Five decades ago, China was closed off to the world. In 1972, Jerome Cohen was part of the first U.S. delegations to travel to China after Richard Nixon’s historic visit. A pioneer in Chinese legal studies in the 1960s, he has been deeply involved in Sino-U.S. political, legal, and business developments in past half-century—from the hopeful early days of China’s reform era in the 1980s to the far darker atmosphere of recent years. In this roundtable, Jerome Cohen, adjunct senior fellow for Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations and faculty director emeritus and founder of NYU Law School’s US-Asia Law Institute, reflects on the trajectory of China and its legal system over the past five decades.