Sixty Years of China Watching | Jerome Cohen

[Music] uh the participants are growing rapidly but at the committee we reward punctuality so we we will start i'm steve orleans and i'm president of national committee on u.s china relations looking at the guest list tonight i really wish we were doing this in person because there's so many old friends and great scholars um but obviously we can't and we wanted to do this before jerry reached his 91st birthday so we were beginning to run out of time um if you don't if you need a formal introduction to jerome cohen i'm not sure why you're on this call but um he is known i think to all of you um i should say 49 years ago jerry if i'm not mistaken uh you entered my life uh like only a few students before me and hundreds and hundreds after me he changed my life as jerry always puts it consistent with confucian tradition as my teacher he educated me he found me my first job but he failed to find me a spouse which a confucian teacher should do but seriously without jerry i and hundreds of others ranging from presidents to judges from academics to practitioners from business leaders to heads of ngos would not be where they are today his students span the globe and carry with them the wisdom and values that he is passed on to them for all of this jerry and from all of us we cannot thank you enough every 10 years i get to turn the tables on my law professor and be the questioner so today is my chance the last time was for his 80th birthday which of course we did in person much has changed and i'll try and focus the conversation today on the past 10 years but it's impossible to start this conversation without kind of starting at the beginning um one of my colleagues at carlisle when we would talk to new associates associates at the firm would say if steve and i were the best lawyers in the united states we wouldn't be here today we wouldn't have changed professions but in 1960 jerry you had what you would call the platinum experience in law you'd been editor of the yale journal you'd been clerked to two not one but two storied supreme court justices felix frankfurter and chief justice earl warren you'd spend time in the u.s attorney's office in d.c and you'd become a professor at the university of california's school of law but you gave that all up to pursue a career in chinese law when china had just emerged from the great leap forward and would enter the cultural level revolution in six years tell us why what made you do make that decision at the very beginning you know steve uh this is a wonderful occasion uh as i listened to your tribute i thought i hope my obituary will be as kind and this uh makes me look back to the spring of 1960 it was a very exciting time kennedy was running against nixon i was a loyal democrat i was told before leaving washington in 1959 don't go we're going to win you'll have a chance to play a role in the administration but i wanted to have my own career i didn't want to spend more years in washington holding onto the coattails of some very eminent people among whom i work dean atchison whose biography i've just been completing now by james chase was prominent among them but i wanted to be a pioneer somehow i never thought about china i thought about public law and then fate intervened luck is very important in life it certainly has been in mine and i didn't know what subject to pursue in order i had to get tenure i had to write something and then dean rusk came into the picture rusk was then president of rockefeller foundation he had been assistant secretary of state under truman and atchison for east asia it had been his sad fate to preside over one of the biggest mistakes u.s foreign policy has made in the post-war era that was to send our troops in the north korea to the chinese border after having pushed the north koreans out of south korea we can talk about the implications of that later but risk having arrived at rockefeller decided that the nation needed better advice on china policy that too many china specialists had been pushed out of the state department and other branches of government by joe mccarthy and other right-wing critics and that a new generation had to be trained and when our dean at berkeley his classmate approached him and said give us a chair an african law because we were worried about what was going on in human rights in south africa rusk said who knows anything about china and law and he later called up bob scalipino at berkeley and said africa is important but we think china is going to be more important and the nation needs to have somebody who understands something about chinese law and government and if berkeley law school is interested in training somebody will put up four years for his preparation that was a remarkable thing and if i'd had my wits about me i should have said i'll do it but i wasn't a logical person to do it as you say but the dean asked me to find somebody find in east german who'd studied law in beijing find an expert on the economy or politics of china who was willing to study law behind us a law professor who was chinese and already knew about the language culture etc find us somebody and i tried hard for a month i couldn't find anybody and then it hit me you want to be a pioneer here's a real chance to be a pioneer and i at that point somebody said to me confucius had said establish yourself at 30. stand firm at 30 and i had just had my 30th birthday and something clicked and i said go for it and most people who heard what i was going to do if they were charitable thought i must be having a nervous breakdown why would you throw away a promising career in a country we couldn't go to they couldn't come here we still had very bad american feelings toward china as a result of the korean conflict it didn't seem logical and the language could be a barrier but i decided if you're going to be an academic if you're going to stay home from the excitement in washington that was about to take place then really go for it and um i did and i've never regretted it it's been over 60 years and my wife joan who is here with me has been with me for this whole 60-year period and been an active participant as you know in u.s china relations in the art field that pioneering spirit let's jump ahead and talk about the pioneering spirit that took you to beijing um to live not to just visit you'd visited a number of times uh in 1979 in fact the invitation that we sent for this event has a picture of you joan ethan in fact who was visiting uh me susan orleans and the class of kind of mid-level beijing cadres that you and i you know and me who's also in the picture had taught law uh to and that in that period from 1979 to 1981 what has happened in the last 10 years what i had always regarded this as as a an