Go East Young Lawyer

An esteemed figure in advancing rule of law in East Asia, Jerome Cohen goes about his life story more in the form of an extraordinarily long dinner monolog than as a first sketch of history.

‘Eastward, Westward: A Life in Law’

Jerome A. Cohen

• Publisher: ‎ Columbia University Press (March 4, 2025)

• Print length: ‎ 384 pages

• ISBN-13 : ‎ 978-0231215923

A CONSUMMATE LAWYER, Jerome A. Cohen is not one to start proceedings with a bang. In “Eastwards, Westwards,” the scholar, ad-hoc diplomat and towering figure in the development of rule of law in East Asia knows where he’s going, but he’s going to do procedurally—and conversationally.

Early in the book, he writes:

I was about to turn thirty and confronted my most daring career decision … less than two years earlier, I had rejected the suggestion of UCLA’s law dean, who said, ‘Somebody should study the law of Red China,’ as many Americans still called the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1958. I had even turned down an offer from the University of Michigan Law School that I replace a retiring professor whose specialties included the legal systems of France and Germany.

Anyone who’s aware of Cohen knows he’s going to reconsider the UCLA law dean’s China suggestion and blaze a trail of glory through the legal field with a focus on China—indeed, with a presence in some of the most pivotal moments in Sino-U.S. relations.

And, that’s the problem.

The reader looking for insights into Cohen’s role in some of those moments should expect much page flipping through domesticity and matters relating to Harvard academia before getting to the meat of the meal. On the other hand, the reader who revels in semi-modestly delivered tales of a charmed rise in a chosen career, rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest names in American politics and academia, of the following kind:

All in all, the first year in academic life had proved busy and satisfying. I had gradually developed into a decent teacher, thanks in part to critical student reactions. I seemed to be accepted by the faculty, even if not warmly embraced. I loved the Bay Area and the environment and, in the autumn, came to enjoy the surprisingly hot Saturday afternoons at the Cal football stadium. We loved our rented house and its setting and ended up, through great fortune, being able to buy the house next door for a modest price! It needed a front deck to take advantage of the Bay view, and Joan wanted to have a spiral staircase leading up to it from the street. We asked our old friend from college days John Field, who was already acquiring architectural recognition, to help us, and he did a splendid job turning what had been a rather ordinary Spanish-style structure into an open, attractive residence.

That’s a glimpse of the long, chatty treat of a prelude you have in store.

And it’s also the last you’re going to hear about Cohen’s picture-perfect domestic tranquility and untarnished professional fulfillment from this reviewer, because after a mere 150 pages or so of it, Cohen’s life starts to intersect with history and become genuinely interesting.

When does it start? It’s the summer of 1963, Berkeley has prepared him for fieldwork, and it’s the final year of a four-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Cohen decides to spend it—family in tow—interviewing Chinese refugees in Hong Kong.

“That was as close as most Americans could get to mainland China at that time,” he remarks, adding:

… My timing was good. We arrived in Hong Kong in early August 1963. In the spring of 1962, for a period of about six weeks, the PRC had suddenly let down the barriers that had made it difficult for Chinese to reach Hong Kong without official permission. This enabled roughly sixty thousand people who, in an effort to escape the starvation and other miseries of the Great Leap Forward’s aftermath, had been massing near Hong Kong’s border with Guangdong Province to enter the colony. Many more would have joined them had the colony not later closed the border to prevent utter inundation by the refugee wave that had overwhelmed its facilities.

Next to nothing was known at the time about China’s legal system and Cohen is determined to find out as much as he can. Was adultery a crime, and if so was it prosecuted? To which, one of his interlocutors, a former policeman from Fuzhou, retorts":

‘Look, if we prosecuted all the cases of adultery, we wouldn’t have time for the counterrevolutionaries!’

Such was the state of the law in China at that time—wave after wave of ideologically driven arbitrary persecution. But, by luck, stumbling on a refugee with actual legal experience, Cohen also begins to learn something about the halting and rudimentary efforts underway to change that. His source joined “the Beijing equivalent of a law firm” in 1956, which Cohen describes as “an exciting period for law reformers …

Many codes of law were drafted with Soviet assistance, including drafts of what were slated to be the PRC’s first codes of criminal law and criminal procedure, and the legal advisory bureaus were expected to help experiment with and implement these drafts. But the effort came to a sudden end in June 1957, when the outpouring of criticisms elicited by the Hundred Flowers Campaign stunned party leaders and led Chairman Mao to unleash the Anti-Rightist Campaign.

