"From a very early age—kindergarten—we were taught that our parents are just biological parents. The real parents is 'the Party,' and Chairman Mao. And so, if there's a conflict between choosing your own parents or the Party, you should always, always choose the Party. And that's basically what the Red Guards did."
In this episode I sit down with Xi Van Fleet, who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. She’s the author of the new book, “Mao’s America: A Survivor’s Warning.”
"Communism is about abolition of private property. But I would say, more important than that, is the abolition of independent thinking. It's really, really about control of peoples' minds. And also, it's about dividing people. They don't want to rule over a united population," says Ms. Van Fleet.
We discuss her childhood under Mao's regime, and what it was like to be subjected to brainwashing, re-education, and struggle sessions. We also examine woke indoctrination today, and how ideologues are adopting Mao's methods of re-writing history and destroying the nuclear family.
Watch the clip:
"Here, especially today in schools, you are supposed to go to 'trusted adults,' not your parents. And so, they do not say 'Party,' but it is very similar. They want to cut the ties between parents and children. Why? That's how you control the children," says Ms. Van Fleet.
🔴 WATCH the full episode (43 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1028XiVanFleet
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Xi Van Fleet, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Xi Van Fleet: Thank you. This is exactly two years after the first interview. Thank you so much for having me back.
Mr. Jekielek: I looked at your interview from back then and it was a great piece. I will link to it for those that are watching our streaming service on the web. It was a powerful interview where you showed the remarkable parallels between what's happening in America and your own experience during the Cultural Revolution in China. It brought tears to my eyes listening to that interview, so thank you again.
Thank you for referencing it in your new book, which we will talk about today. You really dug deep into understanding these parallels. I want to discuss your background; where you were born, what happened, how you came to America, and when you started seeing things that reminded you of your past in China.
Ms. Van Fleet: Yes. I was born in China and spent my first 26 years in Mao's China, which included my entire 10 school years. Mao cut it from 12 to 10 years, because he said that education was useless. My 10 school years were right during the Cultural Revolution. After I graduated from high school, there was nothing for us. There was nothing for the young people, so we were all sent to the countryside. To do what? To get our reeducation from the peasants.
I worked in the countryside under primitive conditions for three years until Deng Xiaoping took power and opened up the universities. Through an entrance examination, I was able to go to college at the age of 19 and study English.
After that I was given a job teaching at a teachers' college where I met some American teachers. In the early eighties, China started to open up and a lot of volunteers from America came to teach. I met a friend and she helped me to get an assistantship in America, so in 1986, I went to Western Kentucky University.
Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me what it was like during the Cultural Revolution and how you were involved. You shared quite a few fascinating anecdotes in the book. A lot of us here in the West have no idea what really happened.
Ms. Van Fleet: In a word, it was chaos, and pretty much overnight, because everything was just turned upside down. Everything. School was closed because the teachers and administrators were ousted by the kids. I was in elementary school and I saw students attacking teachers. One day I was in the classroom and the teacher left a note on the blackboard, "No school for three days." Those three days lasted for two years.
During that time, we were out on the streets every day, watching it unfold in front of our eyes; the Cultural Revolution, the struggle sessions, the parade of those being denounced, which eventually turned into violence and total chaos. We saw the cancel culture by the Red Guards. I saw them going to people's homes, taking out everything that was considered old or traditional and destroying it. I saw them brutalize people, stopping girls who had the incorrect hairstyle and chopping their hair off. It was absolutely chaos.
Mr. Jekielek: One of the things you hear about the Cultural Revolution is that sometimes people were murdered, and there was no reaction from the regime. That emboldened people and it became a kind of a craze.
Ms. Van Fleet: Yes, absolutely. The first killing in the Cultural Revolution was done by a group of girls in middle school. They beat and tortured their assistant principal and then eventually killed her. They were just young girls, ages 12 through 16, and they were actually a little scared. They reported this to the Cultural Revolution Committee and the answer was, "If she died, then she died."
That emboldened the Red Guards and the violence then started to become commonplace. The Red Guards went after the so-called Black Class people and killed over 1,700 in Beijing in just one month alone. After that, chaos took over the whole country and even my province and city.
Mr. Jekielek: You said overnight, you suddenly had chaos.
Ms. Van Fleet: Yes.
Mr. Jekielek: But what was it that changed? Was there an edict? This is what we want to understand here.
Ms. Van Fleet: It started with so-called peaceful ways to denounce people. To do that, they use big character posters. It's like today's social media. They wrote on a big piece of paper with big letters and put it on a wall so everybody could read it. My memory is that overnight, there were big character posters everywhere on campus, and people just went there to read them. I was too young, only in the first grade, and I could not understand the content.
