Chen Guangcheng could be back in China within 12 months Chen Guangcheng with Prof Jemore Cohen, upon arriving on the campus of New York University with his wife, Yuan Weijing. Chen Guangcheng could return to China in as little as a year, a friend who helped arrange for the blind legal activist to study in the US has said. The comments came as a populist Chinese state-run newspaper described Chen's case as a "bubble" of minimal importance and predicted he would soon be forgotten. On Sunday, hours after his arrival in the US, Chen celebrated by relaxing with his family in the New York sunshine. " (Chen) said he hadn't sat in the sun for many, many years," his friend Jerome Cohen told Reuters. He wanted to go out in the garden. The "barefoot lawyer" spent years in prison and then under a punishing regime of house arrest before he escaped his home in eastern Shandong province and fled to the US embassy in Beijing last month. Cohen, an expert on Chinese law and professor at New York University, helped to arrange for Chen and his wife, Yuan Weijing, to study at the institution's law school. The couple will study law and learn English, but will not be working towards degrees, he added. "Maybe he'll go back to China quickly at the end of the year, if things look good," Cohen said. Initially he's going to put in a year of serious study and he'll feel his way. Chen has said he wants to return to China at some point, although some activists and dissidents who have left have not been allowed back into the country. "The Chinese government has a long history of preventing the return of critics who have been abroad," warned Nicholas Bequelin, senior Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. Some parties involved in the negotiations are fairly confident Chen will be able to return ... [But] it is not entirely clear what will happen. Chen took care to thank the central Chinese government in a brief press conference after his arrival on Saturday, but warned that "acts of retribution may not have abated" in his home village of Dongshigu. Supporters have warned that Chen's friends and relatives in China are still at risk of retaliation. The self-taught legal activist was once praised by officials for his work supporting disabled people's rights. But he later angered authorities by helping women who were illegally forced to have late-term abortions and sterilisations after breaching China's strict birth control policies. The state-run tabloid Global Times said in an editorial on Monday that Chen would soon be forgotten and that few Chinese people were interested in him. Chen won't have more propaganda value for the west when he sets foot in the US. There are already many former Chinese dissidents in exile willing to tell stories about a 'bad China'. Chen could join that club," it wrote. The Americans may not get the point, but China's public intellectuals and elites who support Chen should be able to. Intellectuals and elites should help the public form a better understanding of China's complexity and work on defusing conflicts and confrontations instead of pushing things into a deadlock.