Drafting of codes of law comes to a close, Cohen’s source’s law firm closes and the source escapes to Hong Kong after being declared a “rightist.” Cohen’s “exciting period for law reformers” is buried after little more than a year. And, as it happens, a year marks the end of Cohen’s active engagement with China—and for many pages to come. Readers urging the autobiographer, Come one, tell us all about Nixon and Kissinger and Zhou Enlai and Mao are going to have to wait.

Jerome Cohen, sporting his celebrated bow tie. Photo: WikiCommons.

Cohen is unflappable when it comes to making his audience wait, just as he is when it comes to all that is so difficult comprehend and justify about the rise of modern China.

Apart from the much noted “conversational” tone to Cohen’s work, there’s a less-remarked-upon folksy optimism both in his chosen mission and in his regard for China itself. He hints at some of the terrible stories he hears in Hong Kong from victims of unnecessary purges, but he never throws up his hands and says, This self-obsessed, one-party state is never going to establish a legal system that can act in the interests of anything or anyone other than the party and the interests of the leaders who pretend to serve it. The same is true later in the book—Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo never even rates a mention and when basically every lawyer with any interest in human rights in China has been incarcerated, Cohen has other issues to discuss.

Cohen is avowedly a believer in the “pendulum”—the word comes up often—of Chinese history. China goes into a state of irrational crisis, and then the pendulum swings back and the Chinese reemerge as the brilliant, hardworking and friendly people they really are.

Presumably, even if they accidentally start WWIII by attempting to seize a chunk of the first island chain or all of the the South China Sea, they’ll inevitably dust themselves off sooner or later, reinvent gunpowder and start again.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, because after leaving Hong Kong and returning to the US, engagement with China is never far from Cohen’s mind and by 1966 he’s leaning to the view that improved “Sino-American relations might lead to an acceptable way of ending our mistaken Vietnam involvement …

The challenge was how to bring about such an improvement after almost two decades of hostility and while China was in the throes of an unprecedented Cultural Revolution that was wreaking havoc on its foreign affairs as well as its domestic governance.

No shit, as the Americans say.

But by 1969, Richard Nixon has come to power, and with him Cohen’s Harvard colleague Henry Kissinger—for non-Americans, ”Eastward, Westward” is, if nothing else, a fascinating insight into the sheer golden-carpet power of a Harvard law degree .

Cohen and fellow believers (members of the Kennedy Institute) “had agreed on a thoughtful, balanced draft containing about a dozen recommendations [on China],” Cohen writes.

Our first recommendation called on the new president to dispatch the new secretary of state to Beijing to conduct secret, if need be deniable, conversations with the Chinese leadership in order to explore possibilities of a thaw. Shortly after … [Nixon’s] victory, however, when he appointed our Harvard colleague Henry Kissinger to be his national security adviser, we altered the draft’s first recommendation so that Henry might qualify for the mission.

So begins Kissinger’s long and profitable relationship with the Middle Kingdom—Cohen makes no comment on the less savory aspects of his Harvard fellow’s reputation. Cohen merely remarks that Kissinger was initially coy about his China mission, stressing “with Chinese modesty how little he knew about China.” But this begins to change “after he returned from the secret meeting with Zhou Enlai in Beijing in July 1971.”

Of course, the Kissinger visit is prelude to Nixon’s historic eight days in China in February 1972, meeting Chairman Mao and signing the Shanghai Communiqué—marking the first step to normalization of US-China relations and recognition of the “One China,” policy, which allowed sustained unofficial relations with Taiwan.

The rest is history, one might say, except that—Jimmy Carter officially granting China full diplomatic recognition and severing normal ties with Taiwan in 1979 aside—Cohen, whose drive is a slap in the face to anyone who imagines themselves more than averagely productive, still has much to achieve.

