Steven W. Mosher

Mosher married Maggie So, a Hong Kong Chinese of Guangdong descent and they divorced in 1981. Still in the early 1980s, he married Hwang Hui Wa, an assistant professor of English and Chinese at Fu Hsing Technical College in Taiwan. Mosher, a convert to Roman Catholicism whose spiritual mentor was PRI founder Paul Marx (monk), lives in Virginia with his third wife Vera and as of 2012 he has nine children.

In 1979/80 Mosher became the first American scholar to conduct a full-length study scrutinizing a Communist Chinese Commune. He was given early access to China at the request of Jimmy Carter to Deng Xiaoping. He also traveled to Guizhou, then a somewhat remote and rarely visited part of China's southwest. Mosher is known in Chinese as Mao Sidi. (Chinese: 毛思迪; pinyin: Máosīdí), In 1981 Mosher was accused of bribing officials, briefly detained and denied re-entry to China by the Chinese communist government, which considered he had broken its laws and acted unethically.

Steven Westley Mosher (born May 9, 1948) is an American social scientist, anti-abortion activist, neoconservative, anti-communist, and president of the Population Research Institute (PRI), which opposes population control and abortion. In the early 1990s, he was the director of the Claremont Institute's Asian Study Center, as well as a member of the US Commission on Broadcasting to China. He is the author of several books concerning China.

Mosher was born in 1948 to working-class parents in Scotia, California and spent his early years in Fresno, California. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in May 1968, and attended Nuclear Power School before being selected for the Seaman to Admiral program. He received a B.S. degree in Biological Oceanography from the University of Washington in 1971, graduating summa cum laude and receiving a commission as an ensign in the U.S. Navy. The following year he earned an M.S. in Biological Oceanography. For the next three years, he served with the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Far East, achieving the rank of Lieutenant. In early 1976, following his naval service, he enrolled in the Chinese language program of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, completing the two-year course of study in 9 months. Awarded a three-year National Science Foundation fellowship, he was admitted to the doctoral program in anthropology at Stanford University, earning an M.A. in East Asian Studies in 1977, and an M.A. in Anthropology in 1978, and carrying out anthropological fieldwork on rural communities in China.