Xi Van Fleet
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
141.85603
Summary
After George F. Floyd died Memorial Day weekend 2020, people began to say that what was happening in the United States bore some resemblance to the Cultural Revolution in China. But what s that overstatement? Well, Xi Van Fleet has seen both. She was seven years old in 1966, when China's Cultural Revolution started, and 17 when it ended with Mao s death in 1976. She moved to this country, to Kentucky, in 1986, and has been here ever since. She s written a new book comparing them: Mao s America: A Warning. And we re grateful to have her, in the studio with us now. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg and Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Haley Shaw, and our ad music was written and performed by Ian Dorsch, and produced by Matthew Boll, and Bobby Lord, and special thanks to Haley Shaw. for the music used in this episode was written, produced, edited, and mixed by Jeff Perla, with additional mixing and mastering by David Fincher, and additional engineering by Patrick Muldowney, and Rachel Ward, and music was provided by Matthew Keyser, and the production assistance by Andrew Dunn, and James Wardlaw, and a very special thank you to David Fennell, for producing and editing by John Rocha, for the score and mastering, and mastering of the music for this episode. It was edited by Matthew McElroy, and Matthew Ward for additional editing, and extra mixing, and editing, for our mixing and mixing, for which we thank you all by our thanks and mastering and mastering thanks to Rachel Wardell, and thanks to Jeff Perlan for his excellent sound design, and his excellent mixing and editing and mastering work by Rachel Ward for the mixing, respectively. and additional editing by Matthew Heenan for the original music by Matthew Kuchner, and Robert Lord for the background music, and Andrew Hill for the mastering and additional mastering, for additional mastering and mixing. . Thank you for all your support and production assistance, and for all of our mixing, , and thanks also to our excellent mixing, Bobby Lord for his amazing editing, and mastering and our mastering, for our excellent sound effects, and by our excellent mastering and editing. for all the editing and mixing
Transcript
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Shortly after George Floyd died Memorial Day weekend 2020, people began to say that what
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was happening in the United States bore some resemblance to what happened in China 50 years
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ago, the Cultural Revolution, with Red Guards and struggle sessions, public humiliations,
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public atonements, a kind of secular frenzy that looked very much like a hate-centered
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She was seven years old in 1966 when the Cultural Revolution started and 17 when it ended with
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And along the way, she became one of its victims.
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She moved to this country, to Kentucky, in 1986, and she's been here ever since.
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So she has seen both revolutions firsthand, and she's written a new book comparing them
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And we're grateful to have her, Xi Van Fleet, in the studio with us now.
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So you were seven years old when the Cultural Revolution started, the equivalent of first
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And when, what was the moment that you realized something strange and important was happening
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And overnight, I just noticed there's a lot of what's called big character posters everywhere.
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It's just big pieces of paper, and with words written in very large letters, so everyone can read it from distance, kind of like today's social media.
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Yes, it's really, the posters is really of people denouncing others.
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In my school, I remember, the papers were denouncing administrators or teachers.
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And it's overnight, and it's just everywhere, and in the cafeteria, because that's the only place, that high wall, that's indoor.
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And it's just from a ceiling, from the floor to the ceiling, and the class stopped.
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And so one day, I went to the classroom, and I saw a note on the blackboard.
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Because this school was, like all the other institutions, was shut down by the Red Guards.
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And the Red Guards, and I think nowadays more and more Americans are familiar with that.
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And Red Guards were the kids from elementary school to universities.
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And that is struggle sessions, parade of those people who were denounced, and eventually become violence.
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So it was young people aiming their rage at the behest and the direction of the central government of Mao,
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against not foreigners who threatened China, but against Chinese, against your own people.
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And it is difficult, even for me to understand, and it took me a long time to understand what the Cultural Revolution was about.
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It is a revolution that Mao launched against the CCP, against his own party, against his own government.
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He had tens of millions of young people that he had indoctrinated in the government school for the past 17 years.
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They are ready to go, just give them a call, say, you are now mobilized to defend Mao and to defend communism.
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Kill their teachers, kill their principals, and they killed millions of people.
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Did, I mean, the normal people who are watching this, your family, I assume, did anybody say anything about it?
