China Witness is the personal testimony of a generation whose stories have not yet been told. Here the grandparents & great-grandparents of today sum up in their own words
- for the first & 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 & place, & a memorial to those who have lived through war & civil war, persecution, invasion, revolution, famine, modernization, Westernization
- & have survived into the 21st century. We meet everyday heroes, now in their seventies, eighties & 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 female general, a lantern maker, taxi drivers, & more- those whose voices, as Xinran says, `will help our future understand our past`.