intently on the teaching, for their imprisonment might be shortened
if they could demonstrate their familiarity with and loyalty to Com-
munism.
The group was welcomed to visit the October 1st National Day
parade. To Cohen’s surprise, he was able to film the jet planes and
tanks and was given special permits by the PRC Foreign Ministry
to mail his exposed but undeveloped film from China to NBC in
Moscow without a single frame ever being censored or even seen by
any Chinese official.
The young director also documented the intimate moments of
Chinese people.
When visiting a slum by the Suzhou Creek area in Shanghai, the
group was greeted with crowds of wide-eyed children who kept star-
ing at them, laughing and running after their cars.
“It was a friendly greeting,” Cohen recalled. “I was told that most
Asians have little body hair, but I, like most Europeans have rather
hairy arms. The children wanted to figure out whether I was a mon-
key.”
In Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, the group vis-
ited the Tanka community, which made a deep impression on Co-
hen. The Tanka people, also known as sampan dwellers, are an ethnic
subgroup who traditionally lived on boats in coastal parts of South-
ern China. In Guangzhou, there were over 100,000 people living on
boats on the Zhujiang River, the largest river in Southern China.
“These people were from the lowest class in China,” Cohen de-
scribed, “They were so poor that they used little sampan boats as their
homes.”
Cohen visited one Tanka family and was surprised to find three
generations living side by side in the cramped boat. The mother and
girls were gathering twigs for the evening fire. They had meat for din-
ner.
In the past, as Cohen pointed out, it was very unusual for these
people to eat any meat at all. The strict rationing system started by
the government, “although it limited every one to a small amount,”
had enabled the poor sampan dwellers to get meat that they couldn’t
afford before.
80 percent of Tanka children attended the free school run by the
government. In a small wooden room built on a raft, Tanka children,
all wearing floats in case the boat sank, were taught to read and write
by the dim light from a naked bulb.
“Without living in China for years, even the most observant re-
porter cannot experience the daily joys and sorrows that are most im-
portant to the average man,” Cohen said.
China Revisited
After the visit, the delegates ran into their share of trouble.
Upon landing in New York, Cohen refused to surrender his pass-
port to the US Customs officials. He later read in the New York Times
that, other than him, all of the others in the delegation had their
passports confiscated, some even in Hong Kong where the British
Immigration officials had handed them to US Immigration officials.
Although Cohen sent the footage he took to NBC, he found that
NBC’s policy had been to only broadcast scenes of Americans who
were defying the “travel ban.” Everything else, especially the footage
of Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai, was not shown
to the US public. “It was evident to me that NBC had made a policy
decision to only partially defy the US State Department’s effort to
prevent the US public from learning about China,” Cohen said.
He then made the untelevised footage into the 50-minute docu-
mentary film Inside Red China. He began showing it first at private
gatherings and then at universities throughout the USA and Cana-
da. He was contracted to give lectures at over 100 schools and civic
groups, earning up to $1,000 per lecture – a fortune at the time.
“Good money in the 1960s, when you could buy a new Volkswagen
for as little as $1,200,” Cohen said jokingly.
Cohen told our reporter that, despite a few threatening letters and
an occasional telephone threat, the general reaction was positive, as
American people were extremely interested in seeing inside the secre-
tive nation.
In the early 1960s, he added music and narration and converted
the footage into a television show which was syndicated worldwide as
part of The Special of the Week series. Following J. F. Kennedy’s 1960
Presidential victory, Cohen received a letter of commendation for In-
side Red China from the Office of Under-Secretary of State, Chester
Bowles.
In 1978, Cohen was invited again to return to China by the
ACFDY, during which trip he discovered that despite the improve-
ments made since 1957, the internal conflicts of the Great Leap
Forward and Cultural Revolution had slowed, and in many cases,
destroyed many of the gains achieved since 1949.
In 2015, the 85-year-old director once again returned to China to
retrace the route he took in 1957. For Changchun TV, he filmed over
300 hours of video in 12 cities, Inside Robert Carl Cohen’s China. The
greatest impression of his latest trip was that China had been able to
both survive and overcome the internal problems which had formerly
prevented development. He noted that the Reform and Opening Up
process have greatly improved the average quality of life.
For Cohen, the courageous visit to China in 1957 changed his life
and gave him a completely new and different perspective. “I now saw
it as not merely another nation, but as a quarter of the population
of the planet, as a vast sea of humanity striving to raise itself out of
poverty and civil strife,” Cohen told ChinaReport.