effort of public service uh that we did good and there was you know it was kind of a debate about it you know it struck me it was very much apple pie and motherhood there wasn't much uh negative to be said about people who went and without compensation taught these people about how to create law in china but there's been criticism over the last 10 years of what we did you talk about that criticism and how you feel about it now well of course the way we've put it so far it looks like we were impelled by the missionary spirit but of course uh we have to look back at what the real situation was in 1979 80. the chinese were hungering for knowledge of law we were not seeking to proselytize them american business of course wanted to open up china and lawyers are the servants of business to a considerable extent and we were building a law practice and china was a hot item but there were other reasons in addition the chinese were the ones who wanted us there communist chinese were eager to learn about law not to protect human rights but because they wanted to attract foreign investment foreign technology they wanted modernize the country after three decades of chaos under mao and dung xiaoping wasn't afraid of multinational companies uh although many un advisers told them about their depredations in latin america and africa and asia but dung thought he could take care and keep multinational companies in check but what he didn't have was a legal system he had offshore oil companies from america and canada and europe eager to invest in china but not if they take foreign tax credits against their own country's tax system that meant china had to have a creditable tax system and it didn't have one and china had no investment law it had no corporation law and the chinese underdone understood you had to have a legal system lenin understood that after the bolshevik revolution and he created a european type legal system for revolutionary russia in order to attract british and french invest investment deng xiaoping wanted to have a creditable legal system in order to modernize the country not only for doing business with foreigners but for china's internal economic development buyers in china had to know that sellers would deliver or they would make compensation and people had to have reliable means of settling disputes a legal system wasn't necessary for internal political and economic sociological development as well as for external cooperation with foreigners and the chinese beginning december 1978 began to ask us repeatedly for help i remember in december 78 oliver oldman at harvard the head of our international tax program excitedly brought me a letter that was delivered from the tax commissioner of china our friend later mr leo chung harvard had invited china for 24 years to send people from their ministry of finance to study tax at harvard and they never got a response and suddenly 24 years later they get a letter from mr leo saying you know we've been and we think we'd like to explode back professor cullen is spending his sabbatical in hong kong beginning january if you're interested get in touch with them and they did and after that the investment people the trade people everybody in chinese government who was told earned foreign exchange get us established after the chaos of the cultural revolution knew they needed a passable legal system and the problem was how would they get it and we became the chosen instruments and we had to decide do we turn away that great interesting opportunity or do we go for it even though it was far from clear what the outcome would be and we were not naive that we were going to make democrats out of deng xiaoping and company we didn't think they were going to really sponsor the rule of law when they had just been resurrecting the communist system that now imported from stalin but we knew that law could nevertheless be useful do you have any regrets do you did we do anything that you don't think was terrific i i don't know i don't like to say we never made mistakes they had a great opportunity to do many things we not only helped companies including some chinese companies to cope with international business requirements but we also took part in activities for general law reform i went all over china in order to give lectures about the importance of the legal profession uh resurrecting legal education which had been stopped for 20 years under the maoist rule beginning with 1957 anti-rightist movement and culminating in the cultural revolution we did a lot did we make mistakes that's hard to say we were very busy we tried our best and we brought in increasing numbers of younger people some of whom like you steve are still playing a prominent role in u.s china relations in various ways whether academic or professional or ngo etc i don't know can you think of something that was a mistake we have been attacked for being the spearheads of the latest form of american missionaries going back to the 19th century trying to convert the heathen to christ uh i think that's rather overdone i mean there are those who argue we enabled the rise of china i mean my view of that is our it was terrific i think what we did was important but we were always on the margins that it was decisions by dung whether it was decisions to reform and open and the subsequent leaders when it was decisions to crack down there was not there was nothing that we could do except express our opinions but those were decisions which they made best based on their views of what was in china's interest and we never i didn't certainly expected that i would do anything but change china i didn't expect we would change china in a fundamental way i thought in the margins we would leave we would help kind of create a better legal system which was fair to people both inside and outside the chinese communist party i suppose i suppose today some people would say we never should have helped china at all yeah at the time there was a right-wing mostly republican view that john foster dulles the secretary of state under eisenhower perpetuated that we should stay with chiang kai-shek and we should do everything possible not to recognize the communist regime not to assist it in any way no matter what the european governments wanted to do or japan or other countries to cooperate with china we should have led a continuing charge they say against china i thought that was unenlightened i thought it wasn't going to benefit either the american people or the chinese people and i thought we had no choice because whatever the us chose to do the europeans were going ahead to cooperate with china as most of the world was including canada so i had no doubts we were doing the right thing it didn't mean we thought it would necessarily turn out the way we wanted