Oral history is a cop-out, is it not? All writers of nonfiction books do interviews. It's called research. But only the oral historian gets to transcribe the tapes and then go straight to the pub, while the rest of us have to figure out how to turn recorded mumblings into something that won't cause the publishers to ask for the advance back.

So when I pick up an “oral history” the first thing that goes through my mind is - what a brilliant con! One day, inshallah, I will find someone willing to pay me for a book that has no voice, no descriptive passages, no theme or thesis.

At least that's what I used to think - before I started reading China Witness by Xinran Xue, the author of the bestselling The Good Women of China. She's a clever fox, the Madonna of oral history. (She and her publishers use only her first name.)

What makes Xinran different and entertaining is that she doesn't treat her subjects like something from a 1945 newsreel, the dutiful witnesses of history's march. She pokes them and flatters them; she gets excited by their stories and on occasion cries along with them.

“You must have been very beautiful when you were young,” she tells a 76-year-old female oil engineer who spent most of her career in harsh desert outposts. When the woman's 78-year-old husband can't describe their courtship five decades earlier in sufficiently emotive language, she says, “I felt hugely indignant on [her] behalf.”

Xinran is at times schoolmarmish. “No official talk - empty words or false words,” she tells one interview subject. He is no general secretary of the Communist Party, but rather a singer in a traditional tea house. “I'm a little deaf, but I'll tell you no lies,” he replies. Then he sings for her and she transcribes the song. Nice work if you can get it.

What the subjects of this book have in common is that they were contemporaries of Chairman Mao and had to endure his hellish reign from start to finish. They are in their seventies, eighties and nineties now. They were the pioneers who lived through “civil war, persecution, invasion, revolution, famine, modernisation and Westernisation”. (All before they met Xinran.)

Some of them have reached comfort late in life. A former solider tells Xinran: “If you've had a few years of sleeping on the ground and not getting enough to eat, after that, so long as you can fill your belly and sleep well, you don't think much about difficulties.” A former prisoner tells her: “I really am extraordinarily content with my present situation ... We live in a block of flats. I'd never dreamt of it. My husband says when I am dreaming I wake up smiling.”

What Xinran is trying to do here is paint a picture of what happened to the generation of Chinese that was veiled in darkness for decades and that can still remember what the country was like beforehand. How do they feel about the new China with its Olympic Games and semiconductors and coming superpower status? What did they endure along the way and how did they emerge from the experience?

Like the journalist that Xinran once was in China before she married the UK literary agent Toby Eady, she finds some surprising information: Chinese teachers' salaries, for example, did not rise between 1962 and 1995. But what's far more interesting is the meta-story in the book - how an oral history bumps up against constraints of pain and fear, where memory is inaccessible.

Frequently her subjects choke up or refuse to answer or are obviously evasive. At one point, Xinran asks a man if he regretted a politically dangerous act decades earlier. “For almost two and a half minutes, old Mr Lin sat before me, staring up at the ceiling, his face twisted with pain.”

Xinran chronicles these moments and often they are more revealing than the spoken answers. Right here we see the red lines that many Chinese still draw for themselves in public discourse, or even privately, the boundaries they dare not cross even today. No other style of storytelling could have exhibited them with more clarity or greater rawness.

China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation by Xinran
Chatto and Windus, £20; 380pp Buy the book

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