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 female general, a lantern maker, taxi drivers, and more- those whose voices, as Xinran says, ‘will help our future understand our past’.