Will the Boat Sink the Water?

The controversial best-seller that shocked China.'We have seen unimaginable poverty, unimaginable evil, unimaginable suffering and desperation, unimaginable resistance and silence. We are not heroes, because we have no power and no money. All we have are our writing pens ...

This book was written for the city dwellers to read, so that they can understand how peasants really live.'In 2000, acclaimed investigative journalists Wu Chuntao and Chen Guidi set out to document the lives of China's silent majority : the country's 900 million strong peasant underclass. They asked the question: 'Have the peasants been betrayed by the revolution undertaken in their name by Mao and his successors?'

Their research revealed the other side of the Chinese 'economic miracle', a feudal system in which petty dictators are free to tyrannise the rural poor. When the book was published in China it caused an uproar. Two months after it appeared, it was banned.Here for the first time is the English translation of Chen and Wu's prize-winning exposé a startling portrait of the people China forgot.

Told through four dramatic personal narratives, Will the Boat Sink the Water? looks beneath the shiny surface of the rising superpower and gives a voice to its previously unheard masses.Wu Chuntao was born in the Hunan Province of China in 1963. Her husband, Chen Guidi, was born in 1943 in the Province of Anhui. From peasant families themselves, both writers are recipients of awards including the 2004 Lettres Ulysses Prize for the Art of Reportage. In 2005, Time magazine named them 'Asia's Heroes' for their contribution to journalism.