American mother who lived in China for 16 years says she misses the “co-father” of the communist government

An American fashion designer who spent 16 years in Shanghai has published an essay in the New York Times highlighting the virtues of raising your children under the watchful and authoritative gaze of the Chinese government.

Heather Kaye, 49, came to Shanghai in 2006 with her husband George and planned to stay for a year. But the couple stayed and ended up raising her two daughters there. However, in 2022, the family was forced to return to the US after living for two years under the country’s draconian COVID-19 policies.

She has now described her return to Washington DC as a “culture shock” that makes her miss the way her children were “co-raised by the Chinese government.”

His own comments, however, will come as a surprise to many who are concerned about the looming threat the Chinese government poses both domestically and to the global economy, technology, and business.

In October last year it became known that the communist party operates secret police stations in New York City to hunt down dissidents and force them to return to China, while those protesting the country’s zero-COVID policy have been known to disappear without explanation.

In 2022, his family returned to the US after living under the country’s draconian COVID-19 policies for two years.

Kaye recognized the ways the Chinese Communist Party would insert itself into family life, whether it was controlling what their children ate or dictating the number of hours they should sleep at night.

“In China, government co-parenting begins in the womb,” he wrote, referring to limits on how many children parents were allowed, which have since been relaxed.

He added that soon after enrolling his children in state schools, he began to control how his children should live.

“The Chinese kindergarten gave us lessons on everything, including how much sleep our daughters should sleep, what they should eat, and what their optimal weight is,” she said.

But she said she was grateful for the discipline instilled at the school in her two daughters, born in 2008 and 2010.

She recounted: ‘Every morning, all the students performed calisthenics in straight lines and raised the red flag of China while singing the national anthem.’

And he praised the Chinese system for “independently instilling a strong work ethic and an all-out drive for academic excellence,” teaching them that hard work leads to results.

Kaye said she was also grateful for the way giving parts of her children’s lives to the state reduced the burdens on her and her husband, and she hoped 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. Being a parent, like governing, 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 care.

“Every morning, all the students performed calisthenics in straight lines and raised the red flag of China while singing the national anthem,” Kaye wrote.

Kaye also saw merit in Chinese censorship. “Raising children in China was an advantage in other ways, such as the heavy censorship,” she wrote.

The government imposed limits on the amount of time their children could spend playing video games and saved them from accessing problematic material on the Internet.

Not only that, state oversight here would keep the daughters safe as they navigated the sprawling, but relatively safe, according to Kaye, Shanghai subway.

Despite all this, Kaye was forced to leave China, having lived through their zero-COVID approach that confined them to their homes for two months and limited them to government food rations.

But even when the family left, she maintained her admiration for the country and the life they had been able to make there.

In a story covering her family’s departure from Shanghai in 2022, she told Reuters: ‘Anything you can imagine, you can build it here. Anything you want to be, you can make it happen here.

A recent report by human rights watchdog Safeguard Defenders revealed that the Chinese Communist Party has at least 54 ‘overseas police service stations’ in 30 different countries, including in the US.

Since launching that program in April 2021, China reported that it had “persuaded” 230,000 Chinese citizens to return home.

Safeguard Defenders campaign manager Laura Harth alleged that China has been using it to track dissidents and force them to return home.