[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Xi Van Fleet grew up in China during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. She was too young to be a real revolutionary Red Guard, but old enough to observe the astonishing scenes of violence and ideological fervor around her during those terrible years.

I sat down with her to discuss her new book, “Made in America: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Enabled Communist China and Created Our Greatest Threat.”

She says she felt compelled to write this book to help Americans understand the true nature of communism. Over the past hundred years or so, the United States has made one grave mistake after another because of this major blind spot, she says.

In our deep-dive interview, Van Fleet takes me on a tour of China’s history starting in the late 19th century and explains how America—over and over again—made decisions that helped the Chinese Communist Party: first to gain influence, then to defeat the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek, and eventually to rescue the CCP from certain collapse in the 1970s.

By visiting Beijing and re-opening US-China relations at a time when China’s economy was in shambles, President Richard Nixon effectively “saved the CCP from the ruins,” she says.

The history of how the United States helped the CCP survive is “hidden history,” as she calls it, one that is not taught in the schools and not discussed publicly: “A lot of people want to hide it. But in order for us to understand, we have to learn this very, very important piece of history that my book is all about.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Xi Van Fleet, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Xi Van Fleet:

Thank you so much for having me back for the third time.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, and you always have incredibly important things to say, and congratulations on your new book, which I will say is very important, and I find it particularly poignant. You mentioned something in there that a lot of people don’t understand, but I also covered. Totalitarianism is distinct from just your run-of-the-mill authoritarian dictatorship. How is it different?

Ms. Van Fleet:

I think this is important because I think a lot of people use it interchangeably, and a lot of people use authoritarianism to describe the CCP. There is a big difference, and I covered that in my book. So the difference is that authoritarianism is, of course, dictatorship. They demand you do certain things, and they demand that you obey. And mostly leave you alone.

Not totalitarianism. It demands not only that you obey, but you have to believe in them. That means they have to control your mind. And it’s like a religion. So I think that totalitarianism is more like a theocracy. Like in Iran, like in China, they absolutely demand that you change your mind. That’s called thought reform. And believe their lies. You have to believe. They demand that. And that’s my experience, my first 26 years experience in China. It’s important to understand that the CCP and the people running Iran are totalitarian.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, this is super interesting because I think that, you know, through pushing this mass propaganda into the system, right, this is something that was a huge lesson to me over the last 10 years, how powerful propaganda can be, that it will change the minds of people. I always thought that people never really accepted propaganda. It was just, it was kind of like, people knew that it probably wasn’t true, but just kind of were, okay, whatever. We'll run with it because they have all the guns. But no, it actually changes people, right? When it’s pushed in so hard through the system and so in the Cultural Revolution, which you lived through, you saw that in real time.

Ms. Van Fleet:

Yes, and here too I think I want people to realize wokeism is also totalitarian in nature because it demands that you believe. They demand you believe. You can’t just say, okay, women can be, but you have to believe it. And they have been very successful in changing people’s minds. So it is totalitarian in nature. So that’s why the underlying link is communism, Marxism.

Mr. Jekielek:

Interesting. Well, so a fine point here, okay? I think you’re exactly right in that they demand that you believe. But I still think a lot of people don’t quite believe, but they performatively believe. They pretend. They believe because, well, it’s a lot more convenient. And, of course, again, they have all the guns, right? Or all of the social power, let’s say, or a lot of the social power as is the case in the West. So it’s an interesting distinction because they demand that you have to believe, but, of course, not everybody. Some of it is pretty crazy, so not everybody believes. It’s okay to just pretend hard that you believe, right?

Ms. Van Fleet:

It started that way. It’s always in the Cultural Revolution, how many people really believe, but they have to pretend because not believing or showing that you doubt means you’re gonna end up in gulags or even on the execution side. And that is how they run their regime and how they have to do that in order to control your mind.

Mr. Jekielek:

Just very briefly, before we talk about the details of the book, how did the Cultural Revolution affect you personally?

Ms. Van Fleet:

I really start to think more and more that I understand. I really do. I understand people going on the street today in Minneapolis, fighting, their eyes believing they’re doing something noble. And that’s exactly what happened to the Red Guards. You can’t say they just totally have no idea what they’re doing. They believe in it.

And the same thing is true here. Those radical Left, they believe; they thought it’s something noble. And that’s the power of indoctrination. I’ve seen that. I was one of them, even though I was not really a Red Guard; I was too young. But I believed in the lies that I was told. I absolutely never doubted. I always believed that the party is always right. The party cannot be wrong. So what do I do? I believe in the party.

Mr. Jekielek:

And just very briefly, for those that might be uninitiated, the Red Guard, tell me about who they were.

