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Comment by surlyadopter | Hacker News Reader

This post by The Last Psychiatrist is an excellent breakdown of the article (and WHY it was in the WSJ in the first place). http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/01/why_chinese_mothers_a...

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I think the WSJ's intent in publishing it was a little more complex. The piece accomplishes two goals: it ridicules the ineffectiveness of soft, touchy-feely, liberal childrearing, and it presents the Chinese as alien, inhuman, and a superhuman threat, just like the Soviet scientific juggernaut we feared after Sputnik. We are supposed to be scared that the Chinese will "bury us" with inhuman discipline and achievement, and we are supposed to blame liberal attitudes for our weakness.

Those don't sound like the WSJ's goals to me.

In this case, I think the simplest reasoning, and one Chua herself hit on, is correct: They strung together the most controversial parts and got bundles of page hits.

This is excellent!

I think only the very last paragraph analyzing the WSJ's motivations overreached a bit, making them a bit too complex.

The WSJ's wants to sell papers and add space in those papers. That story just makes for great bait for readers, I mean look at us we're all discussing it.

But the analysis of the mother is just brilliant.

I was with him at first, particularly bringing up college as a motivator, but the author pretty quickly loses focus and takes the analysis a bit further than he really has context to support, particularly since he's analyzing strictly from the WSJ article, not having read the book. I don't think he really needed to make tangential and dubious claims about her beliefs and her world view to make his ultimate point that the WSJ chose this article to support theirs.

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