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And Mao had eight rallies to meet the Red Guards in Tiananmen Square eight times to declare that he was their Red Commander-in-Chief.
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And things just get progressively crazier and crazier and crazier.
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And I remember that in the first, it started, it was somewhat peaceful because all they did was destroy the past.
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Old ideas, old culture, old custom, and old habits.
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That includes destroying all the statues, the statues mostly in Buddhist statues, Christian statues.
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And everything that is old has to be destroyed.
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So when they finished with the public spaces, they went to people's homes.
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And I witnessed the Red Guards, went to people's homes, took everything they thought was old.
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Old is something that you need to get rid of, including furniture, people's old photos, everything.
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Because the goal is to get rid of the past so we can replace it with the pure Maoism.
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I remember reading about the Cultural Revolution years ago, reading a biography of Mao, and was so struck by how much Mao hated the Chinese.
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Hated the country, hated the history, hated the culture, and yet he was in charge of the country.
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And we have songs saying that he was our savior.
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He made it possible for us to have a better life.
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Because he removed these three big mountains that had been suppressed in Chinese people.
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They had the foreign imperialism, the old feudalism, and the bourgeois or capitalism.
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And he was not only our savior during the Cultural Revolution.
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So, was there a, do you remember the moment that the Red Guard went from carrying slogans and yelling at people, humiliating them, to the point where they went to killing people?
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Actually, it started about the same time because they only, in the very beginning, it only started on campuses.
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And killing started as early as August of 1966, few months after the Cultural Revolution.
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The first killing took place in a very prestigious middle school for girls.
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They, a bunch of girls, young girls, as young as 12, as old as 16, they beat, tortured, and killed their principal.
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So, in my school, I did not say killing, but I did say attacks by the kids.
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And one of the things I remember so vividly is a teacher.
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She is, she is a pretty teacher and she usually will dress kind of nicely, and that's considered bourgeois.
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So, the kids followed her, called her names, eventually they surrounded her and spit on her.
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So, after a while, she was covered with spit from head to toe.
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And that was considered mild because she was not hurt physically.
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The same time we heard killing happened in middle school, especially in universities.
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But the police were told to stay away from campuses.
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And if the Red Guards hit them, they are not allowed to head back, just like here.
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So, what happened to you as you got older during this period?
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So, the violence of the Red Guard movement lasted until 1969.
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By then, all the power was taken down by the Red Guards for Mao.
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So, basically, all the institutions were paralyzed.
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So, they thought, okay, now it's time for us to get some power.
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And then they started to fight each other for power.
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And that's when it's getting really, really violent.
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They raided the military places and got real weapons.
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Before, it was just sticks and stones and rocks.
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Because they thought, now it's time for us to get power.
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It got so bad that tanks were deployed in cities where there's a lot of defense factories.
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And it was not safe by then for us to go to the street.
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One day, a three bullet landed under our window when we were having dinner.
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So, it was so bad that one day, I described in my book that we were outside and we heard this really awful Chinese funeral music.
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And then, words came back that they have a coal parade.
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So, it was one faction of the Red Guards tried to gain public sympathy.
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So, they had the people that were killed by the other faction on the parade.
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But, once they became a threat to him, he did what?
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So, we don't know the number, the real number, but he killed tens of thousands of Red Guards.
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And then, eventually, he got them together, the leaders, and said, you disappointed me.
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And then, just like that, the whole movement was dismantled.
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Many of them sent to the virgin land, like gulags, to be re-educated through physical labor.
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You have to be, really, go through hard labor to become real communists.
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And from 1969, from that time on, all city kids from high school were sent to the countryside.
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And when I graduated from high school in 1975, I was two, sent to the countryside.
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I was doing the physical labor that was very primitive.
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And I stayed there for three years, after Mao died, and after Deng Xiaoping reopened universities.
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So, a lot of people think about countryside, they think about farm.
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Every rural area was a rural area or organized as commune.
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So in the commune there are a lot of production teams.
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So what I did was every day we would gather in the meeting place of the production team and
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And then in the harvest time, you use the point to get some produce, grain or potato
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So I not only experienced and witnessed the whole cultural revolution, I also got three
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years working in the fields and get to know how peasants did.
