An American fashion designer who spent 16 years in Shanghai has published an essay in the New York Times highlighting the benefits of raising her children under the watchful and authoritarian eye of the Chinese government.
Heather Kaye, 49, came to Shanghai with her husband George in 2006 and planned to stay there for a year. But the couple stayed and eventually raised their two daughters there. In 2022, however, the family was pushed to return to the United States after living under the country’s draconian COVID-19 policies for two years.
She has now described her return to Washington DC as a “culture shock” that made her miss how her children were “raised together by the Chinese government.”
However, her own comments will come as a shock to many concerned about the looming threat the Chinese government poses both domestically and to global economies, technology and businesses.
In October last year, it emerged that the Communist Party was running secret police stations in New York City to hunt down dissidents and force them back to China, while those protesting the country’s zero-COVID policy famously disappeared without explanation .
Heather Kaye spent 16 years in Shanghai and published an article in the New York Times highlighting the benefits of co-parenting her children with the Chinese government
In 2022, her family returned to the United States after living under the country’s draconian COVID-19 policies for two years.
Kaye acknowledged the way the Chinese Communist Party interfered in family life, whether by controlling what her children eat or by dictating the number of hours they should sleep at night.
“In China, state co-parenting begins in the womb,” she wrote, referring to restrictions on the number of children parents were allowed, which have since been relaxed.
She added that not long after her children enrolled in government schools, it began to control how their children should live.
“The Chinese kindergarten explained everything to us, including how many hours our daughters should sleep, what they should eat and their optimal weight,” she said.
But she claimed she is grateful for the discipline her two daughters, born in 2008 and 2010, were taught at school.
She said, “Every morning, all the students performed gymnastics in straight lines and raised China’s red flag while singing the national anthem.”
And she praised the Chinese system for independently “fostering a solid work ethic and an absolute pursuit of academic excellence” by teaching them that hard work produces results.
Kaye claimed she’s also grateful that turning over parts of her children’s lives to the state has eased the burden on her and her husband – and wishes American parents could see the value in doing the same.
“I have learned to appreciate the strong sense of shared values and people connected as a nation. Like governing, parenting is an imperfect art,” she added.
Kaye acknowledged that the Chinese Communist Party was quick to impose itself on her children, but she didn’t mind
“Each morning, all the students performed gymnastics in straight lines and raised China’s red flag while singing the national anthem,” Kaye wrote
Kaye also saw merit in Chinese censorship. “Child education in China has been a plus in other ways — such as heavy censorship,” she wrote.
The government placed limits on how much time their children could spend playing video games and blocked them from accessing problematic material on the Internet.
Not only that, government oversight would keep their daughters safe while navigating the sprawling subway, but relatively safe, according to Kaye, Shanghai Subway.
Despite all of this, Kaye was pushed to leave China after living through his zero-COVID approach, which locked her at home for two months and confined her to government food rations.
But even when the family left, they retained their admiration for the country and the life they were able to lead there.
In a story about her family’s departure from Shanghai in 2022, she told Portal: “Anything you can imagine, you can build here. Everything you want to be, you can achieve here.’
A recent report by human rights organization Safeguard Defenders revealed that the Chinese Communist Party has at least 54 “overseas police stations” in 30 different countries, including the United States.
Since the program launched in April 2021, China has reported that it has “persuaded” 230,000 Chinese nationals to return home.
Safeguard Defenders campaign manager Laura Harth claimed China used it to track down dissidents and force them to return home.