Mosher, Stacy

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Mosher, Stacy

PERSONAL:

Female.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Brooklyn, NY. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Editor, translator, and journalist.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Sharon Hom) Challenging China: Struggle and Hope in an Era of Change, New Press (New York, NY), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

In Challenging China: Struggle and Hope in an Era of Change, Stacy Mosher and her coeditor Sharon Hom collect a series of essays, poems, reports, personal stories, and other accounts of everyday living by Chinese literati that address the problems facing society in China today. The volume, wrote Sharon Hom on the Human Rights in China Web site, "provides windows into the lives of migrants, young women forced into prostitution, the impact of HIV/AIDS and health pandemics on poor villagers, the lingering effects of exile from one's homeland, the burdens of history, and the enforced amnesia for massive past abuses like the Cultural Revolution or the June 4th crackdown." "Challenging China," Hom concluded, "provides insights into the reality for the vast majority of China's people living behind the gleaming facades, now so carefully packaged for the Olympics."

This reality is particularly important because of the image that China struggles to present to the rest of the world at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. "In order to win the right to host the 2008 Olympics," commentator Hu Ping declared on the Human Rights in China Web site, "the Chinese government made promises to improve the human rights situation, but has thus far failed to honor these commitments." "The human rights situation in China has not improved; rather, it has worsened," Ping stated. "To stage what they consider a successful Olympics in 2008, the government has presented an image of China as a flourishing land of peace and prosperity, void of any protests or dissenting voices." These insights are important, Hom and her fellow commentators claim, not only because the Chinese include about twenty percent of the world's population, but also because of the role the Chinese will play—and are playing—in the global economy. The direction that China chooses to go in key international areas like human rights will have a significant impact on these issues in the future.

The China that emerges from these pages is a country in social turmoil, at odds with the vision of an orderly society presented by the Communist rulers of the country. "Workers relate the dangers of working in mines with little protection," Vanessa Bush wrote in Booklist, "activists warn of growing unrest, and reporters chronicle government corruption." "These accounts starkly unmask deep-seated corruption and the iron-fisted tactics of China's ruling class," a Publishers Weekly contributor declared, "while revealing rising individual and collective resistance." The "unique struggles of the everyday Chinese person, both urban and rural," concluded a California Bookwatch reviewer, "is documented here as nowhere else."