Ms. Van Fleet:

The Red Guards are the kids. Yes, during the Cultural Revolution, Mao needed an army to carry out his revolution. And he couldn’t use the army; that would look like a coup because his goal is to take down the CCP. Yes, his goal is to take down the CCP.

Mr. Jekielek:

Run this by me again. Mao’s goal was to take down the CCP. I hadn’t heard that before. Tell me more.

Ms. Van Fleet:

Yes, because he believed that they were somehow not listening to him. So what to do? Get rid of them, all of them, from the central government all the way down to the village level. And so he needed people to do it. He needed an army, and he had an army, and that is tens of millions of Red Guards, the young people. They know nothing, and they can’t think critically. And they do one thing really well: follow the orders. So they did what Mao wanted them to do; to take down the CCP, they did.

Mr. Jekielek:

So what, how did that look like in real life? Like, what did that mean? What did these Red Guards actually do?

Ms. Van Fleet:

In 2020, that’s what they did in the Cultural Revolution. Like what they did here in America. It’s to destroy everything, destroy statues, destroy communities, because they’re so emboldened. They were backed by people in power. In China, they were backed by Mao. Mao claimed himself to be the Red Commander in Chief for the Red Guards. And here, the Democratic Party was behind those mobs, those rioters, those looters, everything. And so you don’t have to imagine. You just think about 2020 in Minneapolis, 2026 in Minneapolis. That is what the Red Guard looked like.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, except that the Red Guard took it to a kind of a whole different level, right? I mean, I remember there was this three-body problem. Remember, there’s this series that came out recently, not too long ago, where they really kind of showed what these Red Guards were doing, right? And I was amazed that this landed on Netflix.

Ms. Van Fleet:

I was too. Yes. And I tweeted about it because it’s very true to life. That’s very close to what happened.

Mr. Jekielek:

So my point is they were killing people literally, right? They were killing people.

Ms. Van Fleet:

And the killing started with the professors, started with their teachers and principals. And so I would say we’re not there yet. Very close, very close. If we don’t stop it, it won’t take long for us to get there.

Mr. Jekielek:

And so what you’re saying is this is a combination of indoctrination and sort of the understanding that there’s institutional power behind you, the combination of those two things.

Ms. Van Fleet:

Absolutely. I would think, I think most people probably will agree that Rene Good did not prepare to die. I think she kind of like many others probably believed that there are no consequences, so yes, and they absolutely feel that they are empowered by the Democratic Party and by the people who urged them to go on the street, by the lieutenant governor who urged them, put your body on the line. And many of them probably did not think there would be any consequences. Because there were no consequences in 2020, after all those riots, what happened to those people? We don’t know. Nothing.

Mr. Jekielek:

So let’s go back now to, you make some really interesting, you did some really interesting research in your book. You’re looking way back to even before the time when the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949 in China, that already there were sort of American interests that were basically supporting it. I did not know about this. Tell me more.

Ms. Van Fleet:

This is what I tried to do in my book: trace all the way back to the beginning. And it really started in the 1800s, in the middle of the 1800s, when a lot of American missionaries or Western missionaries went to China to spread the gospel. At the same time, they also brought with them the idea of democracy and the idea of constitutional government. And their work actually fueled the revolution of 1912, which created the Republic, called the Republic of China.

In 1912, they tried their best. It’s imperfect; it’s far from being perfect, but it’s trying to follow the model of American-style government. And it failed, but it survived. And it’s still here today. People don’t think about it. It’s still here today. The Republic of China is now in Taiwan, having transitioned to a full democracy. So that was the beginning.

But what happened? China was on the way to becoming a really potential republic and Asia’s first, but it was derailed. That part of history is just astonishing, and who played that role to derail the whole potential? It was Woodrow Wilson.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, we know—let’s go before Woodrow Wilson got involved, I mean, the Soviet Comintern was a little bit involved here. Okay, I may say that glibly, right? This was a project of the Soviet Union, right?

Ms. Van Fleet:

No, actually, it’s the other way around. The Western ideas came to China around the same time, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Enlightenment ideas—ideas of democracy, ideas of freedom—and among them is also Marxism. But there was no interaction. People were more drawn to the Western ideas, and they called it Mr. De and Mr. Sai, meaning science and democracy. They believed that’s what China needed, and that’s what would save China and help China modernize and become independent from the foreign influence or control of the imperial West.

And then something happened. After World War I, the foreign powers got together in Versailles, and that was the Paris peace talk. China was very hopeful, thinking that they would get the land called Shandong province back from the Germans. Instead, it went to Japan. Because people were so hopeful that Woodrow Wilson would help them with their demands, with their cause of getting their land back from Germany, it did not happen.

And that turned everything upside down. Overnight, the sentiment shifted from pro-America to anti-America, which paved the way for the red tide to sweep through China. That gave the opening to the Russians to come to China and eventually helped the radicals form communist groups. And in 1921, the Communist Party was officially founded. So Russia came second.

