China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation. Signed first edition.

Xinran

ISBN 10: 0701180390 / ISBN 13: 9780701180393

Published by Chatto & Windus, 2008

About this Item

China Witness: Voices From A Silent Generation by Xinran. Signed first edition, first impression. Signed on the title page by the author. This book is in very good/near fine condition. The red fabric boards are in very good condition, with minor bumping to the spine edges and one small bump to the front board top edge. The white titling to the front board is bright. The pages are clean and the binding is tight. There is a band wrapper on the back board. This is in near fine condition. This edition did not come with a dust jacket.

Seller Inventory # 115

Bibliographic Details

• Title: China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation. Signed first edition.
• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication Date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0701180390
• ISBN 13: 9780701180393
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Signed First Edition
  • China

About this title

Synopsis

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. 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.

About the Author

Xinran was born in Beijing in 1958 and was a successful journalist in China. In 1997 she moved to London where she began work on her seminal book, The Good Women of China. She has also written Sky Burial and a novel, Miss Chopsticks.