In all earnestness, please consider the premises of Chinese parenting as laid out in Chua’s own words:

a) Children are not allowed to 1) play any instrument other than the piano and violin, 2) not play the piano and violin, 3) choose their own extracurricular activities. (Even Socialist Realism permits greater freedom of expression.)

b) Children owe their parents everything (as do citizens to the State).

c) Parents know what is best for their children and therefore override all their children’s own desires and preferences. (The state knows what’s best for the little people and gets it done against their will, but with their best interests very much at heart. Isn’t this how the Communist Party of China justifies its autocratic rule to itself and to the rest of the world?)

In light of all this, perhaps it should come as no surprise that Amy Chua’s bestseller is subtitled “How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability.” ~Kejda Gjermani

Gjermani was doing a fine job of exploding Amy Chua’s case for the superiority of her particular form of obsessive parenting, and then she had to ruin it all with this clumsy bit of ideological nonsense at the end. The person linking parent-child relations with relations between the citizen and the state is Gjermani. She is the one who makes the unfounded leap from relations within a family to relations within the polity, and it is she, not Chua, who has identified state and parental authority as being of the same kind to make a political attack on Chua as a would-be state socialist because she dislikes her disciplinarian parenting methods.

Obviously, Gjermani has never read nor even read about Chua’s book, which argues that rapid democratization in tandem with rapid privatization of the economy will create, well, ethnic hatred and global instability. For my part, this is a statement of the obvious, which is why I have usually been so skeptical of efforts at democracy promotion and why I have argued that neoliberal trade and economic policies are bound to create dangerous backlashes in democratizing countries. Despite her understanding of the dangers, Chua has repeatedly stated her support for promoting both democracy and capitalism, but she argues that it should be done in a more gradual way in order to avoid the worst of the majoritarian and authoritarian backlashes against capitalism on the one hand and against the “market-dominant minorities” who flourish in these societies. Chua’s argument identifies the weaknesses of the conventional Western promotion of “democratic capitalism,” and draws attention to the human costs of ill-considered, rapid democratization and privatization and the sharp increases of inequality that can result, which should make her argument a useful corrective for democratists’ more enthusiastic fantasies of remaking the world, but even this seems to contain too much realism for Gjermani to handle.

Michelle Goldberg wrote in her review of World on Fire:

Yet her argument, that rapid switches to majoritarian rule and free-market democracy in many Third World countries benefit certain ethnic groups over others and lead to vicious sectarian strife, is quite new, if occasionally overstated. Writers such as Robert Kaplan have long argued that the Western obsession with exporting democracy to countries without the institutions to support it is naive and often dangerous, fostering demagogues and communal hatreds. Chua builds on this argument in an essential way, showing how expanding markets exacerbate the problem by enriching already-dominant minority groups even as democracy empowers angry majorities.

Chua’s argument has been borne out in the experience of enough countries around the world just in the last two decades that I think we can conclude that her basic thesis has a great deal of merit. Gjermani would prefer not to engage that argument, and would rather get in some cheap shots against Chua for some alleged fondness for total state control.