Mr. Jekielek:

But it’s just, it’s a fine point, but they took advantage of an opening.

Ms. Van Fleet:

Exactly. The opening was because the Chinese were disillusioned about Western-style democracy. That is really the key point. And so, basically, it set the stage for the Russians to come to China and eventually take over.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, well, trace that for me. Now, of course, the Soviets came; they were doing their thing. But it didn’t last that long in itself, right? Like basically. Mao and the Chinese took control of the Communist party at some point pretty quickly, right?

Ms. Van Fleet:

That is a long history. I think it’s better to read the book, because it’s a lot of history. Actually, the Russians not only took over the communists, because they helped to fund the communists, they also took control of the nationalists. The leader of the nationalist party, Sun Yat-sen, who was considered the founder of a Chinese republic, was looking for help from the West, and no one helped him; everyone turned their back on him.

So eventually, he said, I have to go to Russia because no one was willing to help us. At that time, actually, the dominant thought in America was isolation regarding China, such a vast and poor continent. Over there, it didn’t really matter to our national interests. It might be right, but they overlooked a very important factor: the Russians were ready to move in, and they did.

Mr. Jekielek:

Absolutely. So we have two ways now that you explained sort of how America played a role in bringing us to today, the way the Communist Party rules. There was very early on in America, and frankly, in the West writ large, a kind of love affair with communism. And something that I’ve been increasingly learning more about is, I guess you could call it Lenin’s evil genius, an ability to push very attractive narratives out into the world, very warm and pleasant-sounding propaganda, which was very acceptable to all sorts of people who were disillusioned with their countries, disillusioned with their governments. And so it created this whole group of people that were just very sympathetic, even when atrocities started happening. So just tell me about this whole picture.

Ms. Van Fleet:

Yes, of course. They were very good at finding out what was appealing. At that time, what was appealing to the Chinese was nationalism because they felt humiliated by the West, by Woodrow Wilson particularly, because they put so much faith in him, believing that he would help China with self-determination, right? It just really encouraged everyone.

So what they said was, look, the Western imperialists cannot be trusted, but we‘ll help you. We’ll help you with your struggle against it. And it just sounded like music to the intellectuals’ ears of that time. They absolutely said, this is our way out. And so they believed that the Russian Revolution gave them hope for China’s future.

Mr. Jekielek:

Explain to me how the nationalists were also somehow co-opted by the Soviets alongside the Communist Party itself, which was fighting them.

Ms. Van Fleet:

Because Sun Yat-sen could not get any help, and he wanted to.

Mr. Jekielek:

But how did that manifest? Like what makes it sound like Soviets were fighting the Soviets or something?

Ms. Van Fleet:

This is very difficult to explain. This will be the first United Front. In my book, there’s a whole chapter that covers a lot about the United Front, which is something that every American should know, a term that every American should be familiar with. But let’s go to the beginning. It did not start now. It started way back.

So when the Soviet Union helped to fund the Chinese Communist Party, it was very small. There were only 50 members. Guess who the members were? Do you think they were poor peasants or poor workers, the proletariat? No, they were intellectuals, some professors from Beijing University and their students. It was very small.

Meanwhile, the Nationalists were a mature party because they carried out the 1911 revolution that overthrew the Qing Dynasty. So what they did was, the Soviets helped the Nationalist Party. But there was a condition: they had to incorporate the communists. And so basically, their plan was to let the communists be part of the nationalists and eventually take over from within. They were almost successful until later the new leader of the nationalists infiltrated the party from within and really converted many nationalists into communists.

So in 1927, he made the decision to purge them, and he killed about 4,000 suspects because they did not know who was who. It was a very, very messy situation. So they killed 4,000, including communists and some Leftist nationalists. And that marked the split between these two. But for us to understand, that’s what Chinese communists do, or communists in general. They are parasites. They absolutely attach themselves to a bigger political force, party, or force, and then grow from within, and they are almost successful.

Mr. Jekielek:

So how does the United Front fit in, and maybe explain what it is?

Ms. Van Fleet:

You can see from the first try that they implemented, it worked from within, mostly undercover. So it’s an infiltration and influence operation. A lot of the communists joined the nationalists, but only a few at the top were known to the nationalists. Like Mao was one of them. So they knew that the top leaders were communists. But other people, they did not know. So it really is like working from within.

And that’s what’s going on in America: they work from within. You don’t know who they are, and it’s the influence, and then they leave no trace. A lot of people who played have no idea that this happened to them. So what happened to them? They absolutely took a stand and became the spokespersons for the CCP, and a lot of them were selling or giving away trade secrets. Look at the Confucius Institute.

