I was in Beijing on 9 September 1976, the day Mao died, as was Xi Van Fleet. Fifty years ago this September. Yikes!
So I know exactly what she's talking about. China of that Cultural Revolutionary time. The poverty. The corruption. The oppression. The main food that winter was Chinese cabbage piled high on street corners. All other food was rationed. I needed ration tickets for rice. Ration tickets for cotton. Ration tickets for shoes. Bread didn't exist. You needed permission to travel anywhere. The average urban wage was $25 per month. Farmers much less.
I was a language student. My attempts at essays in my learner's Chinese were graded not just for grammar and character strokes, but for political content. There was correct view and a wrong one. (It’s from Mao that the term “political correctness” comes).
It was in the socialist China of those days that I learned I didn't much like socialism. Let alone communism. Though I tend to treat "socialism" and "communism" pretty much interchangeably. Socialism: bad. Communism: badder.
Socialism in practice, as in China of the 70s, destroyed my lazy-hazy undergraduate chardonna-socialism that I shared with my class mates.
Sadly, though, it's starting again in America. Socialism. Communism. Maoism redux. We see it everywhere.
I've followed Xi Van Fleet for years on X. She's a vocal critic of the CCP. Her grandparents were the Chinese equivalent of Kulaks, small landowners, who had their land confiscated (ie, stolen) by the CCP. Her grandparents were named "Black Faction" members, Hei Pai. And therefore so were her parents, and therefore so was Xi herself. One person in the family is a Black Faction, all the family members are Black Faction. The only escape from the branding was to escape the country.
Talking in the vid above to Adam Carolla, Xi warns of the dangers of resurgent Maoism in America. The only difference from China's of the 60s and 70s being that the divisions between "good" and "bad" -- which in China of the Mao era were class-based, rich or poor, Hei Pai or Hong Pai, Black faction or Red faction -- in America are based on race, or gender, or sexual orientation, or all three. The operatives are the same. The M.O. is the same. Define and name the parties, label one "good", the other "bad", and have at it -- divide the country; go to war. (Joe Biden was pretty good at this. Remember his speech in Philadelphia in October 2024? Where he labelled half the country, Republicans, “near Nazis”?).
With the "good" side, of course, pre-ordained to come out on top of the evil "Black faction". Or so they believe.
When you look at what's going on in America today, in big chunks of the Democrat party, moving ever Left (the communist hammer & sickle red flag of communism at the "No Kings" protests!), often paid by wealthy donors in America and overseas, can you really say her warnings are not relevant? Are some kind of crazy conspiracy theory?
Meantime, China's Communist Party perseveres, even as China's economy is less socialist and more a kind of crony-capitalism. But, The Party stays in power -- 75 years and counting.
The Party Abides, dude.
ADDED: Some background to the Chinese influencer who's popped up all over the internet recently, Jiang Xueqin.
