Maoist Revolution Survivor Exposes Parallels Between China’s Cultural Revolution and Wokeism

Xi Van Fleet in Washington on Oct. 5, 2021. Courtesy of the Conservative Partnership Institute

Although communist China and America have different cultures, a Chinese Cultural Revolution survivor said that when the Maoist Cultural Revolution in China and what is happening in today’s America are put in a broader perspective, one can see commonalities between the two.

The real goal of the woke revolution sweeping America today is “to change the [American] culture and to destroy everything [of] the past: the traditional value, the traditional family, the traditional institutions,” said Xi Van Fleet, who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution.

The Cultural Revolution, which began in China in 1966 and spanned the final decade of Mao’s life, aimed at destroying the so-called “four olds”—old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas—of China.

They have to be destroyed so Maoism can replace them, Ms. Van Fleet said in an interview on Epoch TV’s “American Thought Leaders” program on October 28.

What is going on in America today is aimed at destroying “everything that is traditional, and replace with the woke ideology, which is Marxist ideology, Ms. Van Fleet pointed out.

“Only when they destroy everything, burned it down to the ground, can they build back–not better, but worse–so that they can take power.”

Commonalities

Mark Twain said: “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”

China and America are different, their cultures are different, and the time is different, so “it’s a mistake to compare it as if it’s apple to apple–no–but it rhymes, Ms. Van Fleet explained, citing Mark Twain.

Among the cultural changes in America that parallel the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Ms. Van Fleet highlighted infusing American education with indoctrination, rewriting history, applying the Marxist archetype of oppressors and oppressed to divide American society based on race or sex, and the process of normalizing violence.

If people want to counter the cultural changes taking place in the country, they need to understand them first, Ms. Van Fleet said. “You can’t fight back something that you don’t understand.”

However, many Americans do not understand them because they have never been taught the history of socialism and communism, Ms. Van Fleet said. They were taught that communism is about being inclusive, empathetic, and loving and accepting of others, she added.

But “people like me, who’ve been through the Cultural Revolution, who’ve been through or lived under Communism—we see through it right away because the same thing was taught to us,” Ms. Van Fleet explained.

Therefore, Ms. Van Fleet wrote the book “Mao’s America: A Survivor’s Warning” to help Americans understand the situation and tell them that “what’s going on in America is nothing new; it happened before.”

Once people understand the situation, the next step they should take is to expose it, Ms. Van Fleet said. Then people need to take action and get organized, starting locally by electing the right people to the school board, she advised.

“In order to win this war, we have to win our school system, education system, because those children are the future of this country.”

Indoctrination Through Education

Ms. Van Fleet recalled how she and children in Maoist China, as early as in kindergarten, were taught that their parents “are just biological parents, that [their] real parents [are] the party and Chairman Mao.”

“If there’s a conflict between choosing your own parents or the party, you should always choose the party. ”

In American schools, children should “go to trusted adults,” not their parents, Ms. Van Fleet said. “They did not say ‘party,’ but it is very similar. They want to cut the ties between the parents and children” in order to control the children.

It makes it appear that the government is “the real protector “ of the children, Ms. Van Fleet said. “That’s exactly what happened in China.”

In April, President Joe Biden said in a speech to honor the national and state teachers of the year: “There’s no such thing as someone else’s child. Our nation’s children are all our children.”

Yet, there is a difference between the Chinese system and the American system as Mao and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wielded absolute power in China and totally controlled the education system, Ms. Van Fleet said, so they decided what was taught in schools.

Chinese Red Guards, high school and university students, waving copies of Chairman Mao Zedong's "Little Red Book" parade in Beijing's streets at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution on June 1966. Jean Vincent/AFP/Getty Images

The Chinese Cultural Revolution was carried out by Red Guards, a group of students from secondary schools led by the children of high-ranking CCP cadres.

Ms. Van Fleet said the Red Guards were brainwashed to the point that they believed their purpose in life was to follow Mao’s instruction so Mao could control the movement.

The first killing in the Cultural Revolution was committed by a group of girls, ages 12-16, who tortured and beat to death their middle school’s assistant principal, Ms. Van Fleet said.

“[This incident] emboldened the Red Guards, and the violence started to be really the commonplace.”

This poster, displayed in late 1966 in Beijing, shows Red Guards how to deal with a so-called 'enemy of the people' during the Cultural Revolution. Jean Vincent/AFP via Getty Images

In the Beijing district of Daxing alone, 325 people were killed by the Red Guards within the last five days of August 1966, known as Red August. The victims varied in age from a month-old baby to 80 years old, and 22 families were wiped out completely.

History Rewritten

“In order to control the children, you'll have to rewrite history,” Ms. Van Fleet pointed out, citing George Orwell’s famous quote from his book “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Orwell wrote in his science fiction novel: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

The history, Ms. Van Fleet learned in China, was totally rewritten, she said.

