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Writer-journalist Xinran tells Edmund Lee about her mission to record China’s contemporary history, before it is forever buried in time

For someone who already has several books published under her name, alongside a regular column in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, Xinran – although her surname is Xue, she prefers to go by just her forename – comes across as someone who is distinctly uncomfortable with being called a writer. “I’m a journalist,” she replies when I ask how she sees herself. “I think a writer is much more [about] literature… I’m a good journalist, I would say.”

That reluctance to be identified as a creative writer seemingly has a lot to do with the task, or rather, the mission, she has set herself as an author. “I have my writing principle: my writings can be kept in libraries so that generations of people can read them; they are based on non-fiction and historical recordings that can make people think. I always have an open ending [with my books]. I don’t want to give any judgment or comment. [China] has 5,000 years of history and civilisation – I don’t think I’m qualified to give any colour to this country.”

A successful journalist in China – she ran a popular Nanjing radio programme in which she listened to the sad stories of women trapped in a culture that prohibited speaking out – she moved to London in 1997. Xinran has since published a number of books, both fiction and non-fiction, about her China experience, as well as those of the country’s soon-to-be-forgotten older generation. Her first book, The Good Women of China, tells the life-stories of Chinese women during and after the Cultural Revolution, tales she collected from her radio programme, while her second book, Sky Burial, is a fiction based on true events, about a Chinese woman who spent three decades looking for her husband in Tibet. She followed that up with What the Chinese Don’t Eat, a collection of her regular Guardian columns, and Miss Chopsticks, a novel about the city experiences of three sisters coming from a rural community.

Xinran’s latest book, China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation, looks to continue the journalist’s mission to put her country’s oral history into writing. Rather than a writer with a fixation on her home country, which she has physically (but not emotionally) left behind, Xinran is more akin to the ‘Angel of History’, famously portrayed by Walter Benjamin: “The Angel of History must look this way; he has turned to face the past. Where we see a constant chain of events, he sees only a single catastrophe incessantly piling ruin upon ruin and hurling them at his feet…” Such are Xinran’s obsessive efforts that, after 20 years of researching and ten weeks of travelling across China, they materialize into 800,000 “very emotional” words.

“I spent the summer of 2006 interviewing a cross-section of China’s ‘Greatest Generation’ – men and women now in their seventies, eighties and nineties,” says Xinran. “They were the people who fought the Americans and the Western powers to a stalemate in Korea, a war that changed the Chinese sense of being Chinese all over the world; they oversaw the creation of a new political system; they suffered the costs of the endless political campaigns that led to the far reaching effects of the Cultural Revolution; they opened the gates to the Western world both ways, gates many Chinese might have preferred closed for another 5,000 years; they were led by Deng Xiaoping the reformer, after Mao Zedong the evolutionary.”

As Xinran explains in her new book, China’s younger generation are denied the knowledge about the struggles and sacrifices made for national dignity by their earlier generations, due to the ongoing censorship of the media and the control on school textbooks.

“In the lifetimes of these men and women [interviewed in the book], China has transformed from a largely peasant, agricultural country into a modern state with increasingly efficient economic markets, one that has gained acceptance and respect within the international community,” she says. “China is like a monumental book, its inner pages destroyed by social upheaval, war and the Cultural Revolution. The record of the restoration of its national spirit and confidence has not yet been written.” The grandparents and great-grandparents of the new generation are now mocked for their outdated revolutionary ideals, while their contributions to the now-modernising China are largely forgotten.

Having compiled a list of around fifty individuals in her twenty years of research, each with his or her own interesting stories to tell, Xinran specifically chose to include the ordinary people in her final selection process for her book, knowing that their stories will be lost precisely because of their lack of fame, money, or social status. “The generation of elderly Chinese in their seventies and above are the only ones who can tell this story. Their memories hold, perhaps, the only accurate record of modern Chinese history.”

While her effort is being appreciated and applauded around the world, the same cannot be said in the journalist’s homeland. When asked if things may ever change, Xinran recalls, “I was in tears when I saw that Chinese scroll opened at the [Beijing Olympics] opening ceremony. I hoped that China would be reborn in the world and be recognised as a cultured nation, and the people won’t live under political control anymore. We will try, from the experience of the Beijing Olympics, to free ourselves from the civil war, revolution and endless political movements in the last 100 years.”

And as for her own contribution, she hopes that “[The] Chinese will understand that what I am doing is for helping the future [generations] understand our past… our past is the roots of our [present], no matter it was good or bad. I believe that China is made by [its] people, not just by politicians and history makers.” Additional reporting by Clare Morin