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He mobilized the whole peasantry and promised them free land.
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After the revolution succeeded in 1949, the peasants, the same people that put them into
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power found them in the very bottom of the society.
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And they were the ones that could not leave their land because of the, it's called hukou.
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And so, and I kind of, in a way, I'm glad I get a chance to be with them and to know that
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This is socialism, supposedly to liberate them from the oppression of the pressers.
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And then they end up way more worse off than before.
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And during the famine in 1970, 1959 to 1962, up to 50 of them starved to death, the peasants.
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00:16:23.580
The credit card companies are ripping Americans off, and enough is enough.
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Our legislation, the Credit Card Competition Act, would help in the grip Visa and
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Every time you use your credit card, they charge you a hidden fee called a swipe fee, and they've
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This hurts consumers and every small business owner.
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In fact, American families are paying $1,100 in hidden swipe fees each year.
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The fees Visa and MasterCard charge Americans are the highest in the world, double candidates,
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That's why I've taken action, but I need your help to help get this passed.
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I'm asking you to call your senator today and demand they pass the Credit Card Competition
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Not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee.
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So you're there three years, so you're there from 75 to 78, and then eight years later,
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How did you get here, and why did you come here?
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So I was so lucky that I was able to go to college at the age of 19, which is still not,
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because I was sent to the countryside when I was only 16.
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So I was given a job to teach in a teacher's college.
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And in the early 80s, more and more Americans come to China to volunteer to teach during
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We become friends, and she wanted to help me to come to America.
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She got assistantship for me, and she sponsored me.
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So in 1986, I never dreamed that would happen to me.
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And I got my visa, and I was on my way to America.
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You lived in this country, it sounds happily, from, let's just say, 86.
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George Floyd gets killed, and all of a sudden, in a day, the country changes.
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What did you notice about those early days, late May, early June 2020?
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And what did it make you think as you watched it?
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It's a long time coming, because I start to notice things earlier, even as early as 1990s.
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And I remember in a class that I took, and it's about special education, when the Act of American Disability.
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And the teacher was telling us, you know, now, you know, that they are protected.
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And as teachers, that we should, I just took the class, but there are others that were special ed teachers, that we should be very, very respectful.
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We should say, people with vision, impaired vision, something like that.
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And I was so impressed, as Americans, the nicest people.
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They try, you know, to be nice and not, you know, not hurt people's feelings.
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During the process, and we were taught, you can't say vision impaired.
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Now it's something, something, something different.
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According to Stanford, now that is the correct way.
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So that just reminded me of the Cultural Revolution, that there was only one correct way of thinking, of talking.
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And if you don't do it, you're getting into trouble.
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And so when the language started changing and people announced that, you know, from here on out we're calling X, Y, we're calling, I don't know, Peking, Beijing, or the Orient, Asia, or whatever, the blind, visually impaired, that reminded you of the Cultural Revolution?
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I'm just saying, if you ask me what I noticed, that was something I noticed.
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You can't, there's so many things you can't say, or you have to say it differently.
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And that's the correct way of basically thinking.
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But still, I did not lose my sleep over those things.
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And until later, and in my book, I did say, Trent Law, probably is the thing, the person that came to my mind that I can really pin down.
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The moment I really say, it's kind of really like Cultural Revolution.
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He was called a racist because he said something.
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I said, that really sounds like Cultural Revolution.
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Trent Law was a Republican senator from Mississippi who went to the funeral of the longest-serving Republican senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, and praised him at his funeral.
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And it was way before 2020 that I noticed things is really, really going wrong.
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Because in the workplace, I was invited to be a member of D&I.
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Back then it was D&I, Diversity and Inclusion Council.
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And I just realized this is not really about making people work together, help people work together.
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And, but things, you know, got so much bad in the 2020, when I saw the Antifa and the BMN burning our cities, I said, this is no longer some kind of troubling sign here or there.
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This is exactly what I noticed or what I witnessed during the Cultural Revolution.
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I have to get involved the one way or the other.
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I got involved with the Loudoun Republican, Loudoun County Republican Committee.
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And after that, and we get emails, you know, ask us to go to school board.
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And I was never, never involved politically to go and give a public speech.
