China Witness by Xinran - Voices From A Silent Generation - 9780099501480

Xinran books

A hugely important, groundbreaking book, this unprecedented work of oral history of a vast and powerful nation gives voice to a silent generation and tells the secret history of 20th century China.

China Witness is the personal testimony of a generation whose stories have not yet been told. Here the grandparents and great-grandparents of today sum up in their own words - for the first and perhaps the last time - the vast changes that have overtaken China's people over a century.

In 1912, 5,000 years of feudal rule ended in China. Warlords, Western businessmen, soldiers, missionaries, and Japanese all ruled China, exploited, and fought one another, and the Chinese. In 1949, Mao Zedong came to power. The book is at once a journey by the author through time and through her own country, and a memorial to an extraordinary generation who have lived through war and civil war, invasion, revolution, famine, modernization, Westernization - and have survived into the 21st century to tell the story of their times.

In the lifetimes of these men and women, China has transformed from a largely peasant, agricultural country of more than 1.3 billion people into a modern state. These are ordinary people - a herb woman at a market, retired teachers, a legendary 'bandit' woman, Red Guards, oil pioneers, an acrobat, a naval general, a shoemender, a lantern maker, taxi drivers, and others - from across the vast country, now in their seventies, eighties and nineties and whose memories will soon die with them.

Xinran travelled from west to east, between the Yellow River and the Yangtze, from the cities to the remote countryside of her homeland. She met and talked with a reticent generation, amongst whom the idea of collective guilt is deeply rooted, and freedom of speech can be a dangerous and unfamiliar concept.

They spoke to her about their lives, their private hopes, fears and struggles, about what they witnessed and what they felt. They are a reticent generation from a country where the idea of collective guilt is deeply rooted and where freedom of speech can be a dangerous and unfamiliar concept. and for the first time many of them will speak out about their lives and private thoughts, about what they witnessed and what they felt - about everything from the Long March to oil pipelines, from land reform to folk medicine, from Mao to marriage.

Together their stories are perhaps the only accurate record of modern Chinese history and paint an unprecedentedly intimate portrait of this vast and powerful country and its people, close-up and personal. Its aim, as Xinran says is 'to help our future understand our past'.