It is fitting that Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, the Yale law professor Amy Chua’s defence of the “Chinese” style of child-rearing, should have arrived in bookstores just as Hu Jintao, China’s president, was arriving in Washington. The US champions democratic capitalism, but Mr Hu’s more authoritarian variant has produced higher growth and left him in command of trillions of dollars of American debt. The US educational culture is built around boosting children’s self-esteem, but Ms Chua argues that “the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish, and shame the child”, as her immigrant parents did her. She once rejected a card from her own daughter reading, “I love you! Happy Birthday to the Best Mommy in the World!”, calling it “not good enough”. That daughter gets straight A’s and gave a piano concert in Carnegie Hall in her early teens. Mr Hu and Ms Chua are two faces of the same anxiety. Each argues for a system that Americans once considered repugnant, ineffective and anachronistic, but now seems to be yielding better results than their own.
耶魯大學(Yale)法學院教授蔡美兒(Amy Chua)在《虎媽媽的戰歌》（Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother，中文版書名為《我在美國做媽媽:耶魯法學院教授的育兒經》）中為中式育兒經辯護，該書剛好在中國國家主席胡錦濤抵達華盛頓之時上架銷售，時機再恰當不過。美國推崇的是民主資本主義，但中國更加專制的資本主義模式創造出了更高速的經濟增長，并讓胡主席掌控了數萬億美元的美國國債。美國的教育文化是圍繞著如何增強孩子自尊心展開的，但蔡美兒認為“成績不佳的解決辦法就是嚴厲斥責和懲罰孩子，讓孩子感到羞愧”，她的父母就是這么對待她的，他們都是華裔移民。有一次，她拒絕接受女兒送給自己的生日賀卡，上面寫著“我愛你！祝世界上最好的媽媽生日快樂！”，說卡片“做得不夠好”。也正是這個女兒，學校功課門門都拿A，而且十來歲就在卡耐基音樂廳舉辦了鋼琴演奏會。胡錦濤和蔡美兒是同一種焦慮心理的兩種面孔。他們所提倡的那種體制曾經被美國人斥為令人反感的、效率低下的、落伍的，但現在這種體制所創造的成績似乎要比美國自己的體制更好。