CHINA MAN
A little courage, and equally large doses of bluster and charm, made Morris Cohen an unlikely character of influence in China
Two-Gun Cohen: A Biography by Daniel S. Levy St. Martin's Press 379 pp., $ 29.95.
I FIRST ENCOUNTERED THE name of General Morris Abraham (Two-Gun) Cohen while studying modern Chinese history in Montreal. A Polish-born Jewish emigre in China by way of Great Britain and Canada, Cohen used his personal connections to help the Zionist movement win Nationalist Chinese support in 1945.
Conveniently spanning my developing interest in Sino-Israeli relations, Two-Gun presented himself as the ideal topic for an honors thesis. There was only one problem: Apart from a single, largely uncritical account based entirely upon Cohen's self-aggrandizing and hard-to-substantiate tales, there wasn't enough material available to support the endeavor.
This proved no great impediment to Daniel S. Levy, a staff reporter for Time magazine. During the course of two fellowships, Levy dispatched 1,500 letters seeking information, tracked down and interviewed over 100 people who had known Cohen personally, and took on the CIA, which steadfastly refused to share their own assessments of Cohen. The result of these efforts is a crackerjack study of one of the most peculiar figures to come out of China in modern times.
Levy's book begins with a tight thesis paragraph which bears repeating to give a sense of just how unlikely a figure Cohen cut: "Morris Abraham 'Two Gun' Cohen was an anomaly, a squat, two-hundred-pound Jew who survived within the top ranks of Chinese society. He spoke little Cantonese, having never mastered the nuance of the six-tone tongue or the written intricacies of ideograms. His English had a heavy Cockney lilt with a tinge of a western Canadian twang that was incomprehensible to many Chinese. And his Yiddish and minimal Hebrew did him no good in the Orient. Even so, this Polish-born adventurer became a bodyguard to Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China, and rose to become a general in the Chinese army in the years between the downfall of the Manchu Empire and the Japanese invasion of China during World War II." Cohen's father, Joseph, fled the pogroms for America, but found himself stuck, en route, in late-1880s London, where he settled into a life of piety and poverty as an East End rag dealer. Morris, who arrived a few years later with his mother and sisters, opted for the life of a brigand. In 1896, he took up prizefighting, first as "Fat Moisha," later as "Cockney Cohen," supplementing his income with work as a shill, pickpocket and con man. Caught stealing, he was dispatched to a kosher reformatory in Lewisham, and upon his release in 1905, was exiled to the Canadian prairies, where for a brief time he worked as a farmhand for a sodbuster. Cohen drifted to Winnipeg, where he took up his old tricks, and once again landed in jail. Some time later, in the fashion of his Biblical namesake, he interceded on behalf of a Chinese man being beaten and robbed by whites. This was unheard-of behavior for a white man, and it brought Cohen to the attention of a grateful Saskatoon Chinese community. Eventually, Cohen fell in with Mah Sam, a 52-year-old immigrant from southern China who ran a gambling den. Mah began staking Cohen's poker games, fenced his stolen goods, and, as their friendship deepened, provided him entree to the insular Chinese diaspora. Mah recruited Cohen as fundraiser and local P.R. man for the Nationalist party, and eventually, Cohen's stumping brought him to the attention of its leader, Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Sun was revered by Nationalists and Communists alike as the father of the Chinese revolution. Cohen and Sun would not actually meet, however, until well after World War I, which Cohen, having reinvented himself as a minor real-estate magnate in Edmonton, endured as a sergeant in a Canadian Army sapper unit. In 1922, tiring of Edmonton, Cohen headed for Shanghai, where he wrangled an introduction to Sun. Smitten by Sun's wife, the stately Soong Qingling, a reverential Cohen begged to become Sun's bodyguard. Sun, by then the beleaguered president of a China ruled by warlords, hired Cohen on the spot, bestowing upon him the title of "fuguan," or adjutant. As Sun began his campaign to reunify China, Cohen, packing his trademark pair of Smith & Wesson .45 revolvers, would pull his boss out of tight situations (taking a couple of bullets in the arm on his behalf). At the same time, he thrust his mitts into various pies (figurative and real - for gastronome Cohen, China was not only a source of income, but also one immense Chinese restaurant) and peeling his eyes for the main chance. Unfortunately - and not for the last time - Cohen began to get too big for his Edwardian britches. The puritanical Sun, who had converted to Christianity, despaired over reports of Cohen's conspicuous moral lapses in various Shanghai establishments of ill repute.
Worse, Cohen had taken to misrepresenting himself as one of Sun's key advisers. After numerous warnings and scoldings, Sun eventually fired him. Co-hen regained his job after profuse apologies, but not long after, in 1925, Cohen's hero died. Although Cohen remained loyal throughout his life to Madame Soong, he eventually grew disenchanted with the Nationalist party, which, in 1927, launched a bloody purge of its erstwhile Chinese Communist allies.
UNABLE TO FORGE CLOSE personal ties with Sun's successor as Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, as Levy chronicles, Cohen would spend the rest of his life flitting between Shanghai, where he would try to drum up business brokering deals; England, where he assumed the role of family patriarch; and Montreal, where he lived off the good graces of a long-suffering wife.
Cohen never managed to recapture his past glories, which he relived with anyone who would listen to his barroom stories. While admirers in Canada and England lapped these up (the local papers referred to him as "General" Cohen, thus contributing to his own self-mythologizing), the diplomatic and intelligence circles he so desperately wished to penetrate dismissed him as a blow-hard Cockney Jew of no particular distinction or account.
Later in his life, Cohen became an apologist for the Communist regime, which, out of respect for his services to Sun, funded periodic sojourns in the country. Cohen could always be counted upon to see the best in his hosts, and to refute charges of authoritarianism. Operating at the periphery of Chinese affairs, and incapable of speaking Chinese, Cohen was never really able to formulate an accurate appreciation for the social and political realities extant in China. This did not deter him, however, from promoting himself as an old China hand, and ironically, toward the end of an increasingly precarious life, he was able to parlay his press into lucrative brokerage positions, not least of all on behalf of the fledgling State of Israel. Unfortunately, his standing was never sufficient for him to broker diplomatic relations between the two countries. In 1950, after the Communist regime had replaced the Nationalist, it courted Israel but was rebuffed, as the latter had sided with the U.S. over Korea. Later, when Israel became interested, the Chinese had discovered the Arabs and the Third World. The greatest irony of Cohen's career may be that the Chinese, though put off by his blustering and eager to keep him at bay, almost always played along with his own self-promotion, even ratifying his self-granted honorary rank of major general. Shortly before his death, in 1971, Cohen visited China one last time, as a guest at a state banquet celebrating Sun's centenary. According to Levy, during the dinner, China's foreign minister, Zhou Enlai, walked up to Cohen's table, patted him on the shoulder, raised his cup in a toast, and, addressing him as "Morris, old friend," in English, said "Long life." Cohen began to cry. "Here I am," he told a reporter the next day, "an old cocker. After all these years, and all the things I did to them in Shanghai. They ought to kick my ass and run me out of the country. Instead of which the premier himself comes over and honors me with a toast… Nobody but the Chinese," he blubbered in wonder. Nobody, one might well add (while recalling that the Chinese government would eventually avail itself of the services of another well-known Jew, the late, and infinitely more discreet, Israeli billionaire Shoul Eisenberg), but Cohen.