The Complete Book of Combat With Mum may be lacking in presentational polish, but it compensates for that with Machiavellian guile. For every tenet of parental doctrine described in Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Chen Leshui, right, and Deng Xinyi have a practical or devious solution.

The guide, written in ballpoint pen on a battered notebook, for children between 6 and 12, and illustrated with crude diagrams of each "trick", catalogues how to navigate the relentless lectures and chastisements of everyday life.

Leshui's father, glowing with pride, uploaded the guide on to China's equivalent of Twitter, where it has been forwarded tens of thousands of times. State television has further drawn attention to the girls' work.

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With each stratagem comes a note on how regularly each gambit should be employed and a rating on what sort of mental attitude must be adopted to pull it off. Shoving a note of contrition under the door, for example, is described as "so-so", both in effectiveness and required skill. Bursting into song mid-punishment however, takes guts and should be tried very infrequently.

The guide has about 20 "tricks" ranging from the straightforward (No4: burst into tears and bury head on Mum's shoulder) to the suicidal (No8: when Mum has finished, come back with an insult of your own).

The idea for the guide came to Leshui when she returned home from an examination in which she had performed badly.

Predictably, she faced the snarl of the ambitious Tiger Mother: a humiliating comparison with the other children in the class and a rhetorical "aren't you ashamed to bring this exam paper home?"

Since no guide for dealing with the situation existed, Leshui decided to write one herself. In an interview with The Times, Leshui's father insisted that his wife was not the dragon portrayed in his daughter's drawings. "We always advocate that parents should provide children with a free space," he said.

When Ms Chua's controversial memoir was published this year, it highlighted a chasm between Western and Asian parenting approaches. For some, her threats of burning toys were ludicrously harsh; to others, they were a sensible approach to preparing her children for a competitive world.

From the Australian