HI sTORY
R
isking his entire career and even freedom in the US, Robert
Carl Cohen, a 27-year-old director from Philadelphia, set
out on a six-week forbidden journey to China along with 40
other young Americans in 1957.
Equipped with a 16mm camera and eleven 100-foot rolls of 16mm
black and white film, Cohen travelled to eight cities and later made a
50-minute documentary Inside Red China, which included sensitive
footage of Chairman Mao Zedong, Premier Zhou Enlai, military jet
aircraft, tanks, political prisoners and the October 1st National Day
parade. Before that, no Westerner had ever had the chance to docu-
ment the newly-established PRC on film and delve into the daily lives
of the people.
During the period of frozen relations between the US and China,
when the Korean War (1950-1953) had not officially ended and the
clouds of a potential third world war were gathering, the young man,
who tried hard to stick to journalistic objectivity, was willing to take
every risk to show his fellow countrymen what China was really like.
“Filming in China, so that the US public could see the truth about
conditions there, might – I hoped – contribute in even a very small
way to avoiding war,” 60 years later, the 87-year-old Cohen told Chi-
naReport.
Banned Journey
In 1957, Cohen was living in Paris as a doctoral student in So-
cial Psychology at the prestigious Sorbonne. While attending the 6th
World Youth Festival in Moscow, he and 41 other American youth
were invited to China by the All-China Federation of Democratic
Youth (ACFDY).
The head of NBC-TV in Moscow, Irvine R. Levine, offered Cohen
a contract to take their 16mm camera and film whatever he could.
They went despite a clear warning from the State Department that
their passports would be revoked, that they might have difficulty get-
ting passports in the future and that they might “make themselves
liable to prosecution for trading with an enemy” on the grounds that
the Korean War had not officially ended.
Christian A. Herter, under-secretary of State, said in a special mes-
sage to each of the travellers that the youth would be “willing tools”
of Communist propaganda if they made the trip. Nevertheless, these
42 Americans, whose ages ranged from 19 to 35, defended the trip by
saying they had the “right to travel.”
All the Americans making the journey showed their passports and
submitted their passport numbers to get visas issued by the Chinese
Embassy. These visas, however, were issued on separate pieces of pa-
per so there would be no official record that any of them had been
in China.
The delegation made a nine-day, 9,000-kilometre trip across Sibe-
ria from Moscow to Beijing. The original 42-people group was re-
duced to 41 when one delegate, Shelby Tucker of Mississippi, refused
to show his US passport to the PRC Immigration Authorities and was
later deported back to Moscow.
In contrast to the anti-American propaganda common in China
at the time, the group of young Americans were warmly greeted by
a crowd of 3,000 Chinese students at Peking Railway Station with
applause and bouquets.
To welcome the US youth delegation, the Central Committee of
the Communist Youth League formed a special group to accompany
the travel group, led by Zhu Liang, the then director of International
Liaison Department of the Communist Youth League.
Zhu, in his later writing, pointed out that the 1957 trip was highly
valued by the central government, especially by Premier Zhou Enlai.Robert Carl Cohen
Forbidden Journey
Robert Carl Cohen, the first American to film a documentary in the People’s Republic of
China, talks with ChinaReport about his 1957 ‘forbidden journey’ during the Cold War
By Song Chundan, Huang Wei and Su Jie