by Andrew Court at The Daily Mail
A Virginia mom who survived China’s Cultural Revolution is continuing to speak out against the teaching of critical race theory in US schools after video of her blasting the academic movement went viral earlier this week.
Xi Van Fleet – who fled China at the age of 26 before settling in the United States -made headlines after she slammed CRT at a Loudoun County School Board meeting on Wednesday, saying it had striking similarities to theories pushed by communists in her native country.
‘CRT trains children to be social justice warriors and to loathe their country and their history… It is indeed the American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution,’ she declared during her speech at the meeting.
On Thursday night, Van Fleet appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, where she extrapolated on her comparison.
‘I just want to let the American people know that what is going on in our schools and in our country is really a replay of the cultural revolution in China,’ she said.
‘CRT uses the same ideology, the same methodology, even the same vocabulary. The ideology is cultural Marxism.’
The Cultural Revolution – a violent political purge that occurred in China from 1966 – 1976 – began with leader Mao Zedong attempting to destroy remnants of capitalism by shutting down debate, dissent and free speech.
Mao enlisted the help of young university students, known as ‘Red Guards’, who torched books and artworks, and tried to ‘cancel’ those who were seen as ‘ideologically impure’.
The purge left between 500,000 and 20 million people dead in the space of just a decade. Van Fleet was just six years old when it started.
Van Fleet says the only difference is that CRT segregates people by race, whereas theories pushed in the Cultural Revolution divided people by class before turning them against one another.
‘We basically canceled the whole Chinese civilization pre-Communism and we changed our school names, street names, store names, even our personal names,’ Van Fleet told Hannity.
She even said ‘wokeness’ was a key component of the methods used by Maoists.
‘Wokeness – to be specific – we used class wokeness in China,’ she also recalled.
‘Your level of wokeness determines your chance to get a promotion or to get benefits and who decides your level of wokeness? The party leaders,’ she stated.
Speaking at the School Board meeting on Wednesday night, Van Fleet stated: ‘We were taught to denounce our heritage, and Red Guards destroyed anything that is not communist…statues, books and anything else.’
‘We were also encouraged to report on each other, just like the Student Equity Ambassador program and the bias reporting system,’ Van Fleet added, referring to new initiatives set up in Loudoun County public schools.
After arriving in the US at the age of 26, Van Fleet says she ‘felt like it was such a free country, meaning I have free access to all sorts of information – books on both sides of the issues’.
However, now, she says she feels that some of that freedom is being taken away.
‘I can’t really just say what I mean, even though the other side can say whatever,. To me, and to a lot of Chinese, it is heartbreaking that we escaped communism and now we experience communism here.’…
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