china's development at that time had always gone like a pendulum every few years it changed from radical to more conservative and i anticipated that would continue and indeed that's what we've seen and right now unfortunately as we consider the last 60 years we're in a period of maximum dictatorship uh in china but this too shall pass just the way chairman mao's cultural revolution and anti-rightist movement shall pass so we're at a low point now in judging what we did in china and there's no doubt what we did helped the chinese people who after done freed them up for their economic development benefited enormously from foreign cooperation not only the u.s but many countries certainly the u.n and other organizations but if you compare the welfare of the chinese people today with what it was under mao's dictatorship or the pieces of it we had to deal with when we got there in 1979 to take up work there's no doubt they are not free but they are much better off and their prospects for freedom are enhanced by the progress they've made in economics society education access to the world despite the limitations on their freedom uh that xi jinping has tightened up so i have no regrets uh i think many people are better off in china today even though i sympathize with their lack of freedom and i desperately oppose what the government is doing to not only the lawyers of china who fight for human rights but especially the minority nationalities particularly the muslims and the tibetans so it's a complex picture you i don't have any i think partly because we've been working and living in china for so long and we have witnessed the pendulum i mean i remember when i first joined you in beijing in october of 79 democracy wall was up and then one day it wasn't up and the people who had put posters up um were taken into custody and i remember living through ching chong waran spiritual pollution uh campaign and then obviously living through june 4th and watching the pendulum go back and forth the question today though is has technology and changes in the chinese system made it so that the pendulum will not swing back again i don't think so of course technology works both ways it's opened up the world in many ways that people in china despite all the restrictions uh nevertheless are coming to appreciate uh i think uh the xi jinping repression will inspire a reaction uh no man lives forever a dead men rise up never and the poet vader lindsay said that and i think anyone who hasn't seen the movie the death of stalin ought to see it everyone in china and everyone who cares about china because xi jinping is sowing the seeds of reaction against what he's been doing and we'll witness that i may not live to witness that but i think you may live to witness that steve and it's very hard to predict who could have thought that the chinese path would lead to xi jinping when there were many hopeful periods even after june 4th 1989. the period 2003 was a very optimistic period and it looked like there would be genuine rule of law human rights protections growing in china but it changed and when you think back to the period of the 80s that you and i experienced steve which was in retrospect the kind of golden age for trying to bring a more civilized organization and government to china what if who yao bong the general secretary of the party hadn't been removed by doug in 87 what if jiaozi young hadn't handled things in a way in may of uh 1989 that led to his uh ouster these were enlightened dynamic communist leaders and i often think what if jurong ji who was prime minister in later decade and helped china get into the wto if he had risen to the top spot was that impossible to conjure up because of the nature of chinese communism i don't know so i haven't lost my optimism i think what's been achieved is so far impressive it's depressing to think that it's led at least temporarily to xi jinping's dictatorship but the world hasn't stopped yeah i mean yes the um you were the moving force for two of the uh national committee's track two dialogues you were a moving force for the maritime dialogue which we hold with the south china seas and you were a moving force for the human rights and rule of law dialogue that we conduct with the human rights development foundation in in in china the maritime dialogue you know is is despite enormous differences in the sides we're always able to reach some kind of agreement on certain issues even though we still disagree on kind of what china is doing in the south china sea there's actually interesting agreement among participants who are really expert in the human rights dialogue where we have xinjiang and tibet and hong kong and treatment of dissidents and and treatment of the lawyers of dissidents on the agenda why and you still support continuing that should we still be continuing that uh it was a little garbled there steve but i think i've got your meaning uh we debate among the americans who take part in the human rights dialogue and this is not the official government-to-government dialogue that has taken place on occasion but it's supposed to be tracked to whether to continue or not even when we have requested certain distinguished chinese legal figures to take part and the host organization on the chinese side has complied with our request usually at the meetings those people don't dare voice their true feelings occasionally it's take time or during a meal we'll get a few surreptitious remarks but those dialogues even though we want to continue i enjoy them simply because it's good for my chinese to listen to the chinese pronunciation and listen to the substance of what they say in the content it's linguistically beneficial but it isn't intellectually or politically i think progressive as you say the south china sea discussions those are serious discussions i think people say what they mean they have a diversity of view and a respect for each other that makes it possible to say some difficult things without personally angering the audience and i think that reflects the actual situation xi jinping shows no sign whatever of wanting to give on the world's demands for a greater respect for human rights but i think the south china sea offers some opportunity and for a realistic compromise on various issues and certainly there ought to be ongoing conversations about trying to deal with six or seven legal questions on which we differ on the interpretation of uncle close the united nations convention on the law of the sea i think there's more potential flexibility there than there is when it comes to human rights whether you talk about xinjiang tibet hong kong or the repression that's very severe now of those lawyers who were adventurous and brave enough to still try to protect people's rights in china