John Roderick

Mao: Myth or Monster--A new look at the founder of the People's Republic

John Roderick covered China for the Associated Press from 1945 to 1984. He continues after retirement to write occasionally about China and Asia. Between 1945 and 1947 he spent seven months with Mao Zedong and his fellow revolutionaries in their cave capital of Yanan, reporting the failed U.S. negotiations to bring the Nationalists and Communists together in a coalition government. During that time he saw Mao almost daily, wrote at length then and later about him and his fellow Marxists.

A China Hand Looks Back at Ninety

Veteran AP correspondent John Roderick returns to the China Seminar with a talk on how strong personalities affected history in China and other countries. An AP correspondent and editor since 1937 (not having worked for any other news organization), Mr. Roderick’s life is a true story of adventure personally and professionally. The last of five boys in his family and orphaned at 16, he first encountered China at the age of 13 when caddying on a golf course in Maine.

A Tale of Three Cities: China Revisited

Veteran AP correspondent John Roderick returns to the China Seminar with a report on his first revisit to China since retirement in 1984. An AP correspondent and editor since 1937 (not having worked for any other news organization), Mr. Roderick’s life is a true story of adventure personally and professionally. The last of five boys in his family and orphaned at 16, he first encountered China at the age of 13 when caddying on a golf course in Maine.

China in the Light of Yenan

John Roderick is perhaps the only living American to have known, at close quarters, virtually all of Communist China’s leaders, from Mao Tse-tung to Teng Hsiao-ping. He met, interviewed and lived with most of them during the 1940s in their cave capital of Yenan, the seminal period before gaining all of China. He was in China as an Associated Press correspondent, and he spent the next thirty years following the Chinese scene as one of a small group of journalist China watchers reporting from Hong Kong and Tokyo.