The Other Asian Miracle

The intimidating secrets of raising high-achievers.
By Ann Hulbert
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2005, at 1:33 PM ET

In 2001, a how-to book called Harvard Girl Liu Yiting surged to the top of the Chinese best-seller list. Written by two parents from the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu, it laid out the rigorous "family education" methods they credited with getting their daughter into America's best known Ivy League university—the current pinnacle of academic success in a country now thinking globally. According to press accounts of the manual, Yiting's parents launched the regimen with a cognitively stimulating "verbal barrage" when she was 15 days old. On top of intensive home studying, Yiting went on to endure toughening feats like swimming long distances and holding ice-cubes in her bare hands. By 2003, Harvard Girl had sold about 3 million copies. It also spawned more than a dozen imitators peddling techniques for raising successful Chinese applicants to Oxford, Cambridge, and Columbia University. (Yale, it seems, might need to work on its marketing.)