But I could understand that it was a denunciation of teachers and administrators. There were a lot of cartoons. I could figure out they were about how the whole system was bad and needed to be overthrown. That's how it all started, and it was absolutely overnight. On the street, you saw all sorts of slogans, all sorts of posters, and that was the starting point. From there, it eventually became violent.
Mr. Jekielek: This can be difficult to understand because Mao already had power. Of course, there was the Great Leap Forward, which was disastrous and many people were aware of this, so Mao had received many threats. This so-called, “cultural revolution,” was his reaction and his opportunity to purge yet another group of people. Basically this was communists going after communists.
Ms. Van Fleet: That is something very hard for a lot of people to understand. I have to tell you that it is also very difficult for me to understand, but it actually was a cultural revolution. It was a revolution against Mao's own party, the CCP. It was a revolution against his own institutions. Why? It was for maintaining his own power, because he felt like he was losing power. He felt like whatever that he had been doing for the past 27 years was not radical enough. He wanted to fundamentally transform China into a more radical version of Marxism, which then became Maoism.
Mr. Jekielek: Your book is titled, Mao's America: A Survivor's Warning. Before we discuss it, you talked about participating in some of these struggle sessions. It's hard to imagine that reality. Please tell me what happened.
Ms. Van Fleet: There were all sorts of struggle sessions. The struggle sessions were like a hurricane. You had a huge rally of people and those people who were denounced were standing on the stage, and they had to admit that they were the counter-revolutionaries. They were whatever label was put on them. Those were the big hurricane-type struggle sessions.
But everyone had to go through it. It was not just something for those being denounced. We had what was called criticism and self-criticism. Everyone had to go through it, including kids in school. You had to denounce yourself by comparing yourself to Mao's Little Red Book, and then saying that you hadn't done enough and in this respect or in that respect.
That's not all of it, you also have to denounce others. You have to say, "So-and-so, I saw one day you did this and that's not really what you should do according to Mao's instruction." That was routine. That's the kind of struggle session I have been through. It's a gentler, milder version of the real struggle session, but it was a way of life during the Cultural Revolution.
Mr. Jekielek: But there's this one moment in the book where you describe yourself holding Mao's portrait up on stage and feeling so proud.
Ms. Van Fleet: Everyone wanted to be part of it. If I had been just four or five years older, I definitely would have been part of the Red Guard, but I was too little at the time. I just joined my cousin who was in the real Red Guard and who was in this Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team. They came to my town so I joined them. They had to give shows everywhere they stopped, and I was given the task of carrying Mao's portrait to lead the team on stage. I was so proud of myself.
It was something that swept everybody away. There are people who saw this and understood what it was, but a lot of people just didn't. A lot of kids felt like you just had to join. Just think about the 2020 riots where so many people joined in. Did they really understand what it was? But they still joined in. I saw the videos of thousands of thousands of people on the street thinking they were doing something great.
Mr. Jekielek: Do you feel like you were brainwashed?
Ms. Van Fleet: Absolutely. That is the result of brainwashing. I was too little to do any damage. But what about the Red Guards? They were absolutely brainwashed. They were brainwashed to the point that they believed their purpose of life was to follow Mao's instruction and do what Mao told them to do. Because of that, Mao was able to control them. The Cultural Revolution was really the revolution of the youth. Mao used them to take power, and Mao used them to destroy the traditional culture and all the institutions. It was all done by the young people. How could they do that? It is because they were all brainwashed.
Mr. Jekielek: I am thinking about James Lindsay's book, The Marxification of Education, who also wrote the introduction to your book. We didn't realize how deeply this whole oppressor-oppressed ideology has been embedded in our educational system here in the U.S. and Canada. This is one of the big parallels you draw out.
Ms. Van Fleet: Yes. In China, there's a difference because Mao and the CCP had power. They totally controlled the educational system and decided what to teach. Of course, it was all Marxist and Maoist values. But here, a lot of people just don't understand this, because they were never taught the history of communism. The things that they hear sound good, sounding like you want to be inclusive and you want to be empathetic. You want to love and to accept.
People like me who have been through the Cultural Revolution and who have lived under communism see through it right away, because the same thing was taught to us. But people here, they just don't understand it. It's deceptive, and a lot of people just accept it without understanding that what they're supporting is actually evil.
Mr. Jekielek: What is the commonality between what is being taught today, and what was being taught in Maoist China?
Ms. Van Fleet: In Mao's China, it was very simple. From a very early age and in kindergarten, we were taught that our parents are just biological parents. Our real parents are the party and Chairman Mao. If there's a conflict between choosing between your own parents or the party, you should always, always choose the party.
