That's What Xi Said - A Conversation with Xi Van Fleet

A few years after the failure of China's Great Leap Forward (the cause of the great Chinese famine), a new socio-political movement called the Great Cultural Revolution started. From 1966 to its end with the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, this revolution sought to preserve communism by purging capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society and to re-introduce Maoist thought.

In this episode, our guest Xi Van Fleet - a survivor of the Cultural Revolution (which started when she was six years old) - recalls how it came to pass. Teachers and students were pitted against each other, and the erosion and dismantling of all things "old" or traditional, ultimately led to the death of somewhere between 500,000 and 20 million people. Xi finally made it out by travelling to the United States where she now lives in Virginia.

Xi also received some notoriety recently in 2021, when she spoke out against Critical Race Theory (CRT) at a Loudoun County school board hearing, where she compared it to the Cultural Revolution.