Oct 01, 2026

Surviving Communism continues on The Jenny Beth Show with Orren Wang, who grew up in a village in rural China under Mao's communism and marched against the regime during the nationwide 1989 democracy movement the world remembers as Tiananmen Square. His father never went to school, taught himself to read, and was recruited by the Communist Party as a township-level official. His mother never learned to read. Wang remembers sugar rationed to a pound or two per family each year, officials seizing the tools his neighbors used to make firecrackers at night, and a county uprooting a village peach orchard because peaches were a cash crop. Shortage, he tells Jenny Beth Martin, is not a flaw in socialism. It is the feature. In May 1989 he was a graduate student in Chengdu, posting Voice of America reports on the campus bulletin board. The night Beijing declared martial law, he marched to the city square in the rain and chanted until he lost his voice for two weeks. He came to the United States in 1994 with $1,000 in his pocket, earned a master's in accounting at Western Kentucky University, became a CPA, and waited fourteen years for citizenship. Thirty-three days before Election Day, Wang gives young Americans his warning and makes a free-market case that includes an old Republican idea: break up the monopolies. Guest: Orren Wang, CPA, survivor of communism in China and a legal immigrant to the United States. Learn more at teapartypatriots.org and jennybethshow.com.

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