The history students learn in American schools is whitewashed, Ms. Van Fleet asserted.

“In school, they were taught the crimes of the Nazis, the crimes of slavery, [but] fewer of them know the crime, committed in the name of communism.

“Far more people were killed under communism, but they were taught communism is about the sharing. That’s rewriting history.”

Oppressors Versus Oppressed

Marx’s exploitation theory divides people into two opposing classes: the bourgeoisie with capital and the proletariat without it.

According to Marx, the “capitalist” class is considered the oppressor class because it exploits the proletariat to make money. The proletariat is considered the oppressed and exploited class and therefore occupies the moral high ground.

Marx claimed that to eliminate that exploitation, the entire capitalist society must be destroyed — that is, the bourgeoisie would be eliminated and their assets confiscated, while the party’s vanguard would collectivize property and institute communism.

The Marxist doctrine adopted in China deemed the rich the cause of all problems China was experiencing, Ms. Van Fleet said. “The goal is to eliminate the rich” so equity can be achieved.

“The rich were those who were successful people, including Mao’s own father,” Ms. Van Fleet said.

“Mao’s father was a prosperous and rich peasant.” Ms. Van Fleet said. Mao portrayed his father as a person who got rich through hard work, being smart, and making a lot of good decisions without exploiting or oppressing anyone.

Yet, “in communism, wealth is the original sin” and the reason for everyone’s misery, she added.

Identity Politics

“People still think about communism and socialism as economic systems,” Ms. Van Fleet told Epoch TV’s “Crossroads” program. “It is, in a way,” as it is seeking to abolish private property and private ownership.

“But more than that, [communists] really want to abolish private thoughts. They want to transform you; they want to control your thought.” The Red Guards phenomenon was the result of 17-year indoctrination.”

To control people’s minds and rule over them, communists try to divide people, Ms. Van Fleet pointed out.

Mao’s identity politics divided Chinese people by class. The rich, peasants, landlords, and the poor were all assigned a label that was a person’s identity, Ms. Van Fleet explained.

“If you are categorized as the black class, which is propertied class, you’re the enemy of the state. And that label or that identity becomes hereditary.” That label is passed to a person’s children and grandchildren, she added.

Parents concerned about critical race theory (CRT) took home buttons like this from a school board activist training put on by the The Leadership Institute in Sarasota, Fla., on Jan. 19, 2022. Nanette Holt/The Epoch Times

In America, identity politics use critical race theory (CRT) to divide people, Ms. Van Fleet said. She believes that CRT is the most potent weapon to divide people, much more potent than the class.

It is because to determine which class a person belongs to, one needs to know what work a person does, and where a person lives, while race is something a person always wears, Ms. Van Fleet clarified.

In addition to race, sex, sexual orientation, and even vaccination status during the COVID-19 pandemic were used to divide people, Ms. Van Fleet noted.

Critical race theory, an offshoot of a neo-Marxist branch of thought, was developed by Marxist scholars of the Frankfurt School affiliated with Columbia University in New York with a goal to subvert Western civilization and apply Marxism to the cultural sphere. It applies the archetypal Marxist conflicts between “the oppressor” and “the oppressed” to race and sex instead of class.

Due to class mobility, attempts to divide people based on class did not succeed in developed countries such as the United States or the United Kingdom. For example, a member of the proletariat is no longer among the proletariat if he buys public equity in a company or opens his own business.

During the Cultural Revolution, the criterion to divide people was based on whether the person was against the communist rule or for it, and someone who was against the communist regime was labeled “counterrevolutionary” and was denounced. Ms. Van Fleet explained.

In America, this term was replaced by the word “racist” or related terms like “bigot” or “extremist,” Ms. Van Fleet said. These terms were used “to cast people out and put [them] in the enemy’s camp.”

After the CCP took over power, people learned quickly that being rich, looking rich, thinking like rich, acting like a bourgeois–is bad, Ms. Van Fleet said, so “everyone wants to look like proletarian.”

In America, thinking like white people and acting like white people is considered bad, Van Fleet said, illustrating her view with an example: “If you study hard, you act like white, and you will be [cast out].”

Normalizing Violence

The Marxist ideology holds that violence is justified for the right cause, in particular, the violence exerted against the oppressors, Ms. Van Fleet said on Epoch TV’s “Crossroads” program.

In Mao’s Cultural Revolution, that cause was to eliminate all the enemies, so the people who were killed were identified as the black class, for example, land owners, the revolution survivor said.

The oppressors to the Red Guards were the teachers and the school principals, so violence against them was not only justified but also celebrated and encouraged, she said.

“[In America] we haven’t seen the real violence, but it’s coming,” Ms. Van Fleet warned.

“The first step is to justify the violence, and we passed that already. Now, we’re in the stage of celebrating violence, and that won’t take long to take us to the next step ... which is encouraging violence against the “so-called oppressors.”