Chinese Lives: An Oral History of Contemporary China

By Zhang Xinxin, Zhang Xinixn, Sang Ye

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679720561
• ISBN13: 9780679720560
• Release Date: August 1988
• Publisher: Pantheon
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Chinese Lives..an oral history of contemporary china

This book though written in the early 80's provides a valuable insight into the lives of a wide range of chinese people..at that time.. you can feel the resilience of the people..and their strengths.. having to cope with all that has happened to them since communism and before..being an overseas chinese and always interested in my heritage i have always wanted to find out how they coped.. i have read quite a few earlier books about the lives of the chinese people under communism but none as good as this one.. The book is very readable and i could not put it down till i had finished it..

Street talk with the common and uncommon Chinese

These two Beijing based journalists (from the center of the PRChinese propaganda universe), a man and woman team, take on an ambitious project to provide a glimpse of street thoughts in the mid 80s, for the 35th anniversary of the PRC. They gathered info from these interviews and wrote them up in Chinese. The interviewers did not use tape recorders, which I think would intimidate interviewees, but then the authenticity of the talks would depend entirely on the skill of the journalists. It appears that the authors cherry picked about a fourth of the interviews from people who already had been in the news before as model Chinese. This material was originally published as a column in NYC-based "China Daily News" for expats and OEChinese. Then it was republished as a compendium in Shanghai-based literary magazines in 1985 and a book in 1986 all in Chinese.An editorial staff translated 64 of the 100+ articles from Chinese into Shanghai (UK) English. They edited them into appropriate idiomatic English that would be typical of the speaker. So the vignettes typically had lots of street slang from teenagers, the indigent and peasants, a more formal and cautious tone from middle aged adults, and more reverent speech from the retired. So this work simulated talking about a slice of life from the Chinese public and are categorized into 17 general topics about life. There is no index.Since many interviews were from the available populace who are willing to talk, and many weren't, this book is one of the very few where Americans can read about a slice of life of peasants (small time farmers), the unemployed, the indigent, and the handicapped, something that you will not get at all in tourist books. It also includes a few vignettes on the new "petty capitalism with Chinese characteristics," introduced by Deng's Reform and Opening policy started almost a decade earlier in 1978. Quite a few vignettes captured the essence in surviving the social and economic turmoil of the 50s and 60s of Mao's early socialist experiments. I read this book at a local public library while researching the attitudes of modern China after Deng Xiaoping's death of 1997.Remember, these thoughts are but a slice in time; because most interviews are extemporaneous, ie not planned out or written down. So there are interviews that are obviously braggarts, social climbers, talk about family conflicts and airing dirty laundry, and about a third who have something profound to say as they have tightly sealed their lips heretofore to avoid persecution. Interviews averaged about 4 ½ pages; the shortest about a page and the longest about 11 pages (Prison p229). Many were done in the Beijing / Nanjing metro area; the next common area was in Hebei and Shandong provinces just south of Beijing and Tianjin. Some interviews were done in Szechwan, Shanghai, Harbin, Guangzhou, and the minority regions of SW China. There is a two-page map of China with many specific interview locations marked, along with pro