Mr. Jekielek:

So now we’re going back to the present.

Ms. Van Fleet:

I have been talking about the present. So what they do is work from within. A lot of people don’t know. Okay, so for the Confucius Institutes, money was such an attractive offer. So a lot of universities let them in.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let me just qualify a little bit. So Confucius Institutes, for those that might not be familiar, were basically from China, institutions connected themselves with universities and other educational institutions in America, coming with generous money and also educational materials, and basically creating a partnership, ostensibly with no political orientation, but the reality was quite different.

Ms. Van Fleet:

Yes. One of the things, one of the few things is that you cannot talk about Tibet. You cannot talk about Uyghurs. And you cannot criticize the CCP. So there goes the free speech. But they embed themselves in almost all universities and high schools. And eventually now it’s like everywhere. And so that’s how they come in from within.

And because you want the money, you want the donation, you say, okay, well, it’s okay. We don’t talk about Hong Kong. We don’t talk about Taiwan. But eventually, you can talk about a lot of things. And that’s how they kill free speech. And that’s how they influence people’s minds and make them think that the CCP is just another country, another party.

Mr. Jekielek:

And it’s very interesting, right? Because there’s this sort of, when there’s this financial relationship, you’re also sort of motivated to cover for it because you’re getting this benefit, right? Even if you, you know, if there wasn’t the financial relationship, you might be a little more suspicious; you wouldn’t have so much kind of invested, if you will, right?

Ms. Van Fleet:

So it’s greed, right? And money and greed will blur people’s, you know, people’s view of what they’re dealing with.

Mr. Jekielek:

And so, you know, but when the United Front was started, it absolutely had this goal of kind of creating basically a pro-communist United Front among all sorts of people that were not officially communist, right? Basically, that’s, I think, that’s where the name or the idea came from, right?

Ms. Van Fleet:

Again, talking about the idea where it came from, from Lenin. The United Front, this idea and this tactic was created by Lenin. And of course, the Soviet taught their students well in China.

Mr. Jekielek:

So the nationalists purged the communists, but we still end up getting the CCP taking over in 1949.

Ms. Van Fleet:

This story is so absolutely fascinating. So after the purge, the CCP had to withdraw and went to the mountains to become really bandits. That’s what they are called, red bandits. But they’re not going to give up, and that’s something we have to learn. Communists do not give up. Mao said a little spark will start a prairie fire.

So they have their little so-called Soviet Republic in the mountains of southern China. And they started to expand and call themselves basically the opposition government. And Chiang Kai-shek was determined to get rid of them. So he tried five encirclement campaigns and tried to wipe them out.

And the fifth time he was successful and drove the Communists out of that area and started what many people now know as the Long March to escape, and they went westward and eventually ended up in northern China, a place called Yan'an. And so on, the fight continued because by then the Japanese had started their aggression against China.

Totally by accident, also by national demand, they had to start another United Front, supposedly working together to fight against the Japanese. That turned out to be another disaster. And that turned out to be really the cooperation that ended the nationalists and eventually, after the civil war, drove them out of China to Taiwan. So twice they collaborated, twice the nationalists were deceived, and eventually defeated.

Mr. Jekielek:

And sort of, you know, they had to escape to Taiwan, which is how the Republic of China ended up in Taiwan.

Ms. Van Fleet:

Correct. Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, you know, this enemy of the enemy is my friend approach, it doesn’t work with communists. That’s kind of the message I’m getting here.

Ms. Van Fleet:

Yes. That was later. That was Nixon. But we still have a little important history to cover, and that was during World War II.

Mr. Jekielek:

I guess just to qualify what I mean, in this situation, obviously the nationalists and the communists were not friends, but they got together to fight the Japanese as the common enemy. And I wonder to myself, after what happened, shouldn’t that already have been the lesson? That the enemy of the enemy, as my friend, doesn’t work with communists.

Ms. Van Fleet:

Absolutely. But the history is very complicated. It is not that simple. But my book explains why the nationalists were forced to collaborate with the CCP again. And the same thing happened. They were deceived and defeated. But this takes us back, actually, to the 30s and early 40s. And now the Americans come on the scene. Why? Because of the common enemy, the Japanese.

So now we are taken to the late 1930s and early 1940s. And now the Americans reappeared on the scene because they were forced to engage with China. They had a shared enemy, Imperial Japan. And this period actually was a time when the Americans had first-hand experience with the CCP. And the CCP managed to deceive the Americans and utilized the Americans to defeat their enemy. the nationalists. So the lesson absolutely was never learned because after this, the same thing happened over and over and over until even today.

And so this is why the book is so important to help people understand. We were there. When I say we, America was there, and they did not understand communism. And because they never understood communism, they made all the possible mistakes and then helped the CCP to take over China.

