num_pages: 352
description: This hugely important and ground-breaking book  an unprecedented oral history  gives voice to a silent generation and tells the secret history of 20th century China.In 1912 five thousand 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. China Witness is both a journey through time and through the authors own country and a memorial to an extraordinary generation of men and women who have survived war invasion revolution famine and modernization  to tell the story of their times. It is an extraordinary personal testimony from a normally silent generation who in their lifetimes have seen China 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 shoe mender a lantern maker taxi drivers and others  from west to east across the vast country now in their seventies eighties and nineties and whose memories will soon die with them.Here for the first time many of them speak out about their lives and private thoughts about what they witnessed. Together their intimate stories are perhaps the only accurate record of modern Chinese history.
language: English
title: China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation
publisher: Chatto & Windus