and there are fewer and fewer of them who are not in jail who have not been disbarred who have not been forced to leave the country so i think we have to look at dealing with china issue by issue the elizabeth lynched a question just popped up from her which i think is is interesting she says you're say you say that he's sowing the seeds of reactions against what he is doing what will those reactions look like well that's the thing of course we have no control over uh some people think that if the party elite manages to express their dissatisfaction in a way that would bring an end to she's a dictatorship that could lead perhaps only to a military government in china uh that would not necessarily be more peaceful or more human rights sensitive other people think no we could see uh some gradual improvement over time uh if we had enlightened leadership i don't think anybody expects the chinese people to embrace political democracy as they've seen various uh variations of it in the west and given the u.s performance of the last four years maybe that's the solution some of the thousands and thousands of elite members in china who have always had huge respect for the united states and what we've accomplished so it's very unclear what would succeed xi jinping my hope would be that it would be a moderate uh leaders who would try to introduce more humane uh more civilized techniques in the government and open up the chinese people to more contact with the world i have maybe it's because i'm the eternal as you always say california wasn't built by pessimists i think working on china for this long you have to be an optimist or you give up but i still believe i'll live to see some form of intra-party democracy that i've sat with senior officials in china and they've explained to me how the central committee uh of the party is chosen and they if you know obviously you're talking to me and wanting to impress me that it's a democratic process but it is not totally an undemocratic process so in my view ultimately when there is stalemates and probably in the post-sea era when there are stalemates within the party the best way to resolve them will be through some uh democratic process so i think we won't see it for the 1.4 billion but will we see it for the 90 million i i sometimes think that we will that and i will live to see that um you've met some of the great figures in china in the 20th century including joanne lai dung xiaoping jong jisher um they all knew they were talking to america's leading expert on chinese law did any of them exhibit a sense of the importance of the rule of law to taiwan and china's future i could go back to my meeting with chiang kai-shek and madame john because i had to talk to him i had a specific goal in mind i wanted chiang kai-shek to order academia seneca to set up a project that would provide employment for one of my most outstanding students from taiwan mr john weirin who was a budding legal historian and i had to appeal to john kashak in terms of his often voiced respect for confucian culture and the supposedly unique contribution of the republic of china under his reign for fostering humane chinese values and translating them into public contemporary norms and he proved responsive to that argument and subsequently academia seneca did invest in learning about chinese legal history and jogway wren happily is still although retired working earnestly to tell us more about the qing dynasty and its legal traditions and the extent to which they tried to show respect for what today we would call uh human rights with joe and ly it was a different situation we had a four-hour talk dinner drinks before dinner and john fairbank who was really the honoree for the dinner given by his old friend joe and life for him i was a kind of party crasher brought in near the last minute but joe and ly did his homework for each guest he knew what i had worked on he knew what i was hoping for and he said to me with a somewhat amused heir i understand you've done many books on the chinese legal system and he said it with the heir of somebody who thought knowledgeably that i had made more of chinese law than china had he thought perhaps i must be very naive this was june 72 the culture revolution had only recently ended its worst period and here comes the foreigner who says gee i'm really studying the chinese legal system he must have thought i had air between the ears but he was very genial and a serious person and we had some good political and international law discussions with the dung chanel ping but by the way let me ask you about joanna at that point had the criminal process in the prc 1949-66 been translated into chinese the book that you had written that we used when i was your student uh i only know that there were chinese legal experts whom i met in the 70s who were familiar with that book they were more familiar the international law experts with the book that professor cho hong dao of taiwan and i produced in 1974 about china and international law china i just gave the title people shine in international law it sat on my book she sits on my books shelf to this day i'm glad to see that it's still widely quoted and provides a lot of useful background so many years later for analyzing contemporary problems not the least of which is the legal status of taiwan and the diplomatic relations involving taiwan and the right of beijing to use force uh to annex taiwan these problems have not gone away yeah and then you were going to go on to then uh to uh you had covered chiang kai-shek kill it going live yeah and then at the end of december 1977 i had accompanied ted kennedy and 11 members of his family on their first visit to china and uh we had to work hard to get an interview with deng xiaoping he was only just coming back to power he was suffering from the flu but after many days of elaborate negotiation and scheming to let the chinese know how important it was for kennedy to have the opportunity to meet donald we did have an hour and a half meeting i didn't have the opportunity to interrogate dunn i was seated right behind him and kennedy and i barely took part uh in what was a preliminary sort of feeling out good will discussion and i i was impressed by dung's attitude but he wasn't feeling well he was low in energy uh and we had a rather broad agenda so i don't regard that meeting if given my own interests as having been as successful or as important as meetings with uh joe and lai and jian kai shek and madame john who was essential to any useful interchange uh with uh john kashak himself the um a few people including your son ethan has asked ethan it has been said jerome a cohen is a frank friend of china uh my question is do you think this statement is accurate and one of our public intellectuals