By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Steve Mosher, one of the America’s most prominent China experts, was kicked out of China — and Stanford University — in the early 1980s for breaking the “gentlemen’s rule of silence” regarding Communist China: he tore back the curtain on the country’s “one-child” policy, a draconian campaign that resulted in forced abortions performed in barbaric conditions on millions of Chinese women every year.
I was working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, and was surprised that the State Department showed little interest in Mosher’s exposure of what was clearly one of the most egregious violation of human rights in the world at the time.
My boss, Sen. Jesse Helms, held hearings on China’s one-child policy, and business-as-usual senators and senior staff were aghast when American government experts confirmed that China’s government had made this eradication of unborn life program their highest domestic priority.
Both diplomats and academics — then and now — wanted friendly relations with the Communist regime, and most of them were avid supporters of population control anyway. They expected the reports to subside and, to put it bluntly, they expected Mosher to go away. But he didn’t. In fact, his firsthand witness of China’s house of horrors led to his conversion to the Catholic faith and his involvement in the pro-life movement, mentored by Fr. Paul Marx, OSB.
As president of the Population Research Institute — where I have supported him for years — Mosher has worked with Congress and several administrations to curtail or end the hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. government support that was once routinely distributed around the world to finance abortions under the sobriquet of “Population Control.”
His work has exposed human rights abuses on several continents, but it always seems to come back to China, about which he has now written eight books. The latest (Bully of Asia: Regnery Publishing, $28.99), published in December, is a scholarly, yet enjoyable read. It will undoubtedly prove indispensable to folks following the rapidly changing relationship of China and the United States.
In just under 400 pages, Mosher traces the golden thread of China’s crusade for hegemony and world power as it winds through 3,000 years of tumultuous history, culminating in today’s China and its quest of world domination. (In the book’s latter chapters, Mosher predicted consolidation of power announced just last week, when China’s Communist Party agreed essentially to make Xi Jinping President for Life.)
To discuss these developments, The Wanderer sat down with Steve Mosher to get a closer look at China.
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Q. Blessed Pope Paul VI warned in Humanae Vitae that nations defying the natural and moral law would soon be governed by tyrants manipulating the family, motherhood, and birth itself. How has that worked out in China?
A. As an eyewitness to forced abortions in China’s one-child policy, I have followed this misguided effort by the Chinese Communist Party to force down the birthrate in China for almost 40 years. The Party is no less brutal today than it was then. As one would expect of an officially atheistic political organization that believes that man is only a particularly clever ape, Party cadres think nothing about “thinning the herd,” as it were.
But they have gone too far, and not just in a moral sense. They have created a labor shortage in the most populous country on Earth. Now they are increasingly desperate to raise the birthrate again, but two generations of anti-people propaganda have destroyed the Chinese family and produced the lowest birthrates in the world. Four hundred million babies are no more.
Will the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) resort to forced pregnancy to raise the birthrate? Time will tell.
Q. Just a few days ago, as your book predicted, President Xi Jinping was virtually declared China’s ruler for life. And now Archbishop Sánchez Sorondo, an intimate adviser to Pope Francis, has lavished praise on China as a model of Catholic social teaching. Sure, Cardinal Zen erupted in protest, but, given Xi’s truly totalitarian power, did Pope Francis really have any alternative than to open negotiations?
A. I believe that the effort to negotiate a treaty with the CCP is a mistake. Aside from the obvious point that the Party has a long history of violating agreements it has signed, once the Vatican entered into formal negotiations with the Communists, the Party began to pay a lot more attention to the activities of Chinese Catholics. This put a target on their backs.
I really don’t think that Vatican diplomats realize that they are dealing with a one-party dictatorship that is far more brutal, and far less tolerant of any expressions of religious faith, than any that they had previously dealt with.
But the problem goes even deeper than this. As I write in Bully of Asia, since the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre the Chinese Communist Party has been promoting an extremely toxic form of national narcissism. The state religion of China, in other words, is China itself, and ultimately President Xi Jinping, of course.
[Vatican Secretary of State Pietro] Cardinal Parolin may insist to Chinese leaders that “the Church in China does not want replace the state” but Church leaders there worry that the state does indeed intend to replace the Church. In China, remember, the state aspires to be the “church” and all Chinese are expected to be adoring members.
As if missteps by Vatican diplomats were not enough, China itself, under Xi Jinping’s dictatorial rule, is becoming more and more hostile to religious belief and expression. At last October’s Party Congress, Xi demanded tighter controls over religious activity, insisting that the Party must “exercise overall leadership over all areas of endeavor in every part of the country.”
As a result, new regulations banning unauthorized religious activity were issued on the first of February. According to a priest of the Underground Church, the new rules state that “all religious sites must be registered, no religious activities can be held beyond registered venues, non-registered clergymen are forbidden to host religious liturgies, and minors and Party members are forbidden from entering churches….The living space for the church is getting smaller and smaller.”
Frankly, I wonder, has anyone in the Vatican read these new regulations? After all, they make it clear that China is quickly reverting to Maoist type. Has it occurred to anyone there that now may be a particularly inauspicious time to force the Underground Church into the embrace of the Chinese Communist Party?
Q. During his campaign, Trump promised to confront China’s economic warfare against the U.S. How would you assess his China policy to date? Are federal agencies — State, Commerce, Trade — carrying out his polices?
A. China declared “war” on us in 1991. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Deng Xiaoping told the CCP Politburo, “The old Cold War between the Soviet Union and America is over. The New Cold War between China and America has begun.” China has been at war with us — stealing our intellectual property, stealing our factories and jobs, opposing us internationally, and warring against us in cyberspace — ever since.
The last twenty years have seen the biggest transfer of wealth in human history from the U.S. to China. Trump is determined to stop this hemorrhaging and I believe he will. He is working hard on public-private partnerships to stop the theft of what the FBI estimates to be $600 billion in intellectual property each year. He is prepared to impose tariffs on the Chinese dumping of steel and aluminum in this country, and resist Chinese demands for the continuing transfer of technology by U.S. companies as the cost of doing business in China.
On this and a dozen other fronts, he is confronting an expansive, increasingly aggressive China. It’s about time someone did.
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