Covering China (review)

540 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1995© 1995 by University ofHawai'i Press cording to changing circumstances. Unfortunately, he concludes, Party dominance over the courts will remain for the foreseeable future. Feinerman inquires into the tension between the use of contract law to define economic rights and obligations and its use as an administrative device. He observes that the former application is still weak. Polumbaum's piece on the Draft Press Law captures the contradiction between notions of individual rights and emphasis on the collective. With the adoption of a professional code ofmorality in 1991, the press of the PRC was restricted to the latter. Potter's essay on the Administrative Litigation Law (ALL) makes the point that the very concept of this law caused Chinese policymakers difficulty. The possibility of seeking legal redress for bureaucratic abuses rather than adopting a fatalistic approach or utilizing informal personal relations was novel in China. The severe limitations on judicial power over arbitrary administrative actions contained in the ALL, however, insure that little actual judicial review will take place. Finally, the contributions ofthese distinguished individuals are certainly a welcome addition to our growing body ofWestern scholarship on the topic of Chinese law. One would do well, nevertheless, to keep in mind Stan Lubman's admonition that "Other Western lawyers have gazed out on a turbulent or uncertain China before, and have been deceived, both by China and by themselves." Gerald W. Berkley-Coats University of Guam m John Roderick. Covering China. Chicago: Imprint Publications, 1993. 199 pp. Paperback $19.95. Reviewing a journalist's observations of and the recounting ofhis/her life in China is a daunting if not prohibitive task when the author has actually been there, while a reviewer's exposure to the dramas great and small in that vast country may not count in comparison. The challenge created by such a gap in experience is especially great in the case ofJohn Roderick's Covering China. Roderick, an Associated Press (AP) foreign correspondent for forty-seven years, did not just "cover China." He was there for four decades, beginning in 1945 in the wartime Chinese political centers of Chongqing and Yan'an and ending in 1981 in Beijing, when a new era began under Deng Xiaoping. In the two decades (1950-1970) when there were no American journalists posted in China, Roderick Reviews 541 remained a close China watcher from Tokyo, Hong Kong, and other places nearby. But how much can one learn from a slim volume oftwo hundred pages that appears to be just another field report on the enormous complexity ofChina during those four decades ofprofound change? What makes Roderick's China stories both informative and engaging is his unique writing style. Unlike many other foreign journalists who have been based in that country, Roderick has not attempted a megahistory of the China he was assigned to report on. (The most recent example ofan American journalist's megahistory of China is former New York Times China correspondent Nicholas Kristofs five-hundred-page-long China Wakes: The Strugglefor the Soul ofa Rising Power, coaufhored with Sheryl WuDunn [New York: Times Books, 1994] ). In Covering China, there is no attempt to explain the totality of that country. There is no informed foretelling of its future. What we have are stories Roderick probably was not able to reveal to his readers in his AP reportage. These stories tell of a foreign correspondent's life on the job, treating the major events and personalities ofhistory only when they fit into the story ofhis own life in China. Although much of the book is devoted to descriptions ofhow Roderick reported China and recollections of the emotions he experienced during his years on the job, it does tell us what he thinks China is: Roderick makes it clear that, for him, "Two cities, Yan'an and Beijing, are China" (p. 198). And he sees the history -making figures ofthe Chinese revolution—Chiang Kai-shek, George Marshall, Mao Zedong, Zhu De, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping—as antagonists and protagonists. If one looks for history in Covering China, it is a history ofprominent individuals. In the first four ofthe book's eight...