China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation

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China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation

by Xinran

3.63 of 5 stars 3.63 · rating details · 200 ratings · 34 reviews

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 Z...more

Paperback, 448 pages

Published October 13th 2009 by Vintage Books (first published 2008)

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Feb 25, 2013 Ranjeev Dubey rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Any book on China describing the 'dark years' between the 1940s and 1990s is welcome especially if it avoids the rich, the powerful and the elite and deals instead with the lived experiance of common folk. Xinran has ferreted out people from a variety of fields across the face of China and discussed their lives with her. Some are powerful but many are peasants or poor or stripped of all power or all of the foregoing. The result is a very interesting portrait of life in the raw in times of enormo...more

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Dec 02, 2009 Christina rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A fascinating look at what the older generation feels and thinks about China, and the stories of their lives.

This book makes a lot more sense if you've read a lot about China (I have) because much of what the author says and implies about certain events are easy to miss if you're not aware of Chinese recent history. For instance, many of the people are very guarded in their assessment of political history and seem unable to criticize some of the horrible policies of Mao. In fact, you have to rea...more A fascinating look at what the older generation feels and thinks about China, and the stories of their lives.

This book makes a lot more sense if you've read a lot about China (I have) because much of what the author says and implies about certain events are easy to miss if you're not aware of Chinese recent history. For instance, many of the people are very guarded in their assessment of political history and seem unable to criticize some of the horrible policies of Mao. In fact, you have to read half the book before you even find the slightest criticism of past Chinese policies. It's often difficult to know whether or not that generation is just unwilling to speak freely because of all the purges in the past for unguarded words or whether they actually believe that "Mao was great."

What I found most interesting was first, the wide range of experiences, cultures, and backgrounds of the many interviews, second, the common theme of suffering through hard times, and third, the tenacity and wisdom of many of the interviewees. I was touched by the account of one couple, she a shoe repair woman and he a bicycle repairman. Both were denied opportunities for education, but sacrificed and saved and lived in utter poverty so that their children could all receive doctorate degrees. The pride they have in their children, and the gratitude their children express for them, is amazing. I was touched by their sacrifice.

Some observations: nearly every subject expressed regret for not having more time for their families when they were young. Especially the men were very likely to wish they could change that. Communism and the state ethic of "work for China" really robbed families of time together. Nearly every subject also had told very little about their lives to their children. Many of the stories and experiences are being lost because it is not being passed on. Part of that is real fear of the government and worry about saying something wrong -- many times in the last fifty years, children have been encouraged to report on their parents and make a clean break with any "rightists" or those with "black backgrounds." Parents were necessarily very guarded about what they told their children. I understand that the China of today is more open, yet the tradition of remaining silent has continued. Another thing that fascinated me was that nearly every person interviewed had a negative view of the ethics of modern Chinese young people: (paraphrasing) "It's all about money and getting ahead." said one. "My children don't think I know anything because I don't have a lot of money. I ask them to learn my traditional art (of lantern-making), and they say, 'well, are you rich doing that?'"

A great book for exploring a wide variety of experiences in China.(less)

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Nov 12, 2009 Pat rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a very good book that gives some excellent insights into both current China from the perspective of both the author who is in her middle years and now lives mostly in the UK and of the people that she interviews who are mostly people in their later years, most of whom were revolutionaries when the Communist Party took over China in the late 40s. To give an example of an insight. It had not occurred to me - duh, it should have - that the Chinese have always existed under rulers who foster...more

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May 07, 2009 Nick rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Xinran is one of the most authentic voices from China writing today. I snap up each of her books as soon as they come out. I picked this one up with high hopes, as it's about the 'silent generation' of Chinese who lived through the Revolution and the suffering afterward -- the whole gamut of natural and political catastrophe that is modern China. Unfortunately, the 'silent generation' learned early to lie to stay alive, and that is how their interviews often come across -- they're holding back,...more

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Aug 04, 2011 Sylvia Ttl rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: politics, history

I sought to read this book out of a great interest over the modern history of China from the standpoint of ordinary people from all walks of life. I appreciate the author's effort to tour China to document true but publicly-unavailable stories, yet she has annoyed me in many occasions for interrupting the interviewees from telling a full account. As a result, a potentially noteworthy personal history ends up as boring and long-winded "grandmother" story that I could not bear to read on. Not to m...more

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Dec 28, 2012 Rebecca rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: china

This book is an interesting look at the lives of the older generation in China. Each chapter starts off describing the person or persons that the author is interviewing, followed by a transcript of the interview. I personally was not a huge fan of the straight transcript format, but that's just a personal preference. The people she interviewed were extraordinary, and their stories were fascinating. Sometimes I wished for more analysis to go with the interviews. I would recommend this book to any...more