Mr. Jekielek:

So this is, you’re saying, even during this time period where the nationalists and the communists were working together, the Americans were also kind of on the side of the CCP.

Ms. Van Fleet:

Yes. And here is another important thing: the Americans never understood the difference between totalitarianism and authoritarianism. They never understood that Chiang Kai-shek’s government, the nationalist government, was indeed corrupt, was indeed ineffective, but it was an authoritarian regime. Because they thought that this government was so corrupt, and then they looked on the other side, looked at communism. They seemed to be really organized, devoted. They seemed to be the ones that we should collaborate with. And they had no understanding.

Actually, they should have by then, because there was an example of what went on in the Soviet Union, but they refused to really learn about it. And they bet that it was the Communists who would really help to achieve the goal of defeating the Japanese. So they did. Just as I said, they made all the possible mistakes and eventually helped the CCP to take over China.

Mr. Jekielek:

It seems like these mistakes basically continued for a very long time afterward. It’s kind of hard to imagine how that would be possible. I mean, you’re saying this is like, you know, at the turn of the century, not too long after the turn of the century. We’ve just, and by the way, it’s not just the U.S.; it’s kind of the West at large, right, that we’re really talking about here, but with, of course, the U.S. being the most influential.

Ms. Van Fleet:

That is the key. The lessons never were learned. That’s why the communist tactics of the United Front keep working, keep working. What’s the tactic? The tactic is deception and influence and infiltration. So because of their tactic, the Americans—and the Americans I’m talking about are journalists, diplomats, American generals, American presidents—all bought into the lie that the Communist Party was really, really the one that was going to help to defeat the Japanese. They believed all the lies, even though the lies were just so blatant.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Japanese first, and then later the Soviets, right? Yeah. Under many presidencies, right? Like there was this whole hedge to try to stop the Soviet Union with the help of the Chinese, which at this point, that relationship had soured.

Ms. Van Fleet:

Yes. I can give you some examples of how this started with the journalists, like here too, the journalists. So they went to China before the Americans started to have made alliances with the nationalist government against Japan. One of them was Edgar Snow. He is well-known because he wrote a book called Red Star Over China, and it’s still in print today.

He went to Yan'an, the base of the Chinese Communist Party, and he did a glowing report of the communists and compared them basically to the early Christians. They are organized, devoted, they are patriots, and they are the future.  And of course, he had influence. He had direct influence on presidents like FDR and later Nixon.

So his book absolutely changed the perception of the Chinese Communist Party in the West. And he called them reformers. They are agrarian reformers. You know, they’re not really communists. That perception lingered until today. And it’s not only influential internationally because it’s in English.

Later, it was translated into Chinese and used a different title because that title sounds a little bit like communist propaganda. So changing it into another title, it’s The Journey to the West, a title from a Chinese classic novel, and published. That was absolutely the most influential book to really get so many young people to Yan'an to join the revolution. And among them, two of my uncles, yeah, they read the book. They believed it. They believed that to defeat the Japanese, we have to join the communists. That is how powerful the propaganda is.

Of course, Edgar Snow probably did not know that his book actually was propaganda because all the information he put in his book was offered to him by the CCP. So in many ways, that is the first United Front tactic that they implemented on the Americans, and he was the first, and then followed him, there are so many other journalists, and I mentioned many of them in the book, but later the State Department, the diplomats, and the Christian educators, the missionaries, the people that really were missionaries, they also knowingly or unknowingly, mostly unknowingly, helped to spread the propaganda. And a lot of them just helped so many young people, just like here, just like in America today, to believe in communism and to abandon their families. So a lot of them were well-educated from well-to-do families, abandoned everything, went to Yan'an, and joined the revolution.

Mr. Jekielek:

Wow, that’s amazing. So these became the old friends of the Chinese people, as you call them.

Ms. Van Fleet:

That is the title that the CCP gave to those foreigners who helped them with their cause: the old friends of the Chinese people. And the first one to receive this title is Edgar Snow. And then you will see along the line, many, many people, including our president, got that title: old friend of the Chinese people. It has nothing to do with the Chinese people. It should be called, old friend of the CCP, or useful idiot.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, and this also reminds me of one of the biggest pieces of successful propaganda, I think, that the Chinese Communist Party has affected: just this idea that the Communists actually represent the Chinese people. That the party is the people. In fact, I would argue nothing could be further from the truth. This lie is still being believed by so many Americans and people around the world, even today.

Ms. Van Fleet:

Not too long ago, and this guy called Victor Gao, he worked for some kind of think tank in Beijing. So he had a video that went viral. He said, China, we have 5,000 years of history, most of which there was no United States, and we are expected to survive another 5,000 years. This is a lie. Chinese civilization lasted for thousands of years, but the CCP is not part of Chinese civilization. It’s an imported Western ideology, and they had a beginning. That was 1921. That is the CCP. And they hijacked China. Now they call themselves China. It cannot be further from the truth.