That's basically what the Red Guards did. Many of them denounced their parents. Many of them reported their parents and that ended up with their parents being executed. Here in school, especially today, you are supposed to go to trusted adults, not your parents. They did not say that in the party, but it is very similar. They want to cut the ties between the parents and the children. Why? That's how you control the children.
Mr. Jekielek: The current gender-affirming care ideology is the so-called standard of care that's being applied for many children in schools. The counselors will say to the parent in front of the child, "Would you like to have a dead child or a living child? If you don't go along with our approach, your child will commit suicide." The parent becomes the outsider.
Ms. Van Fleet: Absolutely. They make it sound like it's the government that is the real protector of those children.
President Biden: There's no such thing as someone else's child. No such thing as someone else's child. Our nation's children are all our children.
Ms. Van Fleet: That's exactly what happened in China and I'm sure in all communist countries.
Mr. Jekielek: Another thing that's very striking is the hostility towards accurate accounts of history.
Ms. Van Fleet: Yes, that is always something that the communists do. In order to control the children, you have to rewrite history. In China, history was totally rewritten, and the history that I learned there was absolute fiction. Even today, I still have to detox from the oldest junk they put in my mind. Those who control the present control the past. When you control the past, you control the future.
There are so many people here in America that don't see what you and I see, Jan. Why? Because they don't know history. Today, history is so whitewashed. In school, they are taught about the crimes of the Nazis, and the crimes of slavery. Few of them know about the crimes committed in the name of communism. There were actually more people killed under communism, but they were taught communism is about sharing. That is just one example of rewriting history.
Mr. Jekielek: The proof is that young people view it as a positive system. There have been multiple surveys done on this, and it's astonishing. There is a Chinese expression, “Putting powder on the face of communism.”
Ms. Van Fleet: Absolutely. I was talking to a coworker of mine and she said her new daughter-in-law calls herself a communist. I said, "Do you know what that means? Do you know that sounds like someone telling a Jew that they are a Nazi?" She said, "Really?" That is how bad things are, because they absolutely have no idea." Why? It's because they were taught that way.
Mr. Jekielek: The people who are successful in society are labeled as oppressors by the Marxist system, regardless of whether they are oppressing anybody.
Ms. Van Fleet: Yes.
Mr. Jekielek: What do you think?
Ms. Van Fleet: That's actually the operating system for Marxism. How did they do that in China? They identified the rich as the problem for everything that China was experiencing. The goal was to eliminate the rich so that they can achieve equity. The rich were those who were successful people, and that included Mao's own father. Mao's father was a prosperous and rich peasant, and he described how his father got rich. He did not exploit anyone or oppress anyone. He was smart, made a lot of good decisions, and worked hard.
In communism, wealth is the original sin and the rich are the problem. They are the reason for everyone else's misery. Here it's the same thing, and we see the same thing happening. The Chinese and the Asians in general, according to skin color, have now become white. Before we were supposedly people of color, but not anymore. We are now called white-adjacent. Why? There is only one reason—we're just too successful.
They do not want people to be successful. When you are successful, you are independent and you are not easy to control. They like people to be dependent so that they can control them. But not only that, they want to create divisions between people. They really foment hatred and resentment towards those who are successful.
Mr. Jekielek: You've said that the term racist essentially means the same thing as counter-revolutionary back in the day.
Ms. Van Fleet: Yes. Everything during the Cultural Revolution was about whether you were with them or against them. If you were not exactly in line with them, you were labeled counter-revolutionary. It is the same here. Sometimes you see people being called racist and it's just ridiculous. In America, the word counter-revolutionary is just replaced with the word racist; that bigot, extremist, or whatever phobia you use to cast people out and put them in the enemy's camp. Then they can denounce you and they can punish you.
Mr. Jekielek: There is the correct ideology and you're supposed to know what that is. It comes down from the people in power. If you don't agree with it completely, you are labeled a counter-revolutionary, or today, you are labeled with any one of these other slanderous terms that are now being used.
Ms. Van Fleet: In the early stage after the CCP took power, everyone learned the correct ideology very quickly, which said, “Being rich is bad. Looking rich is bad. Thinking like the rich is bad.” Everyone wanted to look like a proletariat, especially those intellectuals.
Mr. Jekielek: Because the intellectuals were the next group to be persecuted.
Ms. Van Fleet: Yes. To think, act, or look bourgeois was bad, so everyone wanted to look like a proletariat. Today, it is the same thing here. Thinking white is bad, and acting white is bad. If you study hard, you are acting white. Then you will be cast out.