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And, but I got so much support from the members say, I said, I don't even have children in school at that time.
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We're all taxpayers, and then you should have, go there and voice your, your opinion.
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I've been very alarmed about what's going on in our school.
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You are now teaching, training our children to be social justice warriors and to loathe our country and our history.
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Growing up in Mao's China, all this seemed very familiar.
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The communist regime used the same critical theory to divide people.
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The only difference is they used class instead of race.
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And back then, you know, you have to wear a mask.
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I said, thank God, I have to wear a mask and that cover, you know, hide myself.
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Well, I have to say one of the features, just as a foreigner reading about it, of the cultural revolution that's always struck with me, is the mass hysteria.
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People going crazy, getting caught up in this frenzy and really believing things that are, that are absurd.
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I want to show you a piece of tape from the United States.
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This is after George Floyd's drug overdose death.
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And this is a table of affluent white ladies who have paid money to be told they're racist.
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You have something inside of you that's not quite, like, that's racist.
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So you must have, you must have examples in your own life.
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I have absolutely no people of color, or minimal people of color, possibly the exclusion of being slightly Hispanic.
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I can say a racist thing you've done, because it just happened.
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When you just talked to me the way you just did.
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This is how white women talk to us all the time.
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When I say the exact same thing to my white girlfriend, who says the same exact thing.
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I don't care if you talk to everybody like that.
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The way you just spoke to me was straight up white supremacy.
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White supremacy is said to be hidden in innocuous phrases and banal behavior.
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The smallest things could be considered racist.
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It's enough that a person from a minority group feels insulted.
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I don't know that I was all that racist to start with, but I also would be more aware or hyper-aware of my thoughts or reactions to circumstances that would be racist.
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So here we have privileged white ladies being barked at by even more privileged non-white ladies about their sins, and the white ladies are loving it.
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And that's something that everyone has to go through.
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During the Cultural Revolution, in the very beginning, there was those in power that was taken down by the Red Guards.
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They were struggled against in the so-called struggle session.
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Some of them were killed right there in a public trial.
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But everyone had to go through the gentler form of struggle session, and that's called criticism and self-criticism.
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So as kids, we would have that kind of a struggle session every week.
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And we would sit together, and after referring some of the mouse quotes, and we would criticize self.
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And you would say, and I did this and that, not quite up to the requirement by mouse instruction.
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And I still have this bourgeois influence in me, and then everyone would join and say, yes, you're right.
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So we struggle against others, and we're against ourselves.
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So to get rid of every little incorrect thoughts from our mind, that's what it is.
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So China is, I mean, overwhelmingly Han Chinese.
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So you're not going to have racial lines in a country that's got one race.
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But if you take the race stuff out, white supremacy, it's identical, right?
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And they divide the whole population into two classes, red class and the black class.
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And you can figure out pretty much what it means.
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Red is the correct class, and the black is the incorrect class.
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Those are the property owners, landlords, or people with bourgeois worldview.
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It's not something, you know, you say, oh, okay, I'm black class.
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No, you are black class, and that is your identity, and that is required in every government document.
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Just like here, race, you have to figure out, you have to figure out what your race, what your race is.
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There, you have to figure out what your class is.
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And then you pass it down to your children, and your children's children, and you will forever be the enemy of the state.
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You know, Bernie Sanders still talk about 1% versus 99%, but race is the most potent way to divide America.
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And that's just exactly the same thing that happened in China.
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Maybe another similarity is that the people who are screaming about privilege themselves have the most privilege, right?
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I mean, so the people leading the struggle sections were obviously more privileged than the people being interrogated, correct?
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Most of the revolution, you can see who started.
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Only people from a rich family had the time to entertain how to start a revolution.
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And then they turned the people against the other elite.
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And that is always the case because they want people to fight against each other, and that's how they control them.
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So as you're starting to notice these things, do you tell your husband, who's American, your children who are born here, your friends who are American, do you say, wow, this looks like what I grew up with?
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That for a long, long time, I never really talked much about my past.
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And no, I haven't shared a lot of the stories with my family and with my colleagues.
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A lot of them are like, oh, she had such an interesting story.
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Because it's awful things that you want to forget.
