House of Representatives in 1998 formed a special bipartisan committee, headed by Congressman Christopher Cox of California, to assess the damage done to US national security by the Loral/Hughes actions. Investigators soon discovered that, as bad as the transfer of missile technology had been, this was only a relatively minor part of a much larger problem: a massive Chinese espionage effort extending over two decades dedicated to the acquisition of US weapons technology. At a press conference on December 30, 1998, Cox said, “I can tell you today that national security harm did occur.”

Much of the Cox Committee’s 852-page report is still classified. Still, what has been made public shows that China’s spying has accelerated its weapons development program. It may have gained as much as fifteen years, cutting the United States’ lead in key technologies by one-half, maybe more. The report acknowledges, “The Chinese Communist Party’s main aim for the civilian economy is to support the building of modern military weapons and to support the aims of the People’s Liberation Army.”

What, in your opinion, should be the diplomatic priorities of Western nations in dealing with the People’s Republic?

Mosher: As China’s power grows, the fear it inspires among dovish westerners will drive more and more into the appeasement camp. At the present moment, America is still much wealthier, more technologically advanced, and more militarily adept than the PRC. We are the only power in the world capable of stopping the Hegemon. But our policy is currently frozen in the amber of outdated assumptions about China. Dreaming about strategic partnership with the Communist giant renders us unable to act in accordance with our fundamental beliefs and values.

As a distant maritime power with no territorial ambitions, the US should shoulder its responsibility and do the best it can to continue the present Pax Americana. A failure to acknowledge this burden or, worse yet, a retreat into isolationism, would only encourage aggression on the part of would-be hegemons like China.

The Great Game of the twenty-first century will be between the United States and China. America’s success in this competition will reaffirm its role as the leading state in the West, foster unity with a global network of democratic allies, and demonstrate once and for all the universality of human rights and representative government.

And if America failed to challenge China’s ambitions?

Mosher: China’s power would continue to grow apace, and many fragile democracies in Asia would be threatened, as would countries further afield. We have to keep in mind that [former Yugoslavian President Slobodan] Milosevic’s principal foreign backer was China, which provided not only weapons but also financial support for his machine. China presently backs regimes such as the previous one in Serbia. As China’s power increases, it will back other non-democratic regimes around the world, preventing the emergence of democracy and undermining it in those countries where it is not firmly rooted.

It is often said that rapid advances in modern communications helped bring down the Iron Curtain in Europe. Is there a possibility of a similar development in China?

Mosher: In the past, Sinologists from the West often trimmed their sails for fear that Beijing would withhold visas or approval for research projects. Today, fewer China watchers are willing to remain silent when the truth about, say, China’s persecution of Christians is distorted or denied by the government, or when one of their number is savaged for reporting it. For instance, when Song Yongyi [a librarian at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania] was arrested in August 1999 on charges of illegally collecting information about the Cultural Revolution, dozens of China hands signed a petition calling for his release. This raised the price of his incarceration too high for Beijing, and eventually he was released.

There is a lesson here on larger issues. The Hegemon has built up a Great Wall of intimidation around itself; it is time for it to come tumbling down. America’s response to the challenge posed by China rests in large part on the willingness of America’s Sinologists to write without fear or favor. If the China watchers get it right, then the American public and policy makers will, too. And on this hinges our future.

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