Few contemporary China scholars have made as strong and lasting an impact as Jerome Alan Cohen, who passed away at 95 on 22 September 2025. Beginning in 1960, amid Western hostility towards “Red China,” Cohen spent 64 years pioneering Chinese law and engaging deeply with China and its people. After lobbying for the resumption of diplomatic relations between China and the US, he became the first American lawyer to work in China, helping the country, which was reeling from the Cultural Revolution, rebuild its legal system and advising Western enterprises on entering China. Yet in his later years, when the world was in awe of China’s economic might, he became one of the most outspoken critics of the country’s human rights abuses.
His long and fascinating life is captured in a 25-chapter memoir. The opening chapter begins at age 30, when Cohen, then a junior professor in public and international law at the University of California at Berkeley, was asked to find someone for a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study China’s legal system. Unable to persuade others, he took the opportunity himself. Inspired by professors who resisted McCarthyism, he saw “the China challenge” as a chance to think, write and contribute to public debate. Despite warnings not to “throw away your career on China,” Cohen embraced the idea of becoming “an academic pioneer” (p. 5). With an unfamiliar language to learn, a third child on the way, and amidst public suspicion of Communism, he embarked on his new adventure.
Subsequent chapters trace his early life and career: the son of a New Jersey lawyer of Polish Jewish descent, Cohen studied international relations at Yale before entering law school, despite barriers for Jewish students. Cohen’s liberal ideals dated back to college, when he took up legal studies with “a desire to improve the world, whether by promoting social as well as legal justice at home or international peace and human rights abroad” (p. 17). After serving as a law clerk for Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justice Felix Frankfurter and a brief stint at an elite law firm, his interest in criminal cases led him to the US attorney’s office for Columbia. Teaching drew him back to Berkeley in 1959, where his mentor Joseph Levenson encouraged him to study China.
Chapters seven to eleven detail his transition from academia to on-the-ground engagement with China. Cohen’s hallmark optimism, which sustained his long career, showed early: for example, writing to Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai for permission to visit, and telling the Voice of America his unusual choice to study China was “peaceful hands across the sea to a forbidden land” (p. 77). Using Franz Schurmann’s methodology, he interviewed Chinese refugees – including former police and court officers – in Hong Kong from 1963 to 1964, producing his influential and pioneering book The Criminal Process in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1963: An Introduction – the first of his many seminal works on Chinese law.
Back in the US, Cohen helped establish Harvard’s East Asian legal studies programme, and from 1967 he began to chair a group of Asian experts, including John Fairbank, Benjamin Schwartz and Lucian Pye, which urged the next US president to engage with China. The move led to Kissinger’s secret 1971 meeting with Zhou Enlai and the resumption of diplomatic ties. Cohen visited China for the first time in 1972, meeting Zhou and advising China’s participation in the International Court of Justice after its entry into the United Nations. Nixon’s 1972 visit created opportunities for both sides, making Cohen “suddenly… professionally relevant” (p. 217). He advised Western firms and helped draft China’s first Sino-Foreign Equity Joint Venture law, negotiated contracts and published English translations of new legislation, arranged training for Chinese officials and facilitated Harvard exchanges – developments that “reinforced my hopes for the future of the rule of law in China” (p. 229).
When Cohen was due to return to Harvard in 1981, he found himself reluctant to abandon his pioneering work in China. He asked himself: “Would I continue to be part of history in China or simply record it at home?” (p. 231) Cohen chose to join the law firm Paul, Weiss to open offices in Hong Kong and Beijing.
Cohen’s passion went beyond government and commerce with China. His concern over social justice led him to champion human rights, securing releases of political prisoners like Annette Lu and Kim Dae-Jung. Later, he advocated for jailed Chinese lawyers and activists, notably Chen Guangcheng, whose dramatic 2012 escape to the US embassy in Beijing created a diplomatic crisis that Cohen helped resolve by arranging a visiting scholarship for Chen at New York University – an act that ultimately cost him his ties with China. Cohen had long supported Chen’s campaign for rural access to legal services since they met in 2003. After Chen was jailed in 2006, Cohen campaigned tirelessly for him, not only at US congressional hearings but also in China. At a conference there in 2007, he shocked his hosts by holding up a T-shirt emblazoned with the message: “Free the blind man Chen Guangcheng.” After Chen settled in the US, Cohen tried to shield him from partisan politics, but Chen later campaigned for Trump – an outcome which saddened Cohen (chapter 23).
In the final chapters of his autobiography, Cohen reflects on his achievements – pioneering Chinese law studies, shaping US–China policy, freeing prisoners – but also laments failing to bring democracy and rule of law to China. He asks: “Was helping China build its post-1978 legal system a mistake?”, reflecting on critics’ view that US engagement had inadvertently “created a monster” by “enabl(ing) a communist dictatorship to become increasingly repressive” (p. 298). Cohen brings in the historical perspective and asks: When China sought help from the West to rebuild a legal system after the Cultural Revolution, “should we have refused on political grounds?” (p. 300).
Describing himself as an “inveterate optimist,” Cohen refused to accept that his efforts towards bringing rule of law to China had been in vain (pp. 312–314). He believed his works had sown “the seeds” (p. 304) of liberal ideas, and that “silent dissenters” (p. 302) within the system were still quietly advocating the rule of law. This view underpinned his fundamental belief that most Chinese were liberal and only “temporarily silenced,” but given an opportunity, “millions of the PRC’s elite who detest the current situation… can be expected to attempt to alter it” (p. 313). From his decades-long observations, he writes, the PRC had developed in “a pendulum-like fashion” (p. 313). During the Cultural Revolution, he had believed “the madness would eventually subside” (p. 134), and the Reform era proved him right. Likewise, he predicted the political pendulum would swing back towards openness after the current repression. “If that happens, the work that we did in China in the late 1970s and the 1980s may have left a more indelible, more enduring legacy than (currently assumed)” (p. 304).
Much as Cohen stresses his optimism, a palpable sense of regret permeates this memoir. His early goal of bringing social justice for all underpinned his earnest desire to promote the rule of law and liberal-democratic values in China, yet the intensifying suppression of political and civil rights evidently disappointed him. This perhaps explains why Cohen, whose work had helped China grow into an economic and political power, felt so compelled to speak up for the victims of rights abuses. He writes that his “excessive passion for the subject of arbitrary detention” grew out of his belief that the benefits of “equal justice under law” should be extended to Chinese people: “That is why I have emphasized my sympathy for all the victims of the PRC’s increasingly sophisticated repression” (p. 306).
Cohen rejected the idea that democracy and rule of law are Western values unsuitable for Chinese people, citing Taiwan, Japan and South Korea as proof that East Asian traditions need not inhibit political-legal development.
In his last chapter, Cohen voiced his remaining concern over Sino-US relations, expressing sadness over the unprecedented assault on democratic political institutions and liberal principles in his own country. He urged the US and China to “act in ways that assure us that there will be a peaceful future rather than a nuclear holocaust” (p. 314).
Cohen’s memoir, elegantly told in his own voice, sparkles with intellectual humour and self-deprecating humility. Through vivid anecdotes, it provides first-hand insights that make this book an essential read not only for legal scholars but also for historians, political scientists and the general reader who seeks to understand the behind-the-scenes political, cultural and legal tussling in the history of Sino-US relations and China’s Reform era. Amid rising US–China tensions, Cohen’s sobering reflection on his long engagement with China offers a highly relevant historical perspective and a unique scholarly contribution that no other can provide.
