THINC in the News

Radical ideology in US schools reminds me of the Cultural Revolution in China
Originally published in the Washington Examiner
By Yukong Mike Zhao - June 2, 2025

After witnessing how communists imposed their radical ideology during China’s Cultural

Revolution, never in my wildest dreams did I think I would ever see the same sort of indoctrination taking place in American schools. But, to my horror, that is precisely what has come to pass.

We cannot ignore how Marxist ideology destroyed China’s soul during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s and how similar ideologies threaten the U.S. today. As soon as the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, it began to rewrite history to fit its Marxist narrative. In 1962, Chairman Mao Zedong launched nationwide class struggle education that categorized those deemed to be prosperous as “oppressors” or “class enemies,” while calling peasants and workers “the oppressed.”

Our state-issued textbooks taught us a fictionalized version of Chinese history that artificially shoehorned notions of class struggle into traditional stories about resilience and family ties. Tens of millions of children were brainwashed into serving as Mao’s political foot soldiers, known as Red Guards, and eagerly attacked both “oppressors” and the culture they supposedly represented.

Condoned by Mao and the CCP, they embarked on an unprecedented campaign to obliterate Chinese cultural heritage, which was called the “Shatter the Four Olds Campaign,” referring to Old Thoughts, Old Culture, Old Tradition, and Old Habits.

Their war on Chinese culture was not limited to ideas. Temples and tombs of Chinese historical figures, including Confucius, were destroyed. Art that did not conform to the new “political correctness” was banned or burned by young Red Guards acting out of a warped sense of obedient patriotism.

My father was tortured, lost his freedom for more than five years, and was publicly humiliated. His crime? Being born into a landlord’s family.

Regarded as “oppressors,” my grandparents were forced to relocate from Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan Province, to a remote mountain village with no running water or electricity. There, my grandmother suffered a heart attack and was sent to a ramshackle clinic, the only one available. She died a few months later.

Such atrocities became commonplace because of the CCP’s Marxist conviction that people were not individuals but rather members of heritable economic classes. Your deeds and ideas meant nothing, your family background everything. The children of landlords and capitalists were deprived of opportunities for higher education and career advancement and were frequently tortured in “struggle sessions” of state-ordered public humiliation. An entire generation of Chinese was taught that establishing the communist vision of social justice required revolutionary activity — and that violence in service of that goal was not only justified, but necessary.

Sound familiar? Today, Marxist-influenced American radicals similarly reduce people to another attribute of their identity, their race.

Like the CCP, they are so convinced of their rightness that critiquing their worldview makes you, in their eyes, a racist defending a broken status quo. There is no honest disagreement: You’re either a loyal friend or a hateful enemy. They’re teaching children to see everything through a racialized “oppressor vs. oppressed” binary, deeming certain groups inherently virtuous and others inherently guilty.

“Oppressor” — white, Asian, Jewish, and Hindu — children are made to feel guilty and told they are undeserving of their success. “Oppressed” — black, Latino, Arab, and indigenous — children are encouraged to be resentful and taught that succeeding is nearly impossible because the deck is stacked against them.

In one revealing episode in 2021, then-San Francisco Board of Education Vice President Alison Collins posted that Asian Americans “believe they benefit from the ‘model minority’ BS” and “use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”

She continued: “Do they think they won’t be deported? profiled? beaten? Being a house n****r is still being a n****r.”

In her paradigm, the world is a zero-sum game where groups can only succeed at the expense of other groups. Parents want none of it.

I serve on the advisory council of the THINC Foundation, a nonprofit organization that recently conducted a nationwide survey of nearly 1,500 parents of school-aged children. Sixty-three percent opposed political ideology in the classroom. More than 80% believed that children should be taught the value of a colorblind society. Over 90% supported Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerful dream of a world in which his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Today, too many students are taught the exact opposite: that a person’s intrinsic worth depends upon his or her race or ethnic background. They learn resentment, suspicion, and inherited guilt, not mutual respect.

We must teach our children the messy story of America in a balanced, constructive way that avoids neither bitter hardship nor hard-won progress. We must teach them to see others as individuals, not members of racial monoliths. If we don’t, we cede their education to people who remind me of the party of my childhood, whose ideology pervades China to this day.

Mike Zhao is president of the Asian American Coalition for Education and a member of the advisory council of the THINC Foundation (Transparency, Honesty & Integrity in the Classroom).