Nixon’s opening to China in 1971 restored to Roderick something that had been missing for two decades. As one of the very few Western journalists who had built personal relationships with the Communist leadership before 1949, he occupied a particular position in the first wave of renewed contact. Zhou Enlai’s remark that Roderick had opened the door was more than courtesy — it acknowledged the role that sustained personal reporting had played in keeping some thread of understanding alive across the years of estrangement.
Returning to China, Roderick found the physical landscape of his earlier years largely gone. Yan’an’s caves stood mostly empty, their urgency reduced to museum placards. The Beiping he had loved — its walled compounds, ricksha lanes, and slow scholarly rhythms — had been replaced by Soviet-inflected boulevards and utilitarian blocks. The return visits produced some of his most reflective writing, but they were also a sustained confrontation with how thoroughly political upheaval erases the texture of ordinary life.
“There were no crowds of tourists, no merely curious people milling around what should have been a popular shrine.” The men he had known were dead. The revolution they had built had consumed many of them. And the country they had remade was now, under Deng Xiaoping, quietly reversing many of the choices Mao had made. Roderick was grateful for his memories, he wrote, but sad that this, his first gateway to China, no longer existed as he had known it.