Mr. Jekielek: Let's talk about where you find these parallels. One of them is education. We just discussed how having the teachers follow this ideology was a really important element. We talked about a kind of Red Guard here that's functioning at the will of the ruling class. That's another feature. We talked about this antipathy to the nuclear family, which is another important commonality. What else do you think is important?
Ms. Van Fleet: Communism is about the abolition of private property, but more importantly it is the abolition of independent thinking. It's really about the control of people's minds. It's also about dividing people, because they don't want to rule over a united population. They will always try any way possible to divide them. In China, it was relatively simple.
They divide people by class, which was Mao's identity politics. They don't just divide you and say you are rich, peasant, or landlord—you get a label. You absolutely get a label, that label becomes you, and it's your identity. If you are categorized as the Black Class, which is the propertied class, you become an enemy of the state. That label and that identity becomes hereditary. That's so important to understand. It is passed on to your children and to your children's children.
That's what we are seeing in America—identity politics. They divide people, subdivide them, and then subdivide them some more. They will never stop. Here in America, we still have classes. Bernie Sanders still uses class to divide people into the haves and the have-nots, into the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent. By the way, that's exactly the figure that Mao came up with when he analyzed the Chinese population back in the 1920s. He said, "We have 1 percent against the 99 percent." Bernie Sanders came up with the same number and I don't think it's a coincidence. In America there is division by race, sex, sexuality, and during Covid, even the vaxxed and non-vaxxed.
Mr. Jekielek: Yes. You make this very interesting distinction in the book where in China, it was the majority being set against a minority. But here in America it's the other way around. It's actually backwards. It's the minorities that are being set against the majority.
Ms. Van Fleet: They know that is a disadvantage, because you are setting a small group against the big group. That's why they keep expanding the small group, and the list just keeps going on. We mentioned some already; race, sex, gender, sexuality, and age. If you are fat, you become a victim. The list just goes on and on. Why? They want to expand the minority.
Mr. Jekielek: There's a feature of this that we're experiencing in the West, which is the weaponization of empathy. In general, people want to help minorities. We want to be positive towards minorities. That is one of the ways this whole ideology was snuck in.
Ms. Van Fleet: Woke is really a weaponization of people's goodness—neighbors who want to love their fellow citizens and want to accept and want to be empathetic—and using it against them.
Mr. Jekielek: Using a race as this tool for the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy is actually hereditary. You don't have a choice. You would have to take significant steps to change that.
Ms. Van Fleet: Yes. CRT [critical race theory] is really the most potent weapon for dividing people, more so than class. In China, we all look alike. People can know which class you belong from where you live or where you work, but you can get away from that in a public space, because nobody knows who you really are. But race is something that you wear. It's always there and it's much more potent than class.
Mr. Jekielek: I've been thinking about the Hamas attacks on Israel that happened recently and the potency of hatred. In the Cultural Revolution, did people hate like that?
Ms. Van Fleet: The whole thing was driven by hate. Communism is built on hate. Hate what? Hate the enemy. Who were the enemies? The party tells you so. The party tells you who the enemies were. When I grew up, we were taught that the Black Class was our enemy. Those who failed to follow the party in lock steps were our enemy. I mentioned that in my book.
The word people in China is called renmen. The people who are condemned as the enemy are called diren, or class enemy, jieji diren. You either belong to the people, or you belong to the enemy. Once you become an enemy, you're no longer people. Your humanity was taken away from you, and anything done to you was justified. Does that sound familiar in today’s world?
That is how they teach the children to think; black and white. Once the party condemns you as an enemy, anything can be done to you. Nothing is too much. Right now, we see people on the streets who support Hamas. Why? It's simple. They identify Israel as the oppressor, and Palestinian as the oppressed.
Once that definition is made, it's very easy. It's very easy to justify anything that the oppressed will do to the oppressor, including terrorism and murder. That's how they indoctrinate the children. It is this black and white thinking based on oppressor-oppressed, the enemy or the people.
Mr. Jekielek:Your book is fantastic, and I highly recommend it.
Ms. Van Fleet: Thank you.
Mr. Jekielek: It's very important. The Cultural Revolution in China and what is happening in America are not the same. At the same time, there are striking parallels and you do a fantastic job at documenting this. It's a chilling reality. Could we end up in a situation like the Cultural Revolution in China, if our current trends here are left unchecked? I think your answer might be yes.
Ms. Van Fleet: Yes. Mark Twain said. “History seldom repeats itself, but it often rhymes.” Yes, China is not America, the time is different, and the culture is different. It's a mistake to compare them as if it's apples to apples. But history rhymes. When you look at the big picture and connect the dots, the exact same thing is happening again.
