A New Memoir Illuminates The Backstory Of Past US-China Relations

Forbes

26-05-2025

Insufficiently noticed is a recent book with unprecedented glimpses into the history of how the US helped open post-Maoist China to the world - and it couldn't be more timely. These days, the PRC's increasing footprint on the world stage has caught the attention of geostrategic observers concerned with power balances not just in Asia
but across the continents. That's aside from Beijing's increasing leverage in global trade and technology. This book should therefore be required background reading for anyone wanting to know how China climbed out of the Cold War decades and entered the current era.
'Eastward Westward' by Professor Jerome Cohen is actually a personal memoir, a highly readable one that offers revealing windows onto multiple other crucial pieces of history than just US-China relations. Let me say upfront that, for some decades, I have known the author, now in his 90s and the father of an old friend, Ethan Cohen, a top New York gallerist who introduced artists like Ai Weiwei to America. And as in most such situations, out of respect one doesn't ask the parents of a friend too many detailed questions about their achievements, so Prof Cohen's astonishing presence in history remained largely unknown to me - until reading the memoir.
That may seem a strange admission from your Forbes columnist of over 25 years, a widely published journalist about foreign affairs and co-author of two books on the Russia-China alliance. But it conforms with the reason why Jerome Cohen was so efficacious and influential - he worked quietly and tactfully behind the scenes on resolving the nuggety details of great global initiatives while politicians and diplomats got all the publicity. Cohen first enters history when, having edited the prestigious Yale Law Journal as a student in the 1950s he becomes clerk to two Supreme Court Justices in succession, one a Chief Justice, an unheard of achievement. And suddenly the reader has a glimpse of Washington at a pivotal time when the US was still simmering from the previous year's Brown vs Board of Education court precedent.
Within a few years Jerome Cohen has won a Rockefeller Grant to research the laws of Communist China, an almost impossible task considering the tightly sealed status of the country in the 1960s. Cohen overcomes the virtually insuperable challenge by asking the Hong Kong police to present him with any escapee from the PRC, even those found floating in the harbor. 'I figured if anybody knew about China's legal system it would be those fleeing from justice' says Cohen. As a thirty-something he becomes a leading global expert in Chinese law and in the mid 1960s is teaching at Harvard. Over the years he expands the Chinese law department to become the East Asian Law department. The outsize influence of that department on the political affairs of the Far East has yet to be acknowledged. In 1969, he chairs a meeting of Harvard and MIT professors which produces a confidential memo to President Nixon to start secret talks with China. 'That was the origin of Henry Kissinger's famous 1971 visit', says Prof Cohen. (Kissinger had been a colleague at Harvard - the two had often discussed such a demarcate).
Here then was Cohen's first great stealthy entry on his path of quietly realigning East-West relations at a fundamental level. During the next decades, he travels broadly in the Far East with his family. His wife Joan is, in the meantime, a leading cultural intellectual on the region's visual arts. At the start of Deng Xiao Ping's era she is quietly meeting top Chinese artists in Beijing in their homes to view and encourage the stirrings of independent art in China. Hence the family's friendship with Ai Weiwei and his ilk. She is the first Western woman to lecture top art college students on the outside world's contemporary work. In the years before and after, Prof Cohen has expanded the East Asian Law department at Harvard to take in the most accomplished young minds of the region. They, in turn, go on to high government positions in their countries. One shouldn't forget that for a large chunk of that time, polities like South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and the like struggled with military and autocratic leaders. Cohen's students undoubtedly helped change the political climate.
Then in the 1990s, Prof Cohen again quietly enters the engine room of history, this time to thrash out a dependable commercial code for foreign investment in the PRC. He is helped by fellow lawyers, ex students and Beijing officials to lay down this most crucial of foundations. By then he is a senior partner at the law firm of Paul Weiss and brings the first heavy foreign corporation investment into China. (He later returns to academe as a law professor at New York University). From the time of Nixon onwards he helps high profile political prisoners find freedom starting with his old Yale classmate Tom Downey who joins the CIA in the 1950s, is dropped into Maoist China, gets quickly arrested and serves 18 years in prison before Cohen engineers his release. Cohen intervenes on behalf of Benigno Aquino of the Philippines, Kim Dae Jong of South Korea, Annette Lu of Taiwan, all who help guide their countries to liberal governance. More recently he helps get Ai Weiwei released from prison and the famous 'Barefoot' blind lawyer Chen Guangchen.
Though doubtless still respected as a leading pioneer of their present prosperity, Prof Cohen's human rights activities have, perhaps, not endeared him to the current Beijing leadership. What then does he make of the present situation after all his years of opening China to the world? He has trenchant words against the current norm there of 'rule by law' rather than 'rule of law'. And he's a strong supporter of Taiwan especially because its example contradicts all those who argue that Western-style governance is antithetical to Chinese traditions. The chapter dealing with such questions is wonderfully titled 'The Curfew Tolls The Knell of Parting Day' from Thomas Gray's famous poem. He is ultimately optimistic about the future of China, characteristically because he feels that its young legal minds offer a reservoir of potential for guiding the country's path. But you will have to read the book for a full exposure to the chapter's wisdom and Jerome Cohen's 94 years worth of it.