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Mar 19, 2013 Cj Newman rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Great book for those, like myself, who enjoy learning about the culture of Chinese women. Real women, not officials or famous citizens. Xinran winnowed the initial list of 50 down to 20 solid interviews of such women for the purpose of recording a period of Chinese history for the children. Mainly people who lived through the Cultural Revolution and just before and after. She was seeking their honest remembrances. Some warmed up a little slowly, but for the most part many (and their spouses chim...more

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Jul 18, 2011 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

a book filled with interviews. The author is very interested in telling the story of the peasants, and the price they paid with their blood and sweat to build China after the Liberation in 1949.

What we don't understand in the West is what it was like before 1949, so we have no idea why when this new nation was born people were enthused and filled with optimism.

Not as compelling as her book interviewing just women of China, but interesting to me.

"China's peasants have been treated as a part of th...more a book filled with interviews. The author is very interested in telling the story of the peasants, and the price they paid with their blood and sweat to build China after the Liberation in 1949.

What we don't understand in the West is what it was like before 1949, so we have no idea why when this new nation was born people were enthused and filled with optimism.

Not as compelling as her book interviewing just women of China, but interesting to me.

"China's peasants have been treated as a part of the 10,000 things of nature, a group that nobody notices. People are concerned about the melting of the ice caps, they fret over the disappearance of the Asian tigers, they fume at the desert swallowing up the green lands, they even have interminable discussions over the right combination of vitamins for every dish of food. But how many people are calling out for an improvement in the living conditions of the Chinese peasants?"

The author tells the stories of the generation from the 50's through the 70's.

"We cannot stand on the shoulders of the peasants for the world to admire how tall we are"

One of the most thought provoking books I have ever read. It has so much, almost too much to think about. This book must be a little like China then. So big, so vast, so many different worlds and it is changing so fast. Almost bewildering.

Some other quotes that left an impression: ]the next two quotes from a lantern maker] "...traditional culture can't just be chucked into history books and forgotten. Sometimes I feel we've let down our ancestors, let down all those ancestors who've bequeathed thousands of years of folk culture to us"

[here the lantern maker is talking about how the during the Cultural Revolution he was supposed to stop making traditional lanterns: "...I never thought that making revolution meant getting rid of festival traditions! I always thought the reason I was brave enough to carry on with my craft in secret was because I wasn't educated, and had no idea what feudalism, capitalism and revisionism meant. I didn't know about Party principles, or what the revolutionary Four News were meant to be. I wasn't the only one who didn't understand that. Most ordinary people had about as little education as I did. In fact, how many of those anti-everything revolutionaries with their movements for this and that understood what it was all about? Making revolution was just a pretext for people to settle private scores. "

I can't get enough of Xinran(less)

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Dec 06, 2010 Cameling rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

China's history experienced by millions during Mao's Cultural Revolution is captured in a series of interviews by a journalist. Her subjects are the grandparents and great-grandparents who survived imprisonment, re-education, famine, separation from their families and hard labor.

The author selected 50 ordinary individuals across China to interview. The interviews covered not only the tragedies and hardship that they experienced, but also their candid opinions of the changes that China has gone...more

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Mar 25, 2009 Tracy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is a collection of interviews with people who are 60+ years old in contemporary China. So these are people who were born after the Guomintang revolution, but before the Communist one. They survived that, plus the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and now the market reforms. The premise of the book is that this is a group who has both seen and done a lot, and has something important to say about what it means to be Chinese.

The life stories of the people interviewed in this bo...more

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May 04, 2010 Shanrina rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir, history, china

This was a hard book to read--there wasn't always enough background information, especially when it came to smaller aspects of China's recent history, the kind that wouldn't be covered in broad historical surveys. There were also some things that I felt could have been shortened or cut (especially the love letters--they were sweet, but they didn't really add to what the book's main focus was supposed to be).

On the other hand, Xinran really did an excellent job of finding people with perspectives...more

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Feb 02, 2011 Emily rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, meridian

This past century has been a tumultuous one for China. Until 1912, China was still ruled by the Qing Dynasty, which gave way after the Xinhai Revolution to a series of regional warlords vying for supremacy. Nationalists were finally able to consolidate power by 1928, but then war, first with Japan and then civil war within China, was followed by the Communist revolution in 1949. The “Time of the Leadership of the Party” and the Cultural Revolution caused untold suffering, including millions of d...more This past century has been a tumultuous one for China. Until 1912, China was still ruled by the Qing Dynasty, which gave way after the Xinhai Revolution to a series of regional warlords vying for supremacy. Nationalists were finally able to consolidate power by 1928, but then war, first with Japan and then civil war within China, was followed by the Communist revolution in 1949. The “Time of the Leadership of the Party” and the Cultural Revolution caused untold suffering, including millions of deaths from starvation during the Great Leap Forward. In China Witness, Xinran undertook an prodigious, almost Herculean, project. This amazing woman, a journalist in China for over two decades, set out to record the experiences of ordinary Chinese people, particularly those of her parents' generation, before they were lost and forgotten.

