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Lenora Chu, a child of Chinese immigrants to the US, moved back to China with her American husband. They wanted to raise their 3-year-old son to be “a nimble global citizen with no attachment to a specific place.” Seriously, that’s how Chu puts it. In those words.

To achieve the goal of massaging the toddler into nimble  global citizenship, Chu and her husband put the child into a Chinese daycare. China is an authoritarian society stuck in the industrial era mentality. In their school system, children are terrorized into robot-like obedience from the youngest age. Chu was so shocked by what she observed at the Chinese daycare that she wrote a book about it titled Little Soldiers.

The book is built on the contrast between the disciplinarian structure of the Chinese school system and Chu’s mentality of a reflexive hatred towards boundaries. The curious thing is that neither of these ways of being in the world is well suited to the neoliberal reality in which both have to exist. Chu is a standard Western neurotic who is incapable of any form of self-containment. The products of the authoritarian Chinese education system are also incapable of self-containment, but for a different reason. They get used to being disciplined and controlled from the outside from their earliest childhood. Establishing and strictly maintaining internal boundaries is alien both to Chu and the people she criticizes.