John Roderick, who lived with Mao-Zedong in a cave headquarters while covering the Chinese revolution for the Associated press in the mid-1940s, died Tuesday at his Honolulu apartment. He was 93.

An avid journalist to the end, he wrote his final piece for AP last month.

Roderick was a leading China-watcher for decades, covering the country from its pre-revolution days to the economic reforms of the 1980s. After reporting on China from abroad during the height of Communist rule, he reopened AP’s bureau in Beijing in 1979.

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

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

Roderick’s career with AP spanned five decades with postings in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. China was his passion, and a high point in his life came when as a 31-year-old reporter he spent seven months living among the Communist rebel leadership in their capital, Yan’an, in central China between 1945 and 1947.

The city was flattened by Japanese bombers in 1938, and by the mid-1940s was a dusty honeycomb of thousands of caves dug out of the loess hills on the edge of the Gobi Desert. Mao and his Communists had gathered in the city in 1935, at the end of their “Long March” across China to escape their Nationalist Chinese foes.

In his book, “Covering China,” Roderick detailed how at meals, during dances and in conversations he took stock of Mao, Zhou Enlai and other top Communists — men who would soon rule the most populous nation on Earth. “I admired the fact that they were trying to do something for the poor Chinese,” he said. His opinion of Mao, though, soured with the brutality of Communist rule and the failure of Communist policies.

Photos from the time show the broad-jawed Roderick wearing a long parka as defense against the desert cold, wincing in the sun as he posed with battle-hardened guerrillas.

After Yan’an, Roderick covered the breakdown of peace talks between the Communists and Nationalists and the ensuing Chinese civil war from Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing.

In 1948 he arrived in Amman, Jordan, two weeks after the creation of Israel and scooped the rest of the world by four hours on the assassination of the United Nations peace negotiator, Count Folke Bernadotte.

He covered the fall of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam, in 1954. Remaining in Asia, he became the consummate China-watcher, studying Communist news dispatches from afar and working sources for scraps of information about what was going on behind the blinds that Mao had drawn over his country.

After a couple of false starts, the chance to return to the country finally came in 1971, when Roderick accompanied the U.S. pingpong team on an unprecedented trip to China — the first time Americans had been invited by Beijing since 1949.

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.

In 1942 he moved to AP’s office in Washington, D.C. Drafted into the Army and assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, he was sent to Kunming, capital of China’s Yunnan province. After the war, he hooked up again with AP. A year after reopening AP’s Beijing bureau, Roderick returned to Tokyo in 1980 as a special correspondent and roamed Asia, reporting on whatever story caught his interest.

After his retirement at 70 — premature he later complained — he continued to write background stories for AP on China and the Middle East. In 2006, he began a series of monthly China-related articles on the Beijing 2008 Olympics.