Mr. Jekielek: You talk about you deprogramming yourself, and that is also an important piece. People will read your book and understand the extent of these parallels, and they're shockingly extensive. But what about your journey from being the proud holder of a Mao portrait to where you are today? What did that look like?
Ms. Van Fleet: It has been a long journey and I'm still making an effort today. I am still in the process of detoxing. It has been gradual, and it has to do with my desire to assimilate. People now ask, “Why should we want to assimilate? We want multiculturalism.” My question is, “Why did you even want to come here? What made you want to come to America?”
I wanted to come here because I knew America is great. It's great for everyone, for all individuals. It has been a journey, and it took me a long time to appreciate what makes America great. It took me a long time to even grasp the concept that our rights come from God. For the longest time, I thought our rights came from the government, because that's how I grew up. The government allows me to do this, and does not allow me to do that.
A lot of people still don't understand this. They come here and they don't even bother to learn the history and the values of this great country, because they are discouraged from doing that. They were taught you should be proud of your culture and it’s multiculturalism that makes America great. No, multiculturalism is not what makes America great. What makes this country great is American values.
Where do those values come from? They are rooted in Christianity, so that took me a long time to understand. I had to get rid of this idea that being rich is evil. It has really taken a long time. I just felt like they were rich because they exploited others. I have to say that probably just 20 years ago, I still believed this. I thought, “Yes, how can they get rich? The only way they can get rich is by exploiting the poor.” Today, that is something that the young people firmly believe.
Mr. Jekielek: As that belief system has grown, the actual exploitation has grown, because all these things have a kernel of truth in them. Yes, there are some people that get rich that way. Yes, the system can be set up to be stacked against the poor. But the irony is that it's precisely in these communist societies where that dichotomy is so extreme.
Ms. Van Fleet: Capitalism is not perfect. Of course, there's no such thing as a perfect system. But in capitalism, you have the choice to say no. You absolutely have the right to say no. They can give you an unbelievable low wage and you can walk away. Not in a communist country. Not in the communist system. You're stuck where you are. You have no freedom to make a choice.
Mr. Jekielek: There is one choice in that system you have to make. But for some people, that choice is unconscionable, which is to become the model worker, the model communist party member. Then maybe you'll be advanced.
Ms. Van Fleet: That's not a choice. How do you get ahead in the communist system? First of all, you had better have your roots being red, meaning you come from a good family background. If you are from a proletariat background, then you are in the red camp. That's the first step, and then you will have a head start. But if you are not, you still have a way to advance. First, you have to cut ties with your bad family and cut ties with your past. You have to denounce yourself. You have to give up yourself so that you are totally in line with the party ideology. Then you might have a chance to advance.
Mr. Jekielek: That's chilling, because that's a parallel to our society today.
Ms. Van Fleet: Yes. If you want to advance, you better go along with the current ideology, even if it's a lie. You actually know that a woman is a woman, and a man is man, but if you want to advance, you had better go along with the lie that says otherwise.
Mr. Jekielek: Xi, as we finish up, you mentioned cancel culture a number of times throughout our conversation. That’s a key instrument of what's happening here, and what was happening back then. Please tell me about that.
Ms. Van Fleet: I believe that the real goal for the woke revolution or the American cultural revolution is to change the culture and to destroy everything in the past—the traditional values, the traditional family, the traditional institutions— everything. The Cultural Revolution in China had the Four Olds that we talked about in my last interview; the old ideas, the old culture, the old customs, and the old habits, which had to be destroyed. Why? So that they could be replaced by Maoism.
That's what's going on here today in America. They want to destroy everything that is traditional and replace it with the woke ideology, which is Marxist ideology. Only when they destroy everything and burn it down to the ground, can they build back, not better, but worse, and so that they can take power.
Mr. Jekielek: I first became aware of you when you were speaking at a Loudoun County School board meeting. Let’s talk about what's to be done in our current moment?
Ms. Van Fleet: That is a big question and a lot of people ask that question looking for a simple answer. There is no simple answer. The first thing that we need to do is understand what is really happening, and not everybody understands it. Not every conservative understands what's really going on. You can't fight back against something that you don't understand. That's why I wrote my book—to tell Americans that what is going on in America is nothing new. This has happened before in China during the Cultural Revolution.
We need to understand that we can take the next steps to expose it. We also need to take action and get organized. I always tell people to start local. The first and most important thing is to get the right people on the school board. In order to win this war, we have to win back our education system, because those children are the future of this country.
Mr. Jekielek: Xi Van Fleet, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Ms. Van Fleet: Thank you so much for having me.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Xi Van Fleet and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.
🔴 WATCH the full episode (43 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1028XiVanFleet
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