China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation

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 author’s 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.

Together their intimate stories are perhaps the only accurate record of modern Chinese history.