A Scholar of China and a Friend to Its Persecuted

On Jerome A. Cohen, a great, and good, helmsman.

Oct 03, 2025

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

It was from Jerry Cohen—Jerome A. Cohen—that I first heard about the Uyghurs. About the fact that they were being rounded up, en masse, into concentration camps. Cohen was extremely concerned. This looked like a prelude to genocide. Cohen thought about his relatives—some 40 of them—murdered in the Holocaust.

He and I were talking sometime in 2017. I paid serious attention to him. Cohen was no alarmist or Internet “rando.” He was a distinguished, judicious China scholar, then in his late eighties. Very few were talking about the Uyghurs, and Cohen thought the issue was urgent.

The Uyghurs, to remind you, are a Turkic people in northwestern China. The Chinese government is indeed committing genocide against them. This is the judgment of the US State Department and other bodies throughout the world.

Cohen was sometimes called the “dean” of China scholars in the United States. His specialty was Chinese law. Not only a scholar, he was a friend to dissidents and democrats. Such people have long spoken of him with reverence and gratitude.

With amusing irony, admirers dubbed him “the Great Helmsman” (appropriating Mao’s nickname). I think of Bernard Lewis, the great Middle East historian—whose students dubbed him “the Imam.”

Lewis died in 2018 at 101. Jerry Cohen died last week at 95.

He was born in 1930, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. His father, Philip Cohen, was the city attorney in Linden. The son of immigrants, Philip had enlisted in World War I. He was later the head of Jewish War Veterans of New Jersey.

Jerry went to Yale, where he majored in international relations. His senior thesis was on the Yalta agreement in 1945. After graduation, he went to France on a Fulbright scholarship, and then returned to Yale for law school.

Summer internships at top firms were not in the offing—not for a student named “Cohen.” But Jerry was not long impeded. He clerked for one Supreme Court justice—the chief, Earl Warren—and then for another, Felix Frankfurter.

Maybe young Cohen would rise to the Supreme Court himself one day?

In 1959, he joined the law faculty of Berkeley. But then came a twist: he got interested in China. He would concentrate on Chinese law. Mentors and peers thought he was nuts: Who cared about China (in that era)? But Cohen saw a chance to be a pioneer of sorts: to explore uncharted territory.

To me, as to others, he quoted a maxim—a maxim of Confucius: “Establish yourself at 30.” At nine in the morning on August 15, 1960—a month and a half after his thirtieth birthday—he took his first Chinese lesson.

In 1963, he went to Hong Kong, where he conducted research with refugees from the mainland. In 1964, he left Berkeley’s faculty for Harvard’s. The big name at Harvard, where China was concerned, was John K. Fairbank. He was the father of Chinese studies in America.

Fairbank and Cohen took a trip together—to China, in 1972. They had a four-hour meeting with Zhou Enlai, Mao’s number two. (“The most charming dinner host I’ve ever had,” Cohen told me.) Their main purpose was to convince the Chinese government to send Chinese students to Harvard.

But such an opening would not occur until later.

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In 1976, Mao died, and Deng Xiaoping assumed the number-one position in 1978. China would open, or at least loosen. In 1979, Professor Cohen and his wife, Joan, left Harvard to live in China, where they stayed for two years. Jerry wanted to see what this new China could do, firsthand.

China has had looser and tighter periods since then. When Xi Jinping, China’s current number one, cemented his power, China got tight to the point of strangulation. “This is the tightest period since the end of the Cultural Revolution,” Cohen told me—that is, since Mao’s death.

In 1990, Cohen began teaching at New York University. And he was a “go-to” American for Chinese who needed help. In 2012, Chen Guangcheng, the legal activist known as “the blind peasant lawyer,” made a run for the US Embassy in Beijing. Cohen played a key role in the negotiations that brought him to America—to New York, in particular. Cohen arranged for Chen to have a position at NYU.

Few are the Western scholars of China who will stick their neck out for dissidents—who will irritate the Chinese government in any way.

Why? For one thing, scholars count on visas, allowing them to visit China, their area of study. For another thing: money. Lots of Chinese money goes into Chinese studies departments.

This same problem exists in Middle East studies. “Vast sums of money are pouring in from Arab governments, Arab princes,” Bernard Lewis told me. Would you risk a shut-off of the pipeline?

Jerome Cohen was a man of principle. He could also be flexible, diplomatic, when desirable. And he was a lively, engaging personality. This is what he told me when we sat down for an interview in 2018: “As they say in the Ministry of Public Security—shoot.” (The MPS is, in effect, the Chinese KGB.)

At the time, Cohen was worried about Hong Kong, as so many of us were (not least, the people of Hong Kong). Said Cohen: “Hong Kong is right now the battleground between the Chinese Communist dictatorship and Western liberal values and political institutions.” We know how that battle turned out. Hong Kong is now dictated to, ferociously, by Beijing.

How will Taiwan turn out? Cohen drew particular satisfaction from Taiwan, because it evolved from a dictatorship to a bona fide liberal democracy. For years, apologists for oppression in Taiwan, and oppression on the mainland, said, “Liberal democracy is incompatible with Chinese culture.”

“Well,” Cohen told me, “Taiwan is a living refutation of that claim.”

I asked him whether he worried about the future of Taiwan, given Beijing’s obvious hunger for it. “I worry about it every day, including this morning,” Cohen said.

About the democratization of China itself, he was no Pollyanna—but he was not willing to write off such democratization either. In that 2018 interview, he said, “We have 350,000 Chinese students in this country,” meaning the United States, “and while not all of them are in love with America, most of them seem to see the benefits of a free society, and many of them want to go back to China and express themselves without going to jail for it.”

Let us end where we began—with the Uyghurs. When I heard of Jerry Cohen’s passing, I thought of the sense of urgency he felt about them and their fate. I thought of what he said about his relatives in Europe, who were rounded up and killed by the Nazis. Cohen wanted to shake the world’s complacency—which is a hard thing to shake, especially when there is money to be made from the persecutors, in business.

Earlier this year, at the Oslo Freedom Forum, I spoke with Nyrola Elimä, a Uyghur researcher in exile. She said that she understood the Holocaust better than ever, sadly enough. The world at large was indifferent, and some of the world was complicit. In her eyes, things are no different now.

What can we do, in our daily lives, whatever our walk? At least, be aware. That is not a big thing—nothing like worldwide pressure on the Chinese state—but it is not all that small either.