We hear talk of a “new China” everywhere. Those who make frequent visits today often return from their trips aghast at the pace of transformation: Within a month, bustling, centuries-old hutong neighborhoods are emptied and replaced with glittering, air-conditioned shopping centers boasting Louis Vuitton and Pizza Hut. In the midst of this headlong rush into the future, little energy is reserved for contemplating China’s past, especially the brutality accompanying the imposition of communist rule. “The Corpse Walker” (Pantheon, 336 pages, $25), the Chinese poet Liao Yiwu’s collection of interviews with average Chinese who experienced oppression and hardship under the communist regime, is a noble effort to ensure that the horrific dimensions of recent Chinese history do not go undocumented.

Mr. Liao knows firsthand what it means to be a social pariah. He earned notoriety for writing poetry critical of the communist system while a student, and was imprisoned for four years for supporting the democratic protests of 1989. After he was released, he began collecting testimonies of people who, like himself, found themselves among the di-cheng, or “bottom rung,” of Chinese society: A leper, a former landowner, a public restroom manager, and an ethnic Nuohuo Yi, a minority targeted for persecution under the communists, are among his interlocutors in this volume. In many instances, Mr. Liao took great risks to secure the testimonies, interviewing detainees when he himself was imprisoned, and in one instance fleeing out a third-floor window when the authorities sought to apprehend him while he was speaking with a follower of the outlawed spiritual practice, Falun Gong. Accordingly, the interviews published here are not transcripts but reconstructions from memory of his mettlesome exchanges. That Mr. Liao retains the conversational format makes the book engaging, though the mediocre translation by Wen Huang hinders its overall readability.

Plenty varies in these tales, but few of Mr. Liao’s subjects shy from recounting the violence and terror that rained down upon China following the Communist Party’s triumph over the nationalist government in 1949, and all are identified with generic professional terms — the Leper, the Public Restroom Manager — to emphasize their representativeness.

After being released from detention, where he was brutally tortured, The Abbot, branded a “rich temple owner” on account of his stewardship of a Buddhist monastery, and his fellow monks “snif[f] around the temple like dogs” for items to donate to the communist metal drive, ultimately sending hordes of precious relics to the communal furnace to deter further persecution. “The whole country was like a big prison,” offers the Blind Ehru Player, whose relationship with a blind female student was broken up by jealous party supervisors. “The Party controlled every aspect of our life – eating, drinking, p­–ing, s–ing, birth, marriage and death.”

Mr. Liao’s most compelling subjects are those who maintained some reserve of intellectual integrity even as totalitarianism bore down. The Rightist is a former Communist Youth League leader whose attraction to a comely fellow student with capitalist lineage “help[s] [him] see things differently.” Even though he and the girl are eventually banished to the Chinese hinterland for their romance, The Rightist tells Mr. Liao that he does not regret his choice: “We used to hear bulls– stuff like, ‘So-and-so has been nurtured by the Party and the People.’ What do the Party’s breasts look like?”

Apart from former hardliners like the Neighborhood Committee Director, who grumbles that “everyone talks about money and nobody cares about Communism,” “The Corpse Walker” makes clear that nostalgia for the past is limited. In the “new China,” enjoying one’s growing earning power is more worthwhile than agitating fruitlessly for change or redress in a sclerotic political system. “Let bygones be bygones,” the Former Landowner advises, when asked about the loss of his property and social standing in the Chinese Revolution. “Nowadays my life as an ordinary peasant is much better than that of a landowner before 1949.”

Mr. Liao’s book reminds the reader that Mao’s greatest legacy is to be found not in ideology but in the brutal methods of China’s ruling class. Indeed, in the run-up to the Olympics, China has deployed the same strategy toward outspoken citizens — whether protestors in Tibet or human rights advocates such as Hua Jia — as it has to its once-historic cityscapes. If he is able to continue with this courageous work (this collection was banned in China, and, though free, Mr. Liao is closely monitored by the authorities), Mr. Liao will surely have no shortage of tales to add to his important annals of China’s vanquished bottom rung.

Ms. Buskey is a writer living in New York.