The Communist takeover in 1949 effectively ended the era of access that had defined Roderick’s most important work. China closed, and the men he had known personally became figures in a sealed political system about which the outside world could learn very little.
But Roderick never stopped paying attention. From his postings elsewhere in Asia, he kept reading every dispatch, every official statement, every rumor that came out of the country. China was the story he had watched begin, and he had no intention of losing track of it now that he could no longer report from the inside.
What he saw from that distance confirmed rather than challenged his earlier assessments. The Anti-Rightist campaign, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution all pointed toward the darker possibilities he had glimpsed in Mao during their Yenan meetings. The fates of those he had interviewed made the point concretely: Liu Shaoqi, who had argued for gradual reform in their long 1946 conversations, was persecuted and left to die for precisely that moderation. “The revolution was consuming the best of itself”, and Roderick was still watching.