The Chinese Communist Party is a pretty good parent, all things considered.

Sure, the Party hated children so much that they forcibly sterilized millions of women, forced abortions on countless others, starved millions of them during the Great Leap Forward, and shot more than a few in Tiananmen Square.

But the whole social credit system and Zero COVID policies were kinda nice, according to Heather Kaye. The New York Times graced its Op/Ed pages with her pro-totalitarian essay, presumably because praising China’s lockdown on what people can see and hear is far less dangerous than airing the opinions of a Republican Senator.

Communist China uses a US fashion designer and the New York Times to propagandize on the wonders of living in a totalitarian state. https://t.co/Yw9OBZ3hff

— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) January 18, 2023

When Covid was raging across the world a couple of years ago, I came across a picture online of an American woman wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed, “I refuse to co-parent with the government” — a response to perceived government overreach regarding school mask mandates. I laughed out loud: My own kids were, in a way, co-parented by the Chinese government.

My work in the fashion industry took my husband and me to Shanghai in 2006, where we spent the next 16 years and started a family. In China, government co-parenting begins in the womb. Chinese citizens have faced limits on how many children they were allowed under birth control policies that have since been relaxed. People in China are still legally barred from determining the gender of their unborn babies unless medically necessary, because of a history of sex-selective abortions.

As a foreigner, of course, Heather didn’t face any of these issues, so what’s the big deal? It’s good to be a foreigner in China, with those sweet greenbacks and privileges, and the Chinese were very nice to her. Although I am perplexed about the whole sex-selection abortion thing, both because Lefties are for abortion for any reason, and who knows what sex a baby is until they decide at some point in the future. The whole reproductive organ thing is so old-school. So is banning sex-selection abortion a good or bad thing? She doesn’t let on what she thinks.

Our stringent government co-parent quickly made its presence felt. The girls’ Chinese kindergarten lectured on us everything, including how many hours our daughters should sleep, what they should eat and their optimal weight. Each morning all of the students performed calisthenics in straight rows and raised China’s red flag while singing the national anthem. Classroom windows were usually kept open to increase air circulation and prevent contamination by airborne illnesses, even during winter, when the kids would attend class wearing their coats.

We sometimes felt as if our children were on loan to us for evenings and weekends, to be delivered back to school each weekday.

Remember, this is the system that she likes. Now the whole exercise thing sounds pretty good, given how fat American kids have gotten, but freezing in the winter not so much. And the “children were on loan to us for evenings and weekends, to be delivered back to school each weekday?” I guess it takes a village.

Over time, the benefits kicked in. Constantly served up moral, history and culture lessons on pulling together for the sake of the Chinese nation, our girls came home discussing self-discipline, integrity and respect for elders. With school instilling a solid work ethic and a total drive for academic excellence, my husband and I didn’t need to push the girls to complete homework; the shame of letting their teachers and classmates down was enough to light their fires.

The prevailing student-centered American approach to education emphasizes the needs of the children and what engages them and promotes independent thought. China stresses that you can succeed — as long as you obey your teachers and work hard. To celebrate Chinese culture and offer an alternative to Western influences, government-funded events were always on offer, like traditional musical performances, operas and plays. At times, our girls would repeat propaganda or, concerned about keeping up with their peers, despair that we hadn’t tutored them earlier in math. At the end of the day, our less demanding American family culture helped keep the balance.

Now here I am torn. American education is flaccid, and I will join the whole “participation trophies are bad” crowd in an instant. It certainly didn’t do me any good to have insufficient discipline and drive. But you don’t need propaganda to achieve these goals. Proper parenting can do the trick. Ask any Jewish mother what the secret is. My father had one, and wound up getting his PhD at 22 or 23. I forget which.

Raising kids in China was a plus in other ways — such as the heavy censorship, which results in a kid-friendly internet, and national limits on how many hours young people can spend playing online video games. Ironically, the tight control of the Communist Party surveillance state results in its own kind of freedom: With crime and personal safety concerns virtually eliminated, our daughters were riding the subway unsupervised in a city of around 26 million people from the age of 11. A constant but benign (and mostly unarmed) police presence kept order; streets and the green spaces around every corner were kept immaculate, and the sense of civic pride was palpable.

Again, order is great, but not at the expense of freedom. It was said that in Ghengis Khan’s empire a single woman could cross the length and breadth will a wagon full of gold and be safe. That’s great, and I wish that some Soros prosecutors didn’t think chaos and mayhem in the streets was a positive good. But that safety came at a steep price.   The New York Times estimates that Khan also killed off 11% of the world’s population, with a death toll of 40-60 million people.

So on balance perhaps a bit more crime would have been OK. Order and discipline are nice and all, but 11% of the world population is a significant price indeed for that benefit.

As an American parent in China, I learned to appreciate the strong sense of shared values and of people connected as a nation. Parenting, like governing, is an imperfect art. Priorities must be set, and tough choices made. There’s never been a more crucial time for us to learn from one another and build new bridges across the street, nation and world. Attention to the common good is a fundamental value I seek in an American government co-parent.

I get her point about the failings of America when it comes to raising children, but I think she misses the point.

She is looking to government to solve the problems of raising children, and that is the wrong place to do it. What makes Chinese parenting work well is the older Chinese values, which is why Asian students do so well in the United States as well as China. It is not the Chinese Communists who have found solutions–in fact, the Chinese Communists under Mao and the “Gang of Five” did everything they could to wipe those out. The Cultural Revolution was anti-education, not for it.

I am pretty sure that most of the Chinese parents in both China and the US aren’t giving their kids participation trophies, taking them to drag shows, and reading them “This Book is Gay” as a bedtime story. They are making them do homework. Which is why so many colleges have affirmative action programs that actively discriminate against Asian kids, sadly. Just as they used to do with Jewish kids under an actual quota system that limited their admission to colleges.

Ms. Kaye actually gives a pretty good diagnosis of what is wrong with American parenting, but she wrongly assumes it is the government that created the benefits she describes. The government, for much of its history, has actively worked against the very existence of children. Literally.

What Americans need is more good parents, not government parenting. Can you imagine children being even more indoctrinated by the teachers in our public schools? None of those teachers would ever even be hired in most countries, with their blue hair, discussions of their sexual preferences, and secret clubs to hide things from parents.

What she is actually longing for is traditional values which promote hard work, behaving well, and self-discipline. Exactly the values our government and our Elite hate so much.