Sino-American relations have long been plagued by unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that undermine needed efforts to develop mutual trust between the world’s two most important countries. Yet events continue to spawn intriguing speculative possibilities, and who can resist spinning out seductive hypotheses to explain apparent riddles in the behaviour of either or both governments, especially when China’s oppressive censorship exaggerates the role of rumours?

On May 2, 2012, one day after his earlier interview on NPR’s ‘ON POINT with Tom Ashbrook’ , Jerome Cohen returned to that program to discuss Chen Guangcheng having left the US embassy in Beijing. This interview was recorded at 10:00 EST, and there have been significant developments surrounding Mr. Chen since that time. We will continue to post media updates on our website.

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The Portion featuring Professor Cohen can be found here below:

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Following blind ‘barefoot lawyer’ and activist Chen Guangcheng’s escape from prolonged confinement, and the continuing developments in his story, Professor Jerome A. Cohen has been actively responding to media requests for information. We will provide links to many of the reports on this story in which he has been cited or interviewed here.

[Photo: Cohen visits Chinese "barefoot lawyer" Chen Guangcheng in his rural village home in 2003. (© Joan Lebold Cohen)]

Just forty years ago, President Richard Nixon arrived in Beijing for what he immodestly but accurately called “the week that changed the world”. Knowledgeable observers knew that the success of the visit – so crucial to Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign – would turn on how he and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, dealt with the status of Taiwan. That question had been central to Sino-American relations since the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war and establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and it continues to be today.