a fellow at the council uh on foreign relations wang yejung quotes from your from fareed zakaria's interview of seitenkai where he quoted where fareed quoted you extensively on hong kong and ambassador swade then says jerome cohen is an old friend of ours i wish him well i've not seen him for quite a while because of the pandemic hopefully i could talk to him in person very soon does not mean what he says is always right i think the fundamental issues with regard to hong kong is very clear what do you think about those comments and about your great friend i'm sure i'm not the only one who specialized in chinese studies who has trembled at the at hearing this phrase you're an old friend of china that's of course part of the chinese communist charm in taking you in trying to soften your criticism etc but i i do feel that over the years i've been a friend of the chinese people i do feel that in our work whether academic or professional or political we've always tried to have the interests of the chinese people from our point of view at least in a priority position i don't feel i'm a friend of china in the sense that the term is used to describe some people i would regard as just to use communist terminology running dogs of the regime people who just parrot the chinese communist line 10 years ago when i was 80 the south china morning post ran a long story and honor my birthday and i like the way they put it beijing's friendly critic and uh in recent years i don't think the leadership in china thinks i'm so friendly but that's not my problem it's the problem of their behavior i think to understand my attitude toward china you know steve i've coined this simplistic formula called the four c's not s-e-a-s but the letter capital c because in looking as everybody is now looking at nauseam about what biden's china policies should be i think 4c sums it up including the difficulties involved for having a balanced approach to china the first c we have to emphasize more than we have and that's the need for cooperation and the list of issues on which i think there would be increasing support in the united states for cooperation with china is necessarily expanding beyond climate beyond nuclear proliferation including the complex technology and cyber etc and space law and all the evolving questions we need to cooperate with china on critical issues and hope beijing will feel the same way at the same the second c is competition we can't avoid competition we have competition even with friendly allied powers with respect to business and economics uh and certainly we're going to have competition continuing for soft power in the world's opinion uh competition is healthy and it's good the third c is criticism i'm a great advocate of criticism including self-criticism i don't mind when the chinese government occasionally condemns u.s government for certain failures to protect human rights in the united states i think if it's honest it's it's good for us and we should be aware of it but of course we shouldn't resist criticizing the people's republic for many of the violations of human rights that have taken place so criticism has to continue uh and has to be accepted by both sides the final c and here's a word that many people think should be buried is containment but i think uh we have to bolster uh the countries on china's periphery that feel the need for protection assurance at least to preserve their neutrality if not to follow the us foreign policy we have to make sure we take steps to contain any expansionist instincts on the part of the prc and that's not an easy job that's what this indo-pacific uh development reallies system being developed again is all about now it's easy to say we have to have this balanced approach the problem is can you really get cooperation if you're also trying to take steps toward containment if you have a government in china that can't stand criticism which hurts their attempt to have soft power in the world are they going to cooperate with respect to some of the issues that we must have cooperation on and what other things right that is going to be for competition yeah i mean everybody says of course we have new rules of the game and that's much easier said than done yeah i'm i think i agree with the first three of those four the containment has a lot of implications that i think are wouldn't be helpful for the other three and ultimately is not the way we should be approaching china but we don't have time for a full conversation the ash center came out with a 10-year polling survey showing a high degree of chinese public support of the current chinese regime that would be the envy of most governments in the west how do you square that with your pessimistic your negative view of the regime how in the world could we have an accurate poll of what chinese people think when they go to jail if they express what they think in public it's ridiculous to think that we have access to the free expression of opinion on the part of chinese in the circumstances in which the chinese government controls all incoming information in which it creates huge amounts of fake information through the millions of people it employs and through its vast propaganda how in the world would the chinese people be able to express themselves in a way that's meaningful to those of us who are not subject to those restraints i don't take that seriously at all but i do understand there's a new generation in china that emphasizes nationalism the government has been beating the drums for that and these people are proud of what the chinese people have achieved and they're aware very aware of the negative aspects of american government bourgeois democratic governments in various countries of the world so you have a combination of things that makes it understandable they should tell any polars how enthusiastic they are i think xi jinping has the support of most people in china his anti-corruption efforts and the propaganda i've mentioned controls that they have over information uh make it almost inevitable that a rising power should be as nationalistic as they are it's a dangerous situation that even the chinese government itself on occasion has to restrain the rising nationalism i think older people in china 50 years and above have a less zealous attitude but all these things are quite speculative when you have a regime that so suffocatingly controls its own public opinion i think on the media control in that aspect you're right as to the inaccuracy of polling data i think a lot of people who look at this wouldn't agree with you that the polling data is actually accurate and people are willing to speak to pollsters of the chinese equivalent of pollsters in an honest way and in fact i have spoken with provincial level officials who do