AP China-watcher Roderick dies

HONOLULU – John Roderick, an Associated Press correspondent who won renown for his reports on Mao Zedong and other communist guerrilla leaders while living with them in their cave headquarters in the mid-1940s, has died. He was 93.

Roderick died Tuesday morning, friends and family said. He spent his last days in his Honolulu apartment gathering friends for final farewells, smiling and nodding when his weakened condition from heart failure and pneumonia prevented speech.

He was an avid journalist to the end, completing a memoir about his restored farmhouse in Kamakura, Japan, and writing his final piece for AP last month, a personal reflection.

“To my old eyes,” he wrote in his Feb. 18 report, “it seems almost a miracle that China has survived the pain and bloodshed to emerge from poverty and become one of the richest of Earth’s nations in so short a time.”

Roderick was a leading China-watcher for decades, covering the country from its pre-revolution days to the economic reforms of the 1980s. Reporting on Chinese events from the outside in the years after Mao’s victory in China’s civil war, he reopened AP’s bureau in Beijing in 1979.

“John was equal part lion and bon vivant. The result was a courageous reporter, elegant writer and marvelous storyteller,” said AP President and CEO Tom Curley. “He inspired generations of younger AP correspondents, and his loss is deeply felt.”

Ted Anthony, the AP’s China news editor from 2002 to 2004, recalled: “He would always tell us, ‘Keep learning. If you ever think you understand China completely, it’s time to go home.”‘

Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai once praised Roderick as the journalist who “opened the door” to China for foreign news media.

In his final years, Roderick lived part of the year in the Japanese farmhouse restored for him by his adopted son, Yoshihiro Takishita, who with his wife, Reiko, remained part of John’s family for life.

In 2007, Princeton Architectural Press brought out Roderick’s book “Minka: My Farmhouse in Japan,” about the unusual 273-year-old farmhouse. The house became a show place visited by the elder George Bush, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the queens of Denmark and Greece and others.

Born in 1914, in Waterville, Maine, Roderick was orphaned at 16. His career in journalism began at 15 at his hometown newspaper, the Sentinel. He joined AP in Portland in 1937 after graduating from Colby College.