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An extraordinary work of oral history that illuminates the diverse ways in which the Chinese perceive and understand their own modern history.
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Previews available in: English
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China witness: voices from a silent generation
2009, Pantheon Books
in English
0375425470 9780375425479
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China witness: voices from a silent generation
2008, Chatto & Windus
in English
0701180390 9780701180393
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Book Details
Edition Notes
"Originally published in 2008 in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, The Random House Group Limited, London."
Includes index.
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Work Description
This magnificent and groundbreaking work of oral history gives voice to a forgotten generation and reveals 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. The book is at once a journey by the author through time and place, and a memorial to those who have lived through war and civil war, persecution, invasion, revolution, famine, modernization, Westernization – and have survived into the 21st century. We meet everyday heroes, now in their seventies, eighties and nineties, from across this vast country – a herb woman at a market, retired teachers, a legendary 'double-gun woman', Red Guards, oil pioneers, an acrobat, a US-born general, a shoe-mender, a lantern maker, taxi drivers, and more.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 – about everything from the Long March to oil pipelines, from land reform to folk medicine, from Mao to marriage.Together their stories paint an unprecedented, intimate portrait of this vast and powerful country and its people. In such a rapidly changing world its aim, as Xinran says, is 'to help our future understand our past'.
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- Created September 27, 2008
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November 30, 2023 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
December 26, 2022 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
December 20, 2020 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
July 16, 2019 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
September 27, 2008 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from Library of Congress MARC record |