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And that is the mistake that I made, and that is the mistake the conservatives made.
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They never really fight for the schools to teach the horror of communism.
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And when I went to that school board and gave him that speech, I think a lot of them have probably the first time heard such a thing as cultural revolution.
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That's why, as I say, when we, people like me who lived through communism, we saw through it right away.
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That's why they don't realize what was happening here in 2020 and what's happening now.
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When you say that to Americans, how do they respond?
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But many told me they never, they don't know anything about cultural revolution.
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And I think that's the mistake the conservatives made.
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Tell us about your speech at the Loudoun event.
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And so the only thing I can say is that what's happening in our school and how you push the CRT just, to me, is just the repeat of the cultural revolution.
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During the cultural revolution, I witnessed students and teachers turn against each other.
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We changed school names to be politically correct.
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The Red Guards destroy anything that is not communist.
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We are also encouraged to report on each other, just like the student equity ambassador program and the bias reporting system.
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This is indeed the American version of the Chinese communist, the Chinese cultural revolution.
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The critical race theory has its roots in cultural Marxism.
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And I was just, you know, I really, I just left the meeting.
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And because I took time off my work, I have to go back and make up the time.
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And I realized, my God, people just don't know.
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That is absolutely, to me, I'm convinced it's on purpose.
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And they do not teach the horror or the history of communism.
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Because those that are in control, they are Marxists.
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They want to use the same tactics to gain power.
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And as later, from my Twitter follower, and I see comments like, in school, we learned slavery.
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And that's why people don't know what's going on today.
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Because that history has been withheld from them.
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Do you notice similarities in between Mao's attempt to destroy Chinese culture, history, language, and our government's attempt to hide our history and change our history, lie about our history to the population?
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And as we know that whoever controls the present, controls the past.
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And whoever controls the past, controls the future.
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That's what CCP did when they took over China in 1949.
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But what they really put their energy and focus on is to rewrite history.
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So the history that I learned, and even today I have to get rid of all this misinformation that I received as a schoolgirl and later in college, all fictional, absolutely fictional.
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And you believe, just as I said earlier, you believe that communists, the CCP is our savior.
00:36:09.180
To liberate us from the oppression of those, you know, imperialism, imperialism, feudalism, and capitalism.
00:36:32.100
Thinking, I think, requires you know something.
00:36:39.320
And hopefully, you can, you know, go through them and come up with your own conclusion.
00:36:47.780
When you have only one information, you can't think.
00:36:57.880
Some people will say that they see through things within the culture.
00:37:14.800
I mean, you're born 10 years after the Communist Revolution.
00:37:18.460
And you, you know, you watch the whole cycle of it.
00:37:21.620
So, given that, where do you think things are going in this country right now?
00:37:32.400
You know, it is really, really decades in the making in America.
00:37:36.880
After the 60s, when the Marxists took over all universities, they have been creating generations,
00:37:46.380
not just one generation, generations of Marxists or people who absolutely follow those ideologies.
00:37:55.140
Now, they are in our institutions, in every institutions, including educational system, corporations, government, and even our military.
00:38:10.340
So, I always say that the infiltration of communism is complete in this country.
00:38:17.980
And so, it is really, really, we're in dire situation.
00:38:25.220
Well, we have to start from educating people and to wake people up by telling them history,
00:38:31.560
by telling them that what's going on here is nothing new.
00:38:40.280
The witness, the survivors are still here trying to tell American people this is communist revolution.
00:38:51.180
And the goal is for the globalists, I always say globalists, to take power.
00:39:05.460
And sometimes I feel so, just feel like there's no hope.
00:39:10.580
But many times I do feel like there's a great hope.
00:39:13.920
I have been invited to talk to so many people around the country.
00:39:18.540
And I met people who are parents who never involved politically, just like me.
00:39:31.180
And we can't just fight because we kind of figure we might win.
00:39:37.740
To me, we have to fight because we believe in it.
00:39:48.560
People who grew up in this country, most I know, assume that it can never get too out
00:40:07.560
But because it's America, that revolution will never entail the killing of a lot of people.
00:40:13.060
All revolutions end up killing a lot of people, but ours won't somehow.
