When I arrived in Beijing for United Press International in 1981 after two years in Hong Kong, it was a time of great hope for China and no one seemed to understand that better than Jerome (Jerry) Cohen.
He was a lawyer and former professor at Harvard Law School. He and his wife, Joan, were a fixture on the diplomatic cocktail circuit and he developed relationships with many correspondents, including me. It was a friendship that lasted decades and manifested itself in several important Overseas Press Club events in New York. He died September 22 at the age of 95.
Just a few years before my arrival in the region, Mao Tse-tung died in 1976 after the turbulent decade of the Cultural Revolution. It was a period of sometimes violent revolutionary zeal that Mao whipped up against Chinese suspected of being “bourgeois” or “capitalist roaders.” Millions died without any pretense of due process.
Deng Xiaoping consolidated control in 1978 and normalized diplomatic relations with the United States. The hope in the Western world was that the Communist Party would allow a “peaceful evolution” of China’s system, taking a step back from absolute control and accepting a measure of capitalism and civil rights.
One key part of the equation was teaching the Chinese the concept of law and this is what Cohen specialized in. As a Chinese speaker, he had credibility with his Chinese contacts and he advocated relentlessly for the Chinese to allow the development of a court system, which for all intents and purposes they lacked.
It didn’t happen overnight but ultimately, thanks in large part to Cohen, the Chinese developed a court system in which Chinese lawyers could defend Chinese citizens, even dissidents, on the basis of actual laws. This period of reform lasted for the roughly 30 years that China was ruled by Deng and two successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.
When Xi Jinping consolidated control in 2012 and 2013, no one knew which direction he would take China. But it turned out he was an entirely different type of Communist, one who believed that the party should reassert absolute control over all aspects of Chinese life and its economy.
He has now built the world’s largest and most technologically sophisticated authoritarian system, which wiped out many of the gains Cohen had helped achieve. To his death, Cohen argued that China would get back on the reform path one day. As he told The Wire China, last year, “I’m not totally pessimistic, as some people are. China’s development has been pendulum-like. At the moment, we’re in a repressive period. That won’t last. It can’t last.”
At the Overseas Press Club’s reunion of China hands in September 2014, however, Cohen sensed that China’s emerging legal system was in trouble following Xi’s rise to power. “You have a high degree of repression of lawyers,” he said. “It’s so different from 10 years ago when people were predicting great things would happen.” Cohen was then co-director of the US-Asia Law Institute at New York University.
Cohen also took part in OPC panel discussions on the future of China-Taiwan relations, in which he also specialized. Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou, who took office in 2008, had been a student of his at Harvard. Jerry’s presence was everywhere.
But Cohen will best be remembered for his absolute determination to create a legal system in China. At an OPC event in 2019 commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the deterioration of legal rights became a topic of debate. Those who govern China “don’t respond to world criticism, but they do respond to world pressure,” Cohen said. “What the Japanese call gaiatsu, world pressure, is important in China.”
As his friend, I would like to think he was right.
William J. Holstein, co-author of Battlefield Cyber: How China and Russia Are Undermining Our Democracy and National Security, has followed US-China relations since 1979.
