"In the early 1950s, shortly after the Chinese Communist revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong set into motion one of the largest peacetime mobilizations in modern history. Prisoners of war, “reform through labor” convicts and decommissioned Red Army soldiers were dispatched to the Gobi Desert to transform the landscape and obliterate the past. The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps built roads, canals, bridges and dams, turning wasteland into fields of cotton, maize and rice. They built entire cities in the desert. Interviewed in one such place, Shihezi, half a century later, a survivor of the force, a woman called Teacher Sun, recalled making schoolhouses — even desks and lecterns — out of sod bricks and mud in scorching summer heat and winters so frigid she was forced to use her plaited hair as padding for extra warmth. “At that time there was nothing I couldn’t bear,” boasts Sun, who received a pittance as a salary but proudly notes that she was honored at the time as a “Progressive Student of Mao Zedong Thought.”
Sun’s recollections of Communist Party zeal, sacrifice and staggering economic transformation are among the personal narratives assembled by Xinran, a Chinese journalist now a resident of Britain, in “China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation.” In 2005 and 2006, she crisscrossed the country, tracking down and interviewing elderly Chinese and coaxing them — sometimes with difficulty — to open up about their experiences. The result is a Chinese version of Tom Brokaw’s portrait of “The Greatest Generation”: an oral history of the men and women who lived through the Communist takeover and the Cultural Revolution, then watched as China tore off its ideological straitjacket and recast itself as a nation of capitalists and entrepreneurs.
Sun’s recollections of Communist Party zeal, sacrifice and staggering economic transformation are among the personal narratives assembled by Xinran, a Chinese journalist now a resident of Britain, in “China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation.” In 2005 and 2006, she crisscrossed the country, tracking down and interviewing elderly Chinese and coaxing them — sometimes with difficulty — to open up about their experiences. The result is a Chinese version of Tom Brokaw’s portrait of “The Greatest Generation”: an oral history of the men and women who lived through the Communist takeover and the Cultural Revolution, then watched as China tore off its ideological straitjacket and recast itself as a nation of capitalists and entrepreneurs.
Some of Xinran’s interactions are extraordinary. She locates practitioners of vanishing Chinese crafts — including lantern makers and the “news singers” once widely found in traditional tea houses — and meets a 90-year-old survivor of the Long March. She interviews General Phoebe, a Red Army commander born in Ohio, who managed to survive the Cultural Revolution with her rank, health and self-esteem intact. Mr. and Mrs. You, married petroleum engineers who helped tame the remote Daqing oil fields in northwest China, describe sleeping outdoors in sandstorms and surviving on an improbable diet of grapes and melons.
Yet “China Witness” can also be slow going. Too many of Xinran’s interviews read like raw, unfiltered transcripts, with her subjects prattling on about what they ate for lunch that day (“I had noodles — Beijing noodles with minced pork and bean sauce”) or the weather (“Today’s report was 30 degrees, the last two days have been Autumn Tigers, very hot”). The interviews are sloppily put together, with no apparent thematic or chronological organization. And the breathless, Oprah Winfrey quality of many of Xinran’s questions wears thin. “You’ve got such a burning desire to do this, such a strong will, how many young people are studying lantern making with you now?” she asks a septuagenarian artisan in Nanjing. “You really are a witness to the history of education in the Shihezi Construction Corps!” she gushes at another point.
“China Witness” can, nevertheless, have a powerful effect. Many of the older Chinese Xinran meets still take a glossy view of the Communist Party and regard Mao himself as near infallible. (“When we were tending our vegetables, we saw Chairman Mao in the vegetable garden too,” marvels Mr. Changzheng, the Long March survivor. “Think of that. . . . A chairman, tending his vegetables just like a peasant.”) Occasionally, Xinran encounters someone who evinces startling candor about the failings — even crimes — of the Chinese leadership. She herself mixes admiration for China’s ability to mobilize the masses with horror at the humiliations and violence of Mao’s anti-rightist campaigns. Most important, she uses a wide range of stories — of public-works projects and persecutions, romance and re-education — to show how China’s masses clung to scraps of individuality amid the deadening conformity of the Communist system."
CHINA WITNESS
Voices From a Silent Generation
By Xinran. Translated by Nicky Harman, Julia Lovell and Esther Tyldesley
