Imprint Publications

Covering China:

The Story of an American Reporter from Revolutionary Days to the Deng Era

John Roderick

1993; x+199 pp.; illus. (2010 reprint)

Paper ISBN 1-879176-17-3 ($29.95)

Chicago: Imprint Publications

John Roderick (1914-2008) was once described by John Hohenberg, secretary of the Pulitzer Prize Committee, as the correspondent who most influenced American opinion on China. For thirty-one years he was the No. 1 China Watcher for the Associated Press. He spent seven months in the caves of Yan'an, the Communist capital, in the 1940s where he met, lived with, and interviewed Mao Zedong and the other survivors of the epic Long March. As Americans were barred from the People's Republic, he reported from Hong Kong and Tokyo the tumultuous events which marked the first three decades of Maoist rule. In 1971, he accompanied the U.S. Ping Pong team on its historic, pre-Nixon visit to Beijing, where in the Great Hall of the People, Premier Zhou Enlai said: “Mr. Roderick, you opened the door.” He reopened AP's Beijing bureau after a thirty-year hiatus in 1979 and remained there, reporting on the rise of Deng Xiaoping, for the next eighteen months. One of seven AP Special Correspondents, he continued to report on China until his retirement in 1984. A lecturer and author, he lived in a 260-year-old farmhouse in Kamakura, Japan and in Honolulu. This book is his story—the China story, with rare photographs.

“Covering China is a very special book. It is written by a man who carries his authority gently, but has no compunction about evaluating people and their times. The unique value of the book is his ability to come back at his subjects and see them from the perspective of changing times. . . . Anyone who reads this book will come out more knowledgeable and wiser about the Chinese Revolution—the great and still exploding cultural, political, and economic phenomenon of our times. The reader will also learn to appreciate Roderick's firm grip on his subject and the historical perspective that can come from almost a half century of straight, honest reporting.”—Frank Gibney, in Preface

Contents:

1. China Discovered
2. Yan’an
3. War, Johnny, and Sin
4. Lolos, Macbeth, and a Living God
5. China Watched
6. China Rediscovered
7. Love, Change, and Mao’s Dog
8. Epilogue