Few historical records have survived the chaos of these “cataclysmic changes” in China. Many people were understandably reticent to commit anything to paper due to fear of reprisals; the winds of fortune could change very swiftly and an innocuous comment one day could be seen as dangerous proof of disloyalty or insufficient zeal for the motherland the next day. During the Cultural Revolution, many precious traditional landmarks and practices were systematically and intentionally wiped out by those in power in an attempt to “modernize” or simply remove other focuses that might draw loyalty or attention away from the Party; even family genealogical records had to be hidden or they would be destroyed. The lack of written documentation and the aging of the population who had lived through this time period gave Xinran's project a strong sense of urgency. She spent years laying the groundwork and then traveling all over China interviewing people about life during this period.

Her interviewees include a shoe-mender who has fixed footwear on the same back street in Zhengzhou on the Yellow River for 28 years; a husband and wife pair who were two of the founders of China's oil industry; and lantern makers in Nanjing in eastern China desperately trying to keep their ancient cultural tradition alive, but resigned to its eventual demise. Xinran traveled to the desert in the extreme northwest corner of China to an isolated city called Shihezi. Located on the ancient Silk Road, Shihezi is a modern city that was built by hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in the 1950s. She visited big cities like Beijing and Shanghai and small villages all over the country. The result is a broadly painted, but deeply intimate, portrait of a Chinese generation.

Common themes crop up again and again: national pride and self-respect, resilience and persistence in the face of incredible hardship, forgiveness and a willingness to move forward despite the pain of the past. One frequent sadness expressed by those Xinran interviewed involved lost time with family. Children were often raised by grandparents while the parents devoted themselves to the aims of the Communist Party in far-flung places, sometimes able to visit only a few times a year. Xinran mentions during one interview: “Almost all the parents have shared that pain – that is, they didn't give their children the family and the love that they should have done, or fulfilled their needs, and it's the biggest regret of their lives.”

Xinran invites her Western readers to learn about her homeland. “Knowledge about China is so small,” she laments, “it is a decimal fraction many positions after the decimal point.” In her afterword she relates her disappointment in the Western media coverage leading up to the Beijing Olympics, her sorrow at the devastating 7.8 earthquake that hit north Sichuan on 12 May 2008, and her devout hope that more individuals in the West will make a sincere effort to understand China and her people. “As a Chinese media person I struggled with Chinese censorship for a long time before I moved to London in 1997. Now, I feel the same sense of struggle again, but in the West, not with censorship, but with ignorance about my motherland.” Reading China Witness is a solid first step towards diminishing that ignorance and increasing understanding.

For more book reviews, come visit my blog, Build Enough Bookshelves.(less)

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Dec 30, 2009 Budd Dwyer rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Pretty good, although it doesn't make the point that China is now leading the world in abortion without apology.

we need to cut down our population enormously and it seems to me that China is doing its best to do this.

In the US, we still allow a lot of really unsatisfactory mothers to sit on their eggs until they are turned into babies. Bad news -- we have to stop all population growth and abortion should be permitted into the 9th month. But I'm belaboring the obvious...

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Dec 01, 2011 Geraldine rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Might be that I am a bit 20th Century chinese-non-fiction jaded...or might be that I am itching to get on with a pile of books beside my bed...but I found this hard work. It seemed like Xinran was so passionate about all the information she collated to create this book that she wasn't brave enough with the editing. All that being said, the stories of the people who survived the cultural revolution are awe-inspiring and a few of them will be unforgetable to me.

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Jun 14, 2010 Donna Swartz rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Most interesting view, as this was a compilation of interviews of Chinese (who remained in PRC after 1949) by a Chinese journalist, Xinran, who grew up in China but now lives in London. Her sensibilities remain in sync with her interviewees, with the overlay of her western experience. The form, language and content of this book is, therefor, a wonderfully true reading of the mainland Chinese soul. What is unsaid is just as revealing as what is said. Poignant.

