Good question. As a tangent to this question I'm a white parent with a Chinese (as in from China, not American) wife who has her PhD. and is as hard working and focused as you might imagine so we sort of split the middle with our kids (her being the stricter one and me being the more relaxed one). We are still pretty much in agreement on raising them, it's just that my yang balances out her yin (heh), so to speak. Seems to work pretty well in that they do extremely well in school but are also socially happy and well adjusted.

More to your question, we know quite a few Chinese couples (pretty much all of the ones we know, in fact) who seem more like the parents you are describing. I think it would be a tough situation to deal with, as a kid.