High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! John Roderick (September 15, 1914 – March 11, 2008) was an American journalist and foreign correspondent for the Associated Press news service. 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. He 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. He was once praised by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai as the man who "opened the door" to China for foreign news media.