by James A. Bacon

Xi Van Fleet grew up in communist China. She was a schoolgirl in the late 1960s when Mao Zedong’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution shook the nation. She had family members who were persecuted. She experienced the indoctrination that passed for schooling. As a teen, she was torn from her mother and father and assigned to work in a remote village. Throughout it all, she witnessed the wholesale destruction of the “Four Olds” — old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas.

She survived the hellscape of Mao’s China, during which 20 million people lost their lives, and managed to emigrate to the United States. She married an American, got a steady job, and settled into a comfortable middle-class life in Loudoun County. Then to her dismay, Van Fleet saw history repeating itself. “I have lived through two cultural revolutions,” she told a rapt audience Wednesday at the Glen Allen Cultural Center in an event organized by the Virginia Forum.

One day in 2020 she spoke out at a Loudoun County School Board meeting, and her message went viral. She appeared on Fox News and interview requests poured in. Vowing to dedicate herself to raising the alarm, she recounted the parallels between communist China and contemporary America in a book, Mao’s America: A Survivor’s Warning.

The United States is not ruled by a totalitarian dictator, but in what Van Fleet sees as a raw quest for power, American cultural elites have unleashed a similar assault on traditional institutions, values and thought. Nothing is sacred. Nothing is too small to escape criticism.

The political system in China has been termed as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” to describe how Marxist-Leninist theory imported from the Soviet Union was adapted to Chinese history and culture. Van Fleet described the “woke revolution” in the U.S. as “Maoism with American characteristics.”

If someone speaks of communism as a political force in America, people in polite society roll their eyes. Such language seems a throwback to the “red scare” of the 1950s when Senator Joseph McCarthy made wild accusations of communist infiltration into American institutions. According to Van Fleet, McCarthy wasn’t all wrong, but contemporary communism has morphed from Soviet-era agitprop. Talk of class oppression has been subsumed by the doctrine of intersectional oppression. The proletariat (the working class), once seen as the vanguard of progressive thinking, is now regarded as reactionary. The American cultural revolution is justified in the name of “marginalized” racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities.

Van Fleet traced the evolution of Marxist theory culminating in the doctrine of intersectional oppression. Marx created the framework for thinking about one class oppressing another. He went wrong in predicting that the proletariat would lead the way. Communism first gained power in Russia, where the working class was small and the leaders were educated intellectuals, but it failed to spread to the industrialized nations of Europe and North America.

In the 1930s, an Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci, took Marxist theory in a new direction. Instead of advocating the violent overthrow of bourgeois governments, he articulated the “long march through the institutions,” a gradual, peaceful takeover of cultural, educational and political institutions. Gramsci’s concept of cultural “hegemony” — in which the ruling class maintained power through its dominance of cultural institutions — inspired what came to be known as “critical theory,” which critiqued society in terms of power structures. In the U.S., which was divided by race, critical theory made the leap to “critical race theory.” In Van Fleet’s reckoning, the takeover of American cultural institutions is nearly complete, and the doctrine of intersectional oppression, the offspring of critical theory, is the new reigning orthodoxy.

Those who embrace the tenets of intersectional oppression may not think of themselves as Marxists or neo-Marxists, but their ideas have a Marxist intellectual heritage.

Van Fleet put it bluntly. “I say communism is taking over America. It’s here. It’s in our face. It’s everywhere.”

China is the only country to have experienced a sweeping cultural revolution that purged every aspect of the past, she said. (One might argue that the Taliban, inspired by Islam, did the same in Afghanistan.) But she sees history repeating itself in America. Central to both the Chinese and American cultural revolutions is delegitimization of the past. Mao’s youthful Red Guards set about systematically destroying remnants of China’s ancient civilization. They tore down statues, leveled temples, and plundered graves. They raided peoples’ homes and destroyed personal belongings — furniture, artworks, family photos — that spoke of the past. They even desecrated a temple dedicated to Confucius, whose thought and values had inspired two millennia of Chinese history.

Van Fleet sees a direct parallel in America today. Here in Virginia the assault on tradition started with the dismantling of Confederate statues. But the iconoclastic fury has extended beyond rebel generals. “Tomorrow it will be the founding fathers,” she said.

Likewise, the teaching of history has become a battleground. Conventional views of history in America are denounced as racist. “He who controls the past controls the present,” she warned.

Maoism also sought to destroy the family. Schools taught that children owed their primary allegiance to the state. “That’s what’s happening in America,” Van Fleet said. Parents are losing their rights to the state. Novel ideologies relating to sex, gender, and sexual orientation are being taught in schools. If parents protest a child’s decision to proclaim itself transgender, they can be deemed a threat to the child’s well-being, and the child can be removed from their care.

The indoctrination starts in pre-school, Van Fleet said. “They want your kid from the moment they’re born.”

Another frightening parallel is cancel culture. In Mao’s China, people with politically incorrect views were vilified, humiliated, deprived of their livelihoods and subjected to “struggle sessions” like the opening scene of the Netflix series, “The 3 Body Problem” (shown above), based on the novel by Liu Cixin. In China, it was not sufficient just to stay quiet. One had to actively participate in the denunciation of others, says Van Fleet. The logic in the woke left is scarily similar: silence is violence. It’s not enough to be not racist. One has to be “anti-racist.”

“Everything that happened in China is happening in America,” said Van Fleet.