Journey to the forbidden China Book

Wow - fascinating look at China after the cultural revolution ended. While studying in China (near Hong Kong) in 1979-80, Mosher applied for a travel permit to take a road trip deeper into China. He became the "first foreigner in thirty years to journey unescorted into the rural heartland of China...to find out the truth about the revolution and the peasants." (p. 12). With a van he purchased in Hong Kong, a Chinese driver/companion, boxes of canned foods, a large supply of gasoline, and all car-repair tools they could possibly need, they ventured out to villages to speak to peasants and see how they were living. As I just returned from a trip to China, I find Mosher's books absolutely captivating. I love the details, such as how they would eat up to 10 garlic cloves before eating at each village noodle house in hopes of avoiding food poisoning, and the extent small hungry children will go to in their quests to attain food (e.g. a little girl and her toddler siblings would hide in the shadows at a restaurant to finish any food left on plates after customers leave their tables). Mosher was not able to complete his journey, as Communist officials believed he was being too nosy and revoked his travel permit and sent him home. Then Chinese officials told Mosher's university (Stanford) to deal severely with Mosher or the scholarly exchange program would be cut back. So instead of supporting his research and revelation of truth, Stanford expelled Mosher from his Ph.D. program. A knowledgeable and accomplished man, Mosher still speaks on China today (including in front of Congress).

Quotes:
"'Where a great proportion of the people are suffered to languish in helpless misery, that country must be ill-policed and wretchedly governed: a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.' -James Boswell" - vii

"During the three decades it has been in power, what has the Chinese Communist Party done for the peasantry to which it owes- and has promised- so much?... I had come to see the state's relationship with the villages as essentially predatory. Heavy indirect taxes and a ban on almost all economic activity except producing for the state had so shackled peasant enterprise and initiative… like the Russian kulaks, the prosperous Delta peasantry had not been saved by the revolution so much as sacrificed to it." -pp. 8-9

"China stands alone among underdeveloped nations in that no slums disfigure its cities. Foreigners invariably draw the wrong conclusions from this, imagining that it implies rural prosperity and able municipal administrations. In actuality it is a testament to something quite different: the awesome reach of a totalitarian order. China's slums number in the hundreds of thousands, but they are hidden away in the vast recesses of rural China… They are the unnumbered villages and hamlets of remote mountains and valleys...they are an exploited underclass...there are no modern societies which have so deliberately created an underclass, and few which so thoroughly oppress and exploit it." -pp. 157-8

"Chinese peasants are paid less for their grain and other products, and pay more for industrial products, than any other villagers in Asia. So efficient is this system of indirect taxation in rich, lowland areas like the Delta that the state today collects more of the value of peasant production than tenant farmers fifty years ago paid to their supposedly 'parasitical' landlords and 'feudal' government authorities." -pp. 159-60

"Mao had promised liberation to the peasantry but, in an Orwellian reversal, had delivered something very close to enslavement." -pp. 163-4

"From the standpoint of xenophobic, secretive Party leaders and public security personnel, I was a spy, prying into areas that were officially proscribed, revealing things about the dark underside of Chinese society that the Party would rather not have come to light: how the bond between city and countryside has been cut, and walls of regulations erected in its place; how the peasants of the lowlands are exploited to provide foodstuffs to pampered urban residents, while expected to meet their own needs without government assistance; how absolute deprivation and malnutrition are widespread in the highlands, conditions that have been aggravated by government policies that inhibit internal trade and migration. The China I had seen didn't fit any of the standard political labels. It was socialist, petty capitalist, or feudalistic depending on where in the country you happened to look. Socialist was the designation preferred by the Chinese Communist Party, but only the urban population, perhaps 15 percent of the whole, actually lived under a socialist system… In the hills of Kwangsi and Kweichow I had found the villagers living under a system that most closely resembles a kind of state feudalism. The only firm conclusion that can be drawn concerning this hodgepodge of different economic systems is that none of them has done much for village China." -pp. 175-6

"The most important rule of social science inquiry is to demythologize the world, to allow us to see a society for what it is, rather than what various groups of self-interested bureaucrats and politicians of whatever political stripe say it is. If China's rulers prattle endlessly about their concern for the peasantry but covertly adopt policies that disadvantage this group- the vast majority of China's population- then the scholar who uncovers this fact has no choice but to report it, whatever the personal consequences. Social science has a right, no less than a duty, to take a critical and objective stance toward all societies, however powerful, monolithic, or threatening." -p. 180