So this is very important for Americans to understand. The CCP is absolutely a foreign implant in China, and I would say they were the colonizers of this ideology from Western Europe, from Germany, if we trace back to the beginning. And it has nothing to do with Chinese civilization. And during the Cultural Revolution, we saw that Mao wanted to destroy everything that is Chinese through the so-called four oaths: destroy the Four Olds; old ideas, old traditions, old customs, and old habits. Anything Chinese, they want to destroy. They are not Chinese. The CCP is not Chinese. I think it’s so important for people to understand this.

Mr. Jekielek:

Why are communists always so interested in destroying what Mao called the Four Olds, all of this tradition?

Ms. Van Fleet:

Yes, I talked a little bit about it. I really consider communism a theocracy. It’s a religion, and it’s absolutely a religion because it sought to control not just a system, not just property or economy. It really, really wants to control people’s minds. And so, in many ways, it is a religion. Because it is a religion, it cannot put up with any other tradition, civilization, ideology, and of course, religion.

Mr. Jekielek:

But with the coming of Deng Xiaoping, as the story goes, suddenly to be rich is to be glorious. So obviously, China abandoned communism, right?

Ms. Van Fleet:

Well, then we have to go back a little bit to Nixon, don’t you think? It was 1972, and I was in high school when we learned Nixon was coming to China. We just could not believe how shocked Americans were. We could just imagine how shocked we were because, since childhood, we were taught America is our enemy and wants to destroy us, and so we would do everything to defend China against our enemy. And then you told me President Nixon was going to visit us, and we just could not get our minds around it.

That was the height of the Cultural Revolution, when everything was in ruins, absolutely in ruins. There was no economy. A few years after that, I was sent to the countryside after I graduated from high school. Why? There was no economy, no jobs, nothing. We lived in extreme poverty. But the CCP was saved, saved by none other than the President of the United States, Richard Nixon. Trump rightly called that the biggest mistake he made. Yes, that is true. He saved the CCP. He saved the CCP from the ruins.

Mr. Jekielek:

How?

Ms. Van Fleet:

He opened China up. At that time, it was even worse than just economic ruin. The time was just so crucial because, at that time, China was facing absolute total collapse internally. There was no economy. Everyone was living in extreme poverty, but more than that, in the late 1950s, there was a big split between China and the Soviet Union, and it got worse. By the time of 1972, before Nixon visited China, the two powers were almost on the brink of a nuclear war.

Can you imagine? Mao was a threat both internally and externally, and this time it was his former boss, the Soviet Union. He needed help. He absolutely needed help. Sure enough, the help was on the way, and it was none other than the President of the United States, Richard Nixon.

Mr. Jekielek:

So it opened up.

Ms. Van Fleet:

Opened it up. All the crises eased, and soon after that, China got into the Security Council of the United Nations because the Americans did not do anything about it. So it turned around and was absolutely saved, escaping all the immediate threats of being bombed by a nuclear weapon and now safely on the side of the world superpower, the United States of America.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, it’s a really interesting story, and I want to encourage people to read it because you flesh out so many of these details and nuances of how this all happened. But we go from this opening up where the Nixon administration, in effect, you know, kind of saves the CCP, as opposed to having it collapse and something else forming there. Two, there’s this kind of line that goes all the way to today where the CCP has these deep, deep inroads.

In America itself, we’re seeing another biolab that’s been discovered. We have these police stations, as we say in quotes. We have all of this IP theft and cyber theft and United Front compromised individuals across the whole country. And I mean, it’s not just America, but of course, the focus always has been America. So, you know, I would love to talk through all the nuances. And that’s something I think people should read your book for. But just kind of give me a picture of how we went from the Nixon opening up to today.

Ms. Van Fleet:

Yes, I think you’re so right. There’s so much to cover and it’s almost impossible, but I try my best. So after Nixon opened the door to China and a lot of people have problems understanding it. And just like me, I was like, what? But then, of course, I could not think critically. The Party must be right. So, yes, the Party was right.

But a lot of Americans have trouble understanding it. We’re still in the midst of a Cold War. So if we ally with the Chinese, which is a communist country, then it’s a Cold War about communism. And so people have questions. So it just makes no sense, right?

And so what they did, the Nixon administration, they came up with a way that somehow worked. They said, yes, the enemy is still communism, but the Chinese communists, they’re not really communists. They are so-called communists. And that has actually been the way that they deceived Americans and still works.

