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

9781879176188

1879176181

John Roderick 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, & interviewed Mao Zedong & the other survivors of the Long March. As Americans were barred from the People's Republic, he reported from Hong Kong & 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 & 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 & author, he lives in a 260-year-old Japanese farmhouse in Kamakura, Japan. This book is his story--THE China Story. Published & distributed by Imprint Publications, Inc., 520 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 840, Chicago, IL 60611-3705. 312-595-0668; FAX 312-595-0666.