This fascinating 1971 book, written by John Roderick on the People’s Republic of China, was published as ping-pong diplomacy and the Nixon administration’s secret overtures began to crack open more than two decades of minimal contact. Written for an American readership encountering Communist China for the first time as something other than an abstract Cold War adversary, the book draws on Roderick’s unique vantage point — he was one of the very few Western journalists at the time who had actually lived among the Yenan leadership in the 1940s. It represents his attempt to translate a nation with a new state, in which he had once known intimately, for an audience that had effectively lost access to it for a generation.
John Roderick ‘1936