Xi Van Fleet said Cultural Revolution began when she was 6, pitted students against one another and their teachers
A Virginia mom who endured Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution before immigrating to the U.S. ripped a Virginia school board at a public meeting Tuesday over its stubborn support of the controversial critical race theory.
“I’ve been very alarmed by what’s going on in our schools,” Xi 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.”
She likened CRT, 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.
Watch a brave parent who grew up in Mao’s China point out all of the identical traits b/n the Cultural Revolution and what LCPS, and really every school system, are doing through the use of CRT. pic.twitter.com/zH7XuyBmW6
— The Virginia Project UAC (@TVPUAC) June 9, 2021
Van Fleet, whose son graduated from Loudoun High School in 2015, shared some of her experience growing up in China’s Sichuan province with Fox News exclusively Wednesday evening.
The Cultural Revolution began when she was 6 years old, she said, and immediately pitted students and teachers and against one another by hanging “Big Posters” and hallways and the cafeteria where students could write criticisms against anyone deemed ideological impure.”
One of the teachers was considered bourgeoisie because she liked to wear pretty clothes,” Van Fleet said. “So the students attacked her and spit on her. She was covered with spit… and pretty soon it became violence.”
Communist squads would raid homes and destroy any relics of China’s past culture, history, governments or religion, she said.”
Everything that was considered ‘old,’ feudalist, a vase, Buddhas, everything was taken out and smashed,” she said. There were thought crimes, too.
“We were asked to report if we hear anything about someone saying anything showing that there’s a lack of complete loyalty to Mao,” she said. “There were people reporting their parents, and their parents ended up in jail.”
At 26 years old, she said, she finally made it out, traveling to the U. S. – where she immediately found freedoms she had never been able to enjoy before.
“I felt like it’s such a free country, meaning I have free access to all sorts of information – books on both sides of the issues,” she said.
In the current political and cultural climate in the U. S., however, she said she felt some of that freedom eroding.
“I can’t really just say what I mean, even though the other side can say whatever,” she said. “To me, and to a lot of Chinese, it is heartbreaking that we escaped communism and now we experience communism here.”
In her speech to the school board, which officials made her shorten to fit the one-minute limit, she drew direct parallels between what she saw back then in China and what she sees in the United States today.”
The Communist regime used the same critical theory to divide people,” she said. “The only difference is they used class instead of race.”
I just want Americans to know that their privilege is to be here living in America, that is just the biggest privilege. ~ Xi Van Fleet
She said she witnessed students and teachers “turn against each other” during the program 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.”
“This is indeed the American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” she said. “The critical race theory has its roots in cultural Marxism. It should have no place in our school.”
