A woman who survived and escaped Communist China issued a warning, saying, “I no longer feel this is the America that I arrived in. She has been under attack by Marxism/Communism that I thought I had escaped from.” The Chinese immigrant says it’s time for “patriots to wake up” and help “save America.”
Xi Van Fleet, a survivor of Mao Zedong’s communist revolution in China, joined Fox & Friends Weekend to share her experience living under and fleeing from communism. Van Fleet cautioned socialist supporters in the U.S. from embracing a dangerous ideology and “abandoning freedom.”
“I just want to say it’s so ironic — 36 years ago, I run away from socialism when I left China to come to this great country for freedom,” Van Fleet began. “Today, so many Americans [are] abandoning freedom and arriving into socialism.” Van Fleet said these people do not understand socialism and have no concept of what it is like to live under its precepts.
“They have no idea what socialism is about,” the Chinese immigrant said. “I lived under Mao’s socialism. When the government controls everything and makes all the decisions big and small and decide how much grain, meat [and] cooking oil I could have. What I should learn in school, where I should live, and what job I should have, and how I should think. In the socialist society I lived under, there was no choices,” she continued. “There is no freedom,” she declared. “And that’s what people do not know.”
Xi Van Fleet also explained that there is an intentional intent to weaken and dilute the word “socialism,” explaining how socialism is the first stop on the perilous pathway to communism. “Socialism becomes such a diluted word and it’s intentional,” she said. “I can tell you, China is a socialist country. Cuba is a socialist country and so is North Korea. They are a socialist country run by communist parties. And what’s the difference? What’s the difference between socialism and communism? Not much.”
Van Fleet also warned that “Socialism is the initial stage of communism, according to Karl Marx.” This isn’t the first time Van Fleet has spoken out about her experience and cautioned that efforts to silence parents speaking out about contentious issues in schools are similar to crackdowns she saw at the hands of Chinese Communist Party officials.
Van Fleet specifically spoke at the time about disparaging labels given to parent protestors by the National School Boards Association. “When I was in China, I spent my entire school years in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, so I’m very, very familiar with the communist tactics of how to divide people, how they canceled the Chinese traditional culture and destroyed our heritage,” Van Fleet told Fox News. “All this is happening here in America.”
“They call them racists for a long time, but that did not work,” Van Fleet said about parents wanting to keep Chinese traditions. “So, they have to upgrade to ‘domestic terrorists.’” She also addressed a Virginia school board. “I’ve been very alarmed by what’s going on in our schools,” Van Fleet told the Loudoun County School Board members. “You are now teaching, training our children to be social justice warriors and to loathe our country and our history.”
Xi Van Fleet likened Critical Race Theory, which critics deride as a form of “neo-racism,” to China’s Cultural Revolution, a Mao-led purge that left between 500,000 and 20 million people dead from 1966 to 1976. The estimates vary greatly and many details have been shrouded in secrecy for decades.
“The Communist regime used the same critical theory to divide people,” Xi Van Fleet said. “The only difference is they used class instead of race.” She said she witnessed students and teachers “turn against each other” during the pogrom and saw schools change their names “to be politically correct.”
“We were taught to denounce our heritage, and Red Guards destroyed anything that is not communist…statues, books, and anything else,” she continued. “We were also encouraged to report on each other, just like the Student Equity Ambassador program and the bias reporting system.” She added, “I just want Americans to know that their privilege is to be here living in America, that is just the biggest privilege. I do not think a lot of people understand. They are thinking they are doing the right thing, ‘be against racism’ sounds really good. But they are basically breaking the system that is against racism.”