History a hot topic for publishers

Many new books released at the Beijing Book Fair focus on the lives of ordinary people, like The Three Year Groups and Four Chinese. [Photos Provided to China Daily]

Memoirs about the lives of ordinary people were in abundant supply at the 2014 Beijing Book Fair.

Four Chinese, from Tsinghua University Press, follows the lives off our obscure craftsmen, who moonlight doing shadow plays or singing traditional funeral songs.

"They could be blue-collar workers by day, but they are also deeply committed to their own art," says Jiao Ruiqing, one of the book's authors from Tsinghua University. "It's not incongruous, it's how Chinese have always been for hundreds of years."

Jiao filmed and lived with the unknown artists to witness "an entirely different lifestyle from what school has taught". Jiao's studio made the documentary in the hope of "redefining images of the Chinese".

Those Three Year Groups, by China Translation and Publishing Corporation, is a unique approach to the memoir and features essays from the classes of 1977, 1978 and 1979, and has thrown light on a fast-changing society.

Written by the first batch college students after the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), the essays trace their lives from the fate-changing entrance examination to today, when they emerge as the country's top scholars, businessmen and officials.

"We were especially lucky to get into college. And we worked so hard for it," says Li Zishi, who enrolled in Tsinghua University in1977.

Premier Li Keqiang entered Peking University the same year. "He was always reading, book in hand even when walking on the road," recalls Tao Jingzhou, one of his friends from university.

In science, Sichuan People's Publishing House presents Probing the Moon, a biography and scientific record featuring Ouyang Ziyuan, the country's chief scientist for the lunar probe project.

The book unveils the scientist's childhood, with detailed explanations on the history and progress of Chinese people's longing to better understand the moon.