Be more tiger mum!

00:00 05:10

Cindy Yu has narrated this article for you to listen to.

‘What’s it to do with me if your boyfriend wants to break up with you? Or if you cried, or had a fight, these are not things that I as a supervisor care about. I’m not your mother. All I care about is results. Our relationship is just employee-employer.’

In a series of videos posted on Douyin (China’s version of TikTok), Chinese tech executive Qu Jing was a little too candid about her management style. Sharply dressed and with hair cut formidably short, she said she expected her staff to be on call 24 hours a day, including at weekends, even at the cost of their personal relationships. If Qu thought these videos would give her a ‘girlboss’ image, she was wrong. They went viral and she became a national hate figure.

Watching the clips, I shudder to think of the life I might be living had my mother not taken me out of China when I was a child. The graft starts young: in my three years of primary school in Nanjing, the days were ten hours long, after which there was homework until bedtime. Weekends were spent going between piano lessons, swimming lessons and painting lessons. Mum was half driven by ambition and half by fear. All the parents watched each other and their children closely, anxious that theirs might fall behind. They were made more neurotic by the fact that they could have only one child on whom to dump all their hopes and ambitions.

Teachers add to the competitiveness by ranking students according to their grades so everyone always knew who was top of class, and who was bottom.