Still today people think that, oh, Chinese communism is kind of like Confucian communism; it’s not like, you know, Soviet communism. It’s still today Russia, Russia, Russia, and not many people call China, China, China. So they were allowed to not be questioned. The atrocities that happened behind the so-called bamboo curtain were not taught.

Eighty-some million Chinese died under the Chinese regime. And later, more than 300 million babies were falsely aborted, not told. So the American people just, just say, okay, Chinese communists, they’re not really a threat, they’re okay. And so that is really a problem. And so later on, they called it, they’re reformers. Remember Deng Xiaoping, the reformer?

Deng Xiaoping never, never planned to have political reform. All he wanted was economic reform. Why? Because China was absolutely on the brink of total collapse. At that time, nobody believed in the CCP. So he had to do something. So that’s why he got his doctrine, now kind of famous, black cat, white cat, as long as it catches mice; it’s a good cat. Temporarily, we have to save this country. And what do we do?

We get the foreign investment, get their technology. And that’s how we started. And Americans were told, you know, if we help China, first of all, it’s not a real communist country; it’s a so-called communist country. If we help them develop their economy, democracy will just naturally follow. Do we remember that?

I have to say, I even kind of believed, maybe, maybe, yes, maybe if we help them have a strong economy, people will naturally demand more freedom of speech, and they will have a democracy in China. Wrong, because again, we’re dealing with communists. And after all these decades of opening and reform, what happened when Xi Jinping took over in 2012? The reverse. Now it’s going back to the Mao era, because to them, wealth is important, but nothing is more important than the control of power.

Mr. Jekielek:

And keeping the party.

Ms. Van Fleet:

Absolutely, because, yes, power and party are the same thing. To save the party is more important than anything else. And this is something else I think is important that I want to bring up, is the rise of China. Now it’s become the second largest economy. Who benefits? Okay, we'll say, okay, you know, Americans, we sacrificed, we lost millions of jobs. Maybe by doing so, we helped the Chinese people have a better future.

No, that is not the case. We helped the CCP elite become rich. Even today, I think 600 million Chinese only make $5 a day. Why? That’s not what the CCP is doing all this for. It’s for their power. So the CCP elites become billionaires, some even trillionaires. So the rise of China is bad for America, bad for the world, because they have become a real threat, originally a threat, now a world threat.

We can see their hands behind almost all the terrorist organizations and also in America. We can almost see their hands behind all these radical organizations, behind the BLM [Black Lives Matter] and behind the protests for Hamas today and anti-ICE. And there are people reporting the connection of their money coming to fund those radical organizations.

But most of all, I think it is the Chinese people who are the victims of this powerful, powerful party. Before, I said, you know, after the Chinese Cultural Revolution, they really lost all their legitimacy. People did not believe in the CCP. Not only that, the CCP and the whole country were in economic ruins, but also people just lost faith in the Communist Party. Today, they absolutely have more power than ever. And so democracy in China is further away from the horizon than ever. So the victims, absolutely, are the Chinese people.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, I just came back from the International Religious Freedom Summit, which was here in D.C. as we’re filming, you know, the last couple of days. And I keep thinking about this: religious freedom really is the litmus test. Because, as you said, in these communist societies, it is this kind of quasi-false religion character that communism takes on. And so, of course, they have to suppress any other form of anything that would compete with that.

Because people, I mean, I believe that people naturally want to seek that connection, an actual connection to God, not with a communist party ideology or as an intermediary. And so it can never tolerate religious freedom. And I think if we understood this and saw that and understood that this is the red flag, right?

Ms. Van Fleet:

Absolutely.

Mr. Jekielek:

We would be in a very different situation, right?

Ms. Van Fleet:

Yes. And the other thing I can say is that during the Cultural Revolution, they depended on people reporting each other. And I just absolutely remember that we were encouraged to report even our parents if we heard them say something that was not politically correct or was somehow against the party’s line. And they don’t have to do that today; with this surveillance technology, they can absolutely control you before you even utter a word.

And with the social credit system, they absolutely enslave every Chinese. And if they suspect you, it’s not even that you want to do something against the government; if they suspect that you might have something against the government, they can absolutely end your life. They can use the app. They can just take access to your bank account. You can’t even take a train or plane. You’re just basically disabled.

And so that was not like the Cultural Revolution anymore because now they have the technology; they have the money thanks to the West and specifically to the United States. Now they have become more powerful than ever and more dangerous than ever.

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, it’s interesting because they’re more powerful. They have a lot of power, and they are dangerous. I think I agree with that.

Ms. Van Fleet:

At the same time, in some ways, they’re very fragile. You can see that just in the past two weeks; the news came out of China that Xi Jinping purged the number one in the military and a bunch of high-level military leaders. This is not his first, but this is his biggest. This guy was his childhood friend, but it doesn’t matter. Why?

