China Witness is the personal testimony of a generation of stories that have yet to be told. Here, the grandparents and great-grandparents of today's era summarize in their own words - for the first and perhaps last time - the vast changes that have affected the people of China for over a century. The book is both a journey of the author through time and place, as well as a memorial to those who have lived through war and civil war, persecution, invasions, revolution, hunger, modernization, and Westernization - and have survived into the 21st century. We meet everyday heroes, now in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, from all over this vast country - a woman with herbs in a market, retired teachers, a legendary "double-barreled shotgun woman," Red Guards, pioneers in oil extraction, an acrobat, a female general, lamp manufacturers, taxi drivers, and many more - those whose voices, as Xinran says, "will help our future understand our past."