In her new book, “Mao’s America: A Survivor’s Warning,” anti-communist advocate Xi Van Fleet recounts all the troubling signs indicating that America’s present is rapidly coming to resemble China’s Maoist past.
She should know.
Xi was in school when the Cultural Revolution burst upon the Chinese landscape in 1966 with all the violence of a late summer hurricane.
Big Character posters on the walls of her school — where classes had been suspended — carried the shocking news that the country she was living in was rotten to the core.
China’s history, its traditions, its literature, its very culture, all had to be cancelled.
Chairman Mao Zedong had said so.
As Xi recounts in “Mao’s America,” she watched in shock as beloved teachers were publicly humiliated in “struggle sessions” that grew ever more violent over time.
Encouraged by Mao, the students then organized into paramilitary units called Red Guards and began to attack society as a whole.
They rampaged through cities and towns, destroying churches, temples, libraries and museums.
They burned books, beheaded statues, and smashed priceless antiques wherever they found them.
They broke into the homes of those who had been declared by the Party to have a “bad class background.”
In the midst of this terror, you were either with Mao or you were a counterrevolutionary “People turned against each other in search of enemies and in defense of Mao,” Xi writes. “Friends turned against friends, neighbors against neighbors, coworkers against coworkers, and family members.”
Competing Red Guard factions soon graduated from shouting quotations from Chairman to each other to open warfare and mass killing.
Such was the hatred sown that political cannibalism — eating of the hearts and livers of defeated enemies— was reported in many parts of the country. Xi herself had nightmares for years about corpses,“with eyes gouged out and the body cut open.”
Robbed of their education, the students had been turned into mindless Maoist bots convinced that Mao was a god and anyone who opposed him was evil.
In 1986, after years of trying, Xi was able to leave this horror and study in the US.
She details reveling in the freedoms she found here, embracing the idea that all men are created equal, and that individual effort and merit mattered.
She worked hard to get a degree in library science, married the love of her life, bought a house, and started a family.
She was living her own American dream.
But as she details, Xi had escaped the nightmare that was Mao’s China, only to find that it had followed her to her new home.
That was the day her employer instituted a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) program.
Mandatory training sessions followed at which she was told that some of her colleagues were benefiting from White Privilege, while others were somehow being oppressed by ill-defined “structural racism.”
Xi was appalled that the company was dividing people into “good classes” and “bad classes” on the basis of their sex or skin color.
“I have seen all this before,” she thought to herself. It was just what Mao had done in China, only now the divisions were based not on class, but on race and gender.
Xi decided to speak up at the next DEI meeting.
“I have great working relationships with all my white colleagues,” she writes. “But [DEI] has made me realize that I have been surrounded by ‘white supremists.’ Should I feel unsafe now?”
Her superiors were furious at her brutal takedown of DEI, and not long afterwards she was forced out of the company.
Now fully awake to the dangers of this kind of cultural Marxism, she says she recognized its signs everywhere:
As she explains in the pages of her first book, Xi saw it in the overreach during COVID, when the government labeled anyone who disobeyed the Made-in-China lockdowns, masking, and social distancing a threat to others. She saw it in the orgy of destruction that followed George Floyd’s death.
Most of all, she found it in America’s public schools where, just as in Mao’s China, students were being dumbed down. Now more easy to manipulate and control, they were then brainwashed into believing that their country was systemically and irredeemably racist.
Xi says she realized that the very fabric of her adopted homeland was being torn apart by the same kind of hateful Maoist ideology that had once convulsed China.
She had seen Mao burn his country to the ground during the Cultural Revolution — and she didn’t want the same kind of discord to take root here.
But when she looked around at her fellow Americans, she realized that most of them had no idea of the danger that the Maoist rewriting of history or theories like DEI posed to the Republic. They were sleepwalking into a kind of cultural Armageddon.
“Mao’s America” is Xi Van Fleet’s wake-up call to the country. Read it and learn about the Cultural Revolution she believes is destroying the soul of America.
Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of The Devil and Communist China (TAN Books)
