A Chinese child-rearing book that has been a runaway success in China has this piece of advice: Listen to your child.

That may not sound like revolutionary parenting advice, but as Yin Jianli, the book's author has found, it has struck a chord with many Chinese parents as just that.

Nurturing a child's confidence and independence is not a traditional cornerstone of Chinese child rearing. The few books on parenting or education by home-grown authors that have managed to sell well in China have mostly focused on how to get into elite schools, such as the book titled 'Harvard Girl Liu Yiting.'

But middle-class Chinese parents' attitudes may be changing along with the country's rising wealth. Yin's book, 'A Good Mom Is Better Than a Good Teacher,' which advocates developing children's potential without forcing them to accept adults' views, has been welcomed by Chinese readers and seems to have filled a void. So far, some 1.7 million copies of the book have been printed since it was first published in January 2009 and the book has topped Chinese bestseller lists.

The book, which has won a broad readership - from middle-class parents and teachers to babysitters and grandparents - encourages independence and freedom while cautioning parents against overprotecting their children.

One mother said on the website for dangdang.com, one of China's biggest online retailers, that after reading the book she realized that many methods she had used in raising her child were wrong, such as scolding or beating her child for failing to achieve a good score.

Yin, a former Beijing public school teacher, urges parents to allow kids to take reasonable risks - and to make mistakes. She describes how she encouraged her daughter, at age nine, to travel alone for 17 hours by train from their home in the eastern coastal city of Yantai to Beijing in the North.

At home, she advised her daughter not to blindly obey teachers' authority, sometimes openly questioning teachers' decisions. For example, when Yin's daughter was asked to copy the same words over a dozen times a night - a common way for teachers to punish students for failing to memorize something correctly - Yin offered to do the work for her.

Yin calls such assignments stupid. For a parent to question a teachers' decision is highly unusual in China.

Yin also encouraged her daughter not to be bound by narrow thinking. When a preschool teacher told the then three-year-old girl that she shouldn't have painted a river pink, Yin simply said, 'Rivers can be pink.'