Consider that this amazing mum was willing to pay any price to see her daughter at Stanford, the US university of her choice.

But – and I surmise your mounting anger – I cannot bring myself to condemn Mum Zhao or almost any