polling to understand what the law by seeing are thinking so my guess is they trust that polling and they're polling on specific issues that that they they want to better understand what people are thinking so i'm i agree that it's manipulated in the sense that the you know media is controlled you know it's it's an incredible apparatus but the polling data itself actually may be uh accurate and this enormous support of the chinese government is actually true and that if there were an election uh you know the folks in government would likely be elected but that's you know if i controlled all the newspapers and all the televisions and the internet i think i could get elected whatever i wanted to so i don't know if that's a a truly relevant uh analysis um you're opposing candidate b right yes um a few people have asked what madeleine ross has asked um have you made significant errors in your assessment of china over the years and if so what are they and how have they informed your thinking about china now well that goes back to what we talked about earlier uh in terms of what did we anticipate would come out of our efforts it was always open-ended any student of chinese politics knows that so much of circumstances what we might say adventitious a lot depends on circumstances luck i'm not happy as i indicate every day with what's going on under xi jinping but i don't know that i can say i'm disappointed i'm not surprised perhaps at the severity of his repression increasing but i don't know i suppose i never had any great expectations we were hoping piecemeal bit by bit to improve the lives of the chinese people uh i think that has happened to a considerable extent uh many people including these wonderful human rights lawyers who've been suffering torture and imprisonment and expulsion and disorder they could lead a happy life in china if you keep your nose clean just go to work do your thing keep out of politics make money you know many people have compromised on that in china and the masses of people don't even think they're compromising and if we look at analogies in our own country do we worry about what the elite thinks about politics but because of our system we also have to worry about what the masses think i think in china there may be a lot of doubt criticism unhappiness with xi jinping among the educated intellectuals academics even many government officials some even in the legal system these people are informed and wishing for a better life than xi jinping gives them but most people probably you know as long as they do a little better economically and they don't run into local problems they're happy enough and we have the problem here as i say how do we deal with the american masses and maybe we should be trying to meet their needs to a greater extent than we have and that's part of the turmoil that we're experiencing now um we're good let me tell you we're gonna because one of the benefits of zoom is we can run over and we're gonna run over because i have lots of more questions if i'm not exhausting you jerry we'll uh you know we'll continue a few minutes past the appointed closing time and if people need to i see nobody has did our audience remains enormous um and nobody is disconnecting so if they want to stay on and listen to a few more questions i'm happy to continue for when we say another 15 minutes jerry is that okay of course um what was your most difficult moment in china over the last 50 years most difficult moment that's a that's a good one i suppose uh after 10 on one the june third fourth 1989 slaughter near tina mon square the collapse of the whole foreign investment cooperative movement with china uh for i figured it would go on at least three years uh was certainly a difficult moment especially since i felt i had to speak out against what dungeon company had done this meant the end of that wonderful period of the 80s which despite halting progress really represented progress that was a difficult period but again i felt patience is required one has to adjust for the immediate make the best of the situation during that period i really discovered vietnam and i found an opportunity to introduce many of the companies i had been working with to vietnam which was just opening up a decade after the prc had opened up and i found fascinating insights in vietnam into the chinese legal system which uh quietly the vietnamese were building upon translating chinese works trying to improve chinese uh legal provisions to attract foreign investment i sort of made up for disappointment about what was going on in china and having lived through the period 1960 to 78 i felt better equipped than many of my former students who would come out of law school in the late 70s and only knew the hopeful decade of the 80s i think many of them took it very hard but i felt china would come back deng xiaoping's southern tour in early 92 began to embody that and we soon saw a greater need and opportunity for business law in china than before even though there was little progress with respect to the protection of human rights so i don't know maybe i'm an inventor but optimist and uh i just have felt uh that i should continue to support china it reminds me a little bit in 1950 the state of massachusetts passed a law requiring uh all uh academic people who are involved with state support to take an oath to support the constitution and when harvard's leading professor of constitutional law was asked are you going to be willing to support the constitution equipped why shouldn't i it supported me all my life and i have felt indissolubly linked to china and i don't think there's reason in the long run for despair or disappointment along the way inevitably there are bumps in the road uh but i think we've seen immense progress in china even though that progress itself has become a challenge to us yes what do you think your greatest accomplishment has been well i suppose it's the students from taiwan hong kong and china who have taken the opportunity to study abroad about the legal system and who have returned to their own societies to play a role taiwan is the outstanding example because lawyers in taiwan for better or worse have played an important role in leadership politics and they continue and when i say lawyers i mean people who have been trained in law even though they may never have practiced as professional lawyers like president tsai uh herself and certainly in hong kong when you look at the distinguished academics there and you look at some members of the legal profession that gives me a feeling of pride and a feeling that there are as they say in beijing revolutionary successors that uh when i leave the scene you have a lot of people who will carry on the cause and in the mainland although politics has precluded