Because he does not feel secure. So because of that, he has to purge everyone that he feels is suspicious. of. But eventually, he won’t trust anyone. There’s no one left to trust. And how fragile is that kind of regime? Yes, while from the outside it looks very powerful, inside, it’s very fragile. You’re absolutely right.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes. So, I mean, because it’s kind of like a mixed message, right? Because on the one hand, you’re saying, yes, there’s a lot of power. I mean, yes, they have nuclear weapons. They have TikTok. They have, you know, all of this, you know, the biggest militarization in the history of the world, fastest, you know, arguably, you know, a massive state security apparatus to repress the people of the country.

At the same time, it’s just always, I mean, some people would argue, and I think I would be one of them, that it’s unusually fragile. And, you know, I had Heng He, one of our kind of key analysts, explaining how, you know, in order to achieve what she achieved through these purges of the top military leaders, in a way, he sort of reduced the overall power of the system because they don’t because you started breaking all of the unwritten rules of how that system works.

Ms. Van Fleet:

Yes, the other thing I think a lot of Americans don’t understand is who do you think is the number one threat to the CCP? Most people probably say the United States because it is the superpower that the CCP wants to replace. And of course, it considers the United States its number one enemy.

It’s kind of true, but there is another enemy it fears the most: the Chinese people. It spends more money than the military on this so-called security or public safety. It is really all these surveillance systems and all this police to do what? To control the population because they are scared of the people that they rule over.

Mr. Jekielek:

So Xi, I’m really enjoying this conversation, and I would love to actually continue it for hours, but I think we'll let people read your book and kind of figure out a lot of these details. Again, we looked at a situation where, on the one hand, we do feel like the CCP has an unusual level of power, military, and unusual level of influence in the West, in America. I mean, we can see variations of it all the time. They’ve really taken advantage of the openness of our system in the West. At the same time, there’s this fragility inherent because there isn’t that legitimacy and there’s this sort of paranoia to keep power at any cost. What do you see as the right approach that would be good for America and good for the Chinese people going forward?

Ms. Van Fleet:

Yes, it’s a big question. But one thing I would say is that the theme or the goal of my book is really to tell the American people we have a threat absolutely over there: that’s the CCP. And also, in my first book, I addressed the threat within, that is the American cultural revolution, the woke ideology. But where is the real source of all this problem? Are they even connected? And how do I address it?

It’s a big question, but I would say that in my first book, Mao’s America, I tried to answer the question of the threat from within, and that is the woke ideology. And that is not coming from somewhere else. It’s home-born. Woke ideology was born here and made specifically for a country like America. But after that, I still feel like there are a lot of questions unanswered.

But also, I want to make this very clear in my second book, Made in America, as the title says. I believe that the reason that the CCP, first of all, was successful in taking over China and later in challenging America directly is that we, as Americans, failed to understand the true nature of communism. And we failed to understand the threat it poses to us, to our way of life. Because of that, we made one mistake after another, and history was never learned. And that’s why, I mean, the problem is here.

We have to look inside rather than look outside for solutions. And this is a huge problem, but I say start with learning history. Start to learn how we got here to begin with. I think this book will help you really understand a lot of things that you were not taught because schools do not address it, and it’s not talked about or discussed in public discourse, because a lot of people want to hide it. But in order for us to understand, we have to learn this very, very important piece of history, and that is what my book is all about.

Mr. Jekielek:

And, you know, you mentioned that we really failed to understand the true nature of the Chinese Communist Party, of Chinese communism. I think this is of critical importance. I actually make the same argument. In a nutshell, how would you explain that nature in the shortest possible way? What is it that we don’t understand?

Ms. Van Fleet:

One way is to understand that communism, as we talk a little bit, is a religion. And it really wants to remake the world in its own image. And not only that, it wants to remake human nature. And so it cannot be peaceful because in order to do that, they have to use power and they have to use violence. And this is not what I’m saying. Okay, I think that’s what they are. I lived through it. And history is there for us to learn. It happened in the Soviet Union, happened in Poland, where your family is from. It happened in China, and it happened in Cuba. What do we do? We have to learn. History.

The other thing I have to say is that nowadays a lot of people talk about globalism. And I have to say communism is globalism. In its DNA, it wants not just to change human nature; it wants to take over the world.  When I was growing up, we were always told our goal was to liberate humanity. So its goal is not just China and then maybe some other country.

No, the entire world. That is the threat. You can treat it as a friend, but it always treats you as its mortal enemy. And I did use this story in the book, The Farmer and the Snake. A lot of people probably know that story. The CCP or communism is a snake. You can save it. You can help it. It will bite you because it’s in its nature. The nature is that it’s going to destroy you.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Xi Van Fleet, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Ms. Van Fleet:

Thank you so much, as usual.

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.