John Roderick

John Roderick (September 15, 1914 – March 11, 2008) was an American journalist and foreign correspondent for the Associated Press for 70 years. Roderick was best known for covering Mao Zedong and other Chinese Communist guerillas while living with them in a cave during the mid-1940s. Roderick continued to cover China throughout the rest of his career and was considered to be a leading “China watcher.” who covered the country from before the Chinese Communist victory of 1949 to the economic reforms during the 1980s.

Roderick’s career as a correspondent with the Associated Press spanned over fifty years, with postings in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Roderick reopened the Associated Press bureau in Beijing in 1979. He continued to work with the AP as a special correspondent for the two decades following his retirement in 1984, and filed his last pieces to AP less than a month before he died.

In 2007, Princeton Architectural Press published John Roderick’s memoir Minka: My Farmhouse in Japan.