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Aug 21, 2009 Patty rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fictionhistory, orient-express

Not as riveting as Wild Swans, mostly because the interviews were so uneven. Some were fascinating and others, minimally interesting. Also, the author was disturbingly intrusive throughout. I wanted to get more of the flavor of the Chinese subjects, without her commentary- except perhaps as a footnote. The question and answer format was annoying, especially as she kept asking key questions over and over to all the subjects. There is no doubt that the interviews are an important part of the story...more

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Mar 05, 2012 Brenda rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Book summary compared this book to "The Greatest Generation." This is China's version of the great men and women who were part of the changes in China during that time period. I was struck by the horrid living conditions these people survived and a lack of appreciation or understanding their children had. These people sacrificed greatly, more stories like this need to get out.

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Oct 13, 2012 Geoff Alford rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Xinran interviews the older generation of Chinese, ordinary people in their 70-90s.

She wants to document the old China on which modern China is built so that the current generation will not forget.

I understand what she means. I have mentioned 1989 to some Chinese people in various Chinese cities and they do not know what I am talking about.

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Jun 15, 2011 Jennifer rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, non-fiction

I read to page 231 (out of 417) before deciding to set this one aside. I find the subject, living through the turmoil of China's cultural revolution, interesting, but the presentation did not engage me. I expected it to be like her other books, The Good Women of China and Letter from an Unknown Chinese Mother, but it lacked the narrative style of those books. Instead of telling a different story in each chapter, China Witness gives only a short introduction followed by a transcript of an intervi...more

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Aug 16, 2009 Pamela rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: china

Although I am not usually a fan of question/answer formats, I found that in this book, it works. Xinran interviewed about 20 senior citizens from a wide variety of backgrounds in China about their experiences in the last century. Each one had a unique story to tell. Like our own depression/WWII-era relatives, each thought they just did what they had to do, and it wasn't really worth talking about. Thank goodness Xinran (and Tom Brokaw in the US) did think it was worth talkign about!

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Mar 07, 2012 Laura rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I feel guilty for not liking this book more. Xinran travelled China, interviewing the elderly who had lived through the Communist Revolution. She is trying to give these men and women the chance to share their true thoughts and feelings - something they have been forbidden to do throughout their lives. There were many nuggets of fascinating insight, but the book mostly consisted of straight transcriptions of her interviews. I wanted to want to be drawn in by them, but the book spent a lot of tim...more

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May 11, 2009 Amy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Xin Ran has done it again. Her insight, knowedge and ability to draw thoughtful stories from her interviews made this book invaluable to understanding Chinese culture. Her goal was to capture stories from the older generation of Chinese who lived through so many changes in China's h istory. I loved reading it.

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Sep 24, 2009 Vanessa rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Clearly, she spent a lot of time jetting around China, and there are interesting interview, but at times, the interviews feels unfocused and wandering, the author inserts herself far too much, and the moment a granny/grandfather doesn't want to talk, she backs off.

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Apr 11, 2009 Cathay rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Incredible insight to the culture of a people who have lived through Mao's influence as well as the strong influence of a belief in family and social responsibility that extends for generations. It is a valuable book; I commend author Xinran on her work and courage.

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Mar 21, 2011 Michelle rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: around-the-world, history

I liked this book when it was the actual stories of the people Xinran interviewed. I liked a little less all the portions when she was continually talking. I've never read an oral history project with quite so much input from the interviewer--it got rather on my nerves at times.

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Aug 07, 2010 Margaret rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a good book with many personal accounts from people that have lived through the Cultural Revolution as well as the Great Leap Forward. I felt deeply moved by many of the accounts and the suffering that these people went through.

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Sep 03, 2012 Ke Yu rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

this comes as a huge disappointment after the high expectation set by "the good women of China"--the book reads like 'raw' transcriptions of interviews (with inadquate good probings); the author's strength--intertwinning her actions, thinking and the storyline, is in the main casted away; and the stories read quite thin--at times, it seems that she had wanted to achieve too many purposes (how people expereinced the old times, how they met and raised the family..) and in the end none is adequatel...more

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Oct 12, 2012 Pat rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A fascinating insight into life in China from the start of Communism and during the Cultural Revolution etc, as told by the now elderly people who lived through all the many changes.

What amazing people!
I got a very different impression of Communist China to the one I had got from Western news sources.

I don't read a lot of non-fiction and I often don't finish the book, but I finished this one & really enjoyed it - enough to get me looking for more by the same author.

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Oct 18, 2010 Mary marked it as to-read · review of another edition

do ILL

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Jul 26, 2012 Carol Scott rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I read this book out of an interest in the modern history of China from the viewpoint of ordinary people from all walks of life. I enjoyed reading this even though I did find it hard going in places.

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