00:40:16.980
Just looking out on the streets and the campus today, look at those people who have no empathy
00:40:24.980
because their empathy is guided by the ideology.
00:40:31.140
That ideology is Marxist ideology about oppressors and oppressed.
00:40:37.160
The worldview is looking at everything in terms of who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed.
00:40:43.160
And that is absolutely the communist worldview.
00:40:47.740
And for those who are oppressed, anything they do to the oppressor is justified.
00:40:59.640
This is all justified, just like the Cultural Revolution.
00:41:03.220
And that's what's happening in today's America.
00:41:05.460
Those are the absolute result of decades of indoctrination.
00:41:17.120
And today they're just out there accepting, justifying, and celebrating violence.
00:41:23.260
It's only a short step away from committing violence.
00:41:26.300
Those kids in China that killed their principal, their teachers, they're not monsters.
00:41:34.220
They were, actually, most of them were from very prestigious universities and high schools.
00:41:43.300
You know, I mean, the parallels are unbelievable.
00:41:45.880
So the Chinese Harvard was more radical than the Chinese HVAC repair school.
00:41:52.860
The Cultural Revolution started in Tsinghua and Beijing University, the top of the top.
00:41:58.600
And those, the Red Guards that committed murders were the best of the best, supposedly.
00:42:07.080
And there's one short step that we'll see this happen if we don't stop it.
00:42:12.040
When you say that, do people take you seriously, do you think, in this country?
00:42:17.960
I think the people who listen to me, yes, they believe me.
00:42:21.140
And that's why I think I play a very, very important role.
00:42:25.100
Because I'm telling people not something I just learned from books or just I did some research.
00:42:30.260
It is from my lived experience, using the left terminology.
00:42:44.840
So, but our system was supposed to, we were taught growing up that our system would never allow something like this to happen because it's a democracy.
00:42:54.920
And you can vote them out if you don't like them.
00:43:02.000
Our system, our constitution is made for moral and religious people.
00:43:20.180
We are dealing with Marxists and communists who control our institution.
00:43:27.860
And so they can use this democratic process and carry out their agenda and destroy everything on the path.
00:44:00.580
That's why I always tell people, the only way for us to win the war is to get our school back.
00:44:11.780
Because those are the institutions that are shaping people's mind.
00:44:24.540
When you think that way, everything is easier to see.
00:44:27.180
I did not know why Mao would just launch this revolution that destroyed everything.
00:44:33.160
Destroyed people's lives, my life, and everything.
00:44:38.840
He wanted to launch the Cultural Revolution because he wanted to have absolute power.
00:44:45.380
In the process, he became not just the supreme leader.
00:44:50.460
In China today, are average people aware that the Cultural Revolution happened?
00:45:02.260
I think it's so important for people to understand.
00:45:05.580
People in power, they want to control history, and they want to erase inconvenient history.
00:45:15.840
Young people were not taught Cultural Revolution.
00:45:19.100
And when they talk about it, they were told that was the anti-corruption campaign.
00:45:27.460
And the young people, many of them, never heard about the Tiananmen Massacre because it was not in the history book, not taught, forgotten.
00:45:40.460
All the history of the atrocities by the CCP were not taught to the new generation.
00:45:47.160
Is it, I mean, it's not very reassuring that the political party that killed tens of millions of people is still in power.
00:46:02.080
And young people don't know, and old people dare not to talk about it.
00:46:11.200
People who know, a lot of them don't want to talk about it.
00:46:18.040
You survived all of this, this first revolution.
00:46:21.820
What advice would you give to Americans for how to respond to our revolution right now happening in this country?
00:46:31.580
Only when you understand what's going on, you can fight back.
00:46:34.980
Otherwise, you can't fight something you don't understand.
00:46:37.540
And it's not some kind of crazy kind of a Democrat that they just do some crazy things.
00:46:44.180
This is absolutely a full-blowing communist revolution.
00:46:50.700
Destroy this country so some people can have total control of power.
00:46:55.680
So it has nothing to do with improving anybody's life.
00:46:59.520
And if you want to save this country and save it for your children and your children's children,
00:47:05.620
you have to get involved, you have to fight back, as your life depends on it.
00:47:11.160
With that, Shijian Banfleet, thank you very much.