For a start, why not the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), better known as North Korea? Surely the so-called “Hermit Kingdom” deserves a legal system—or at least somebody should go and dig to find out what passes for one there.

Writes the indefatigable Cohen;

… My interest was enhanced, of course, by the excitement of breaking new ground. A dozen years earlier I had been motivated by the desire to be a pioneer, to break new academic and legal ground by becoming America’s first specialist in contemporary Chinese law and government. That offered the opportunity to promote a reconciliation between the American and Chinese people too long separated by China’s civil war and revolution and the Korean conflict. Now suddenly this quest had created a new chance for adventure and a useful contribution, one that I had never considered: opening up relations with the mysterious and potentially dangerous Hermit Kingdom that was even more isolated from the world community than China.

He adds:

Our family would only be the third group of Americans ever permitted by both the DPRK and the United States to set foot in North Korea. No American diplomats, officials, congressional representatives, businesspeople, academics, athletic figures, entertainers, or others had ever legally preceded us. This opportunity was irresistible.

By 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, Cohen steps back from the limelight and returns to practicing law, explaining:

Any aspirations I might still have had to take part in diplomacy or other government service relating to China were put on hold because I had neither Republican inclinations nor connections.

This is far from the end of the “Eastwards, Westwards.”’ story. Cohen joins Paul, Weiss Partnership, which clearly involves a lot of work and a lot of name-dropping, including even Mia Farrow for reasons not worth going into. Meanwhile, his law firm dispatches Cohen to Hong Kong, where Lord Kadoorie, (“whom I called Lawrence”) drops him a bombshell of a job—consulting for China Light & Power (CLP) in a joint venture worth US$3.5 billion for the construction and operation of China’s first nuclear power plant. He later organizes pandas for New York Bronx zoo through the innovative solution (“my idea”) of leasing them via the Chinese Wildlife Foundation.

Somewhere along the way, Cohen lectures a relatively youthful Zhu Rongji on fair business trade and of course they become friends, and later Zhu becomes the force behind China’s entry into the WTO.

The fact that China has never truly abided by its rules is ignored.

Perhaps that note is the point to pause and reflect on why much of the tale end of “Eastward, Westward” is a measured plea for understanding. Cohen is clearly rattled by the events of June 4 1989—what some call the Tiananmen Massacre—and it comes as a surprise when he openly muses on the question asked by some as to whether “those of us who sought to … improve the legal system of the PRC” were not simply wasting our time, but “like Dr. Frankenstein” creating a monster?

Cohen’s answers are both logically coherent and naively wishful. He concludes with the debatable—and, as I say, somewhat naively wishful—contention:

Despite the impact of June 4, some important legal reforms were achieved in the two decades between Deng Xiaoping’s famous 1992 southern tour and the ascent to power of Xi Jinping in late 2012. Even today, some improvements in the formal judicial system continue to be made amid ever increasing party and police oppression.

Cohen knows that in today’s China rule by law in the interests of the party has erased any pretense of rule of law and that China has become a far more effectively repressive machine by means of its legal system, such as it is. But, he writes:

On political grounds, I feel no guilt or regret about the years spent cooperating with the PRC during the halcyon days of the largely optimistic 1980s prior to the massacre of June 4. Nor am I doubtful about the desirability of continuing that cooperation today, as our New York University (NYU) School of Law U.S.-Asia Law Institute (USALI) and other foreign institutions struggle to do.

Ever the optimist, Cohen builds on his upbeat feelings:

One of the PRC’s most popular songs has been ‘Tomorrow Will Be Even Better.’ Because I am an inveterate optimist, I have often referred to it in China when ending lectures that were critical of current practices. I am not as depressed as many of my fellow foreign China-watchers are.

At its worst, “Eastward Westward” might be described as a chatty high-fiving account of US diplomatic successes from one of the self-convinced good guys. For some it will be that too often Cohen’s busy-do-gooding and ensuring his next career enhancement when the Chinese government clearly has a none-too-hidden agenda that is anathema not just to what the West represents but what Cohen himself is most proud to represent.

At its best, well, there’s no denying that Cohen has led a full and productive life during interesting times—in both the best and worst senses—and “Eastward, Westwards” shares some of that with the patient, non-overly judgmental reader.