Sasha Gong was born in Beijing in 1956, seven years after the Communist Party took China, and grew up inside Mao's Cultural Revolution: her parents sent to a labor camp, her grandfather jailed for 20 years as an accused "culture spy," schools closed, a Red Guard sign hung around her great-aunt's neck, public executions staged at the village market every ten days. At 12 she read a cadres-only copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and one footnote connected everything: every misery she saw traced back to the system. She joined an underground dissident group as a teenager, hand-copied Hayek's Road to Serfdom in 1975, and at 20 was held for 11 months with seven guards and an interrogation team whose first question was whether she listened to enemy radio. She did. It was Voice of America.
The man who freed her group in 1978 was Xi Zhongxun, Xi Jinping's father, fresh from a communist jail himself. She asked him for one thing: college. She placed first in her province on the entrance exam, chose Peking University, went on to a Harvard PhD in sociology (a field China had banned), organized Tiananmen protests from America in 1989, and was barred from re-entering China in 1991. She taught at UCLA, worked for Radio Free Asia and the AFL-CIO, and was later hired to direct the China branch of Voice of America. Jenny Beth Martin asks her what the rise of socialism in America looks like to someone who has lived the full arc, and her answer is blunt.
Guest: Sasha Gong, who grew up in Mao's China, holds a PhD in sociology from Harvard, and later directed the China branch of Voice of America. This is her second solo interview on The Jenny Beth Show; she also sat on the Surviving Communism panels.
Today's topics:
• Born in 1956 Beijing, raised in Canton, with great-grandfathers who built American railroads
• Sent to the countryside at nine with no school; parents in a labor camp by 1968
• The meat soup she carried to her father's camp, and why he slapped her for arguing with the guards
• How communism separates "true" from "truth": you are hungry, but the official line says abundance
• The footnote in a banned Solzhenitsyn novel that connected every misery to the system
• Public executions, the paraded student with his tongue cut, and why fear stopped working on her
• The wall poster on socialist democracy that led a teenage factory worker into a dissident group
• Hand-copying Hayek's Road to Serfdom in 1975, plus Adam Smith, Plato, Aristotle, and Herodotus
• Reading Marx and Stalin's own textbook to find the evidence against them
• Voice of America on a crystal shortwave set: 55 to 60 languages into countries with zero information
• Eleven months in jail at 20: seven guards, a hunger strike for books, and the guard she tutored for the college exam
• Xi Jinping's father, 16 years in a communist jail and five in shackles, releases the group without approval
• First in her province, Peking University, Harvard, and why she chose a field China had banned
• Barred from China in 1991 after Tiananmen: "I never killed anyone"
• Why she left UCLA in 1998: the most unfree environment she had ever seen
• Her grandmother's "Gold Mountain," the house in Canton built with California gold, and a street in Baltimore that looked just like it
• A bicycle ride down a Boston highway to Lexington, in tears, on her third day in America
• Socialism as the worst combination of smart people and stupid people
• "False hope is no hope": her advice to Americans who want everything for free
• Voting for the First Amendment, and why Charlie Kirk reminded her of her younger self
• What liberty actually means: do what you want, and take responsibility for it
The Jenny Beth Show airs live Monday through Friday at 1:00 PM ET. Hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party movement and Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action. Subscribe for daily analysis of politics, policy, and the fight for constitutionally limited government. teapartypatriots.org
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