uh law people uh by and large from entering the political system and even to some extent the government system there are many people there who have studied in the united states as well as elsewhere in the west who are still motivated by the values of human rights trying to protect individuals against arbitrary government who know that torture is evil and that incommunicado interrogation is evil and that we are still struggling of course to wipe out those evils in the united states but they too are working and even today there is legal progress in china uh in the business field but even with respect to legal institutions even though it's often more on paper uh than it is to practice uh even though when they now publicize millions of court decisions they're restricted on what courtesy will be published sometimes and to what extent but there is progress going on and that gives me some hope that uh i think i can hear jones in the background no one thinks i have silenced opinion the the you were breaking up a little bit so i was slow in getting the question um just just uh two more questions um you know besides obviously arguing that i should never have been admitted to harvard law school what would you do differently if you could if there's one thing you could rewrite um what would it be well i don't want to appear smug there were opportunities to do other things certainly i think you'll remember steve you were a young lawyer in the state department legal advisor's office when jimmy carter got elected and you called me one day in january 77 quite excited and you said they're going to name you legal advisor to the state department and i said are you serious i've heard nothing about that and you said i've just talked to somebody who's come out of the white house and he's told me that well if i had been certain that's what i wanted to do i could have mobilized support carter's team and from ted kennedy for whom i had worked for a decade in bringing him around on china policy and if i had any regret about a career change or addition maybe it's that but i didn't i didn't move i just to some extent have always felt that fate will determine just keep plugging do what you think you should be doing and somehow life will take care of you i don't have any other professional regrets it would have been fun to join the kennedy administration and work with nick katzenbach or bill bundy or many of the other people i knew in the late 50s uh who knows where that would have led but i was happy sitting in the basement of our home on san luis road in berkeley studying my characters and trying to learn to speak and read chinese so i don't really have any you have to look at age 90. i get up every day and i'm excited about what the internet is going to tell me just happened and i want to blog too much instead of working on my memoirs to be 90 and be that interested in what you've chosen as a life's career i don't know many lawyers who've had that opportunity so there are many roads to socialism khrushchev once said just before socialism collapsed um i have to another question because it's from another member of your family so you'll have two of your three sons having asked the question this one's from peter um who says you've made a compelling argument about modernization of chinese law has been good for china but has it been good for the united states well certainly the modernization of chinese law has enabled the very substantial cooperation between the united states and china and between china and many other countries and it has been not only good for the chinese people as well as the chinese government but it's been good for the rest of us in terms of encouraging exchange understanding uh business profitability american consumers benefit from china's economic promise i think the legal system has been very helpful in terms of economic business cooperation and it's been helpful in terms of china's assimilation into many aspects of the world that require cooperation that we take for granted it's been imperfect but the u.s development and use of law has also been imperfect as much of the world will tell us so i i don't think you can have too much all out 100 criticism of any government you have to recognize the limits of humanity and the circumstances that are so complex i think the legal system that's developed in china to a considerable extent has been beneficial compared to the terrible chaos that existed in the mid 70s after mao's death in 76 especially the um i see by the way don clark posted the amazon link to people's china and international law so if staff can put that in the chat that would be that would be fun for anybody who wants to still buy it eugene chen has asked when can we expect jerry's memoirs well i'd like to see many of our younger colleagues take up the daily blogging assignments that some of them do engage in i'd like to put aside more time for the memoirs but i am making progress i'm currently in the summer of 197 uh 1952 having spent a fulbright year in europe having uh gotten mixed up with the algerian revolution against french colonialism i'm about to enter yale law school uh it's getting closer to the time in washington that people will find i think interesting and then i'll get back to establish yourself in 30. i've already published several chapters in the post-1960 period including one about the year ezra vogel and i spent together in uh hong kong 1963 iv and that reminds me of something i wanted to say at the outset before starting to answer questions steve and i had agreed last year when he suggested the idea of a 90th birthday uh program that we should include ezra vogel because ezra was only a month or two younger than i we were close friends in the 60s we shared refugees who were very helpful in helping us understand the china that prohibit us from coming in and uh i thought that uh we should say something uh and recalling ezra's huge contributions and uh regret that he couldn't be with us uh tonight we did a program jan hosted a program uh with a lot of ezra's former students and colleagues last week which was you know which was very nice um last question which is what should president biden do about the issues that you care about in u.s china relations well that covers quite a stretch ranging from xinjiang uh to taiwan i feel taiwan is the ultimate question it's the biggest danger to say sino-american relations and world peace i like the fact that biden is continuing to have higher level contacts with people in the taiwan government i think it's important even if we can't have taiwan be a full participant in the traditional international relations diplomatic regime that we develop innovative new ways of making sure taiwan is an increasingly active participant i think we're witnessing in various ways in the relations between taiwan and a number of countries and upgrading of those countries appreciation of taiwan's importance and i'm glad biden hasn't backed away from the late trump policy of increasing the level of contact with taiwan i'd like to see especially a lifting of the traditional state department rule against allowing taiwan's president vice president and foreign minister to come and speak at nyu or the national committee or the council on foreign relations or any public forum i have never said they should have the highest taiwan officials go to the white house or even address the congress but i do feel we need to know more about taiwan we have to have access to their leaders and they have to have access to us and we have to make it clear to beijing that despite all the reasons that militate against u.s attempt to protect taiwan against any militant aggression that we would respond and that's a huge question given the last 20 years of american diplomatic history and our relationships with taiwan china and other countries with respect to shenzhen but jerry can i just on this taiwan question let me just stop you there when did the chinese military build up really start when did china begin to spend a lot more money on as a percentage of gdp they it exceeded its gdp growth when li dong way after li dunque visited uh cornell given that given give that we really think the chinese officials that taiwan officials should come to the united states and speak at nyu or elsewhere and and do not in transit visions but actually come and is it worth the risk is that good for the people on taiwan i don't regard that risk as great as having high taiwan officials or address the congress whereas listening to the leaders of a foreign government with which we do not maintain diplomatic relations that to me doesn't challenge the two china policy as much as the more official contacts okay you're going to go on to xinjiang i want to say a word about shinjun because this of course is very much the uh question i i took part in a very good debate today with human rights organizations over this question of genocide and to what extent the u.s the uk and other states should charge china with genocide is that a fair reading of the genocide convention and if so what follows from that and of course in practical terms what's coming up is the question of the winter olympics in china and i initially thought uh it would make sense for the u.s and other countries simply to boycott but i've been convinced since then that it's unrealistic and i think the administration has already dismissed that but it leaves open the possibility of participation in the winter olympics in ways that will remind the world of what the nature of the chinese government is and the atrocities that it is committing in xinjiang tibet and the repression of human rights generally so that's a very hot issue of course south china sea south china sea uh i think the chinese really fogged one by us and uh developing these non-islands often into military bases through the use of construction i think the u.s attention was diverted elsewhere by our involvement in the middle east etc but i do think there is room for compromise on various issues one of the most dangerous issues of course is does the u.s or any other country have a right to conduct military surveillance in the exclusive economic zone offshore china according to the law of the sea we do china vehemently takes the minority position we've recently had a fuss over should the united states notify china and seek its permission if it wants to peacefully settle set military vessels through the territorial sea that is within 12 miles of the chinese coastline here the chinese again start the minority position because china says if you want to send a military vessel in our territorial sea you've got to tell us and ask for our approval well that's not the dominant law of the sea but i sympathize here with the chinese position and i'm wondering whether it might be possible through negotiations to have some horse trading where we accept the chinese position about peaceful entry into innocent passage so-called in the territorial sea of china if they will accept uh are monitoring what takes place in china from the further offshore exclusive economic zone uh the chance for that may be enhanced by the fact the prc itself as it expands its navy is finding it convenient to spy on others from the exclusive economic zone offshore of those countries chinese attitudes toward international law change with chinese development and circumstances just as the attitudes of other countries do so i'm just using that as an example of the kind of discussion there may be room there may even be room for developing peaceful uses of those areas where china has now developed military bases that put us uh at a certain disadvantage we didn't previously suffer uh i think there are so many pieces around the south china sea that there's got to be some room for negotiation it's much harder to have a negotiation over xinjiang perhaps or tibet or hong kong but even there a new leadership in china could do a lot to ease tensions with the rest of the world let me close with with looking at my birthday greeting for you which i wrote in on july 1 1980 um which which was at your 50th birthday which if anybody if if jason is still on this he's free to post the entire thing but it was basically it ended wishing you at thanking you for all you've done you know expressing my respect admiration affection and gratitude to professor cohn appropriate for his 50th birthday um but then i asked at the very end can china stand another 50 years so you've got another good 10 years left before this birthday wish can be fully fully uh fully allow me just to say one thing in closing steve about the satisfaction of studying china for so many decades uh in a way art book wall summarized it all during the cultural revolution where he had a very funny column allegedly reporting what mao said to leo about dung in front of joe etc and then he said i thought after that i had a stomach full of china watching but the thing about china watching is an hour later you're hungry for war it's a perfect way for to end we are hung we've gone only 25 minutes over uh we're hungry for more uh we'll have to do this for uh maybe we'll do it for a 90 in in a few months for a 91st birthday so we're not 10 years away we're only we're less than nine and a half so thank you so much it's been an honor of a lifetime thank you have you as a professor and as a friend thanks steve

Channel: National Committee on U.S.-China Relations

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Id: myBP2q3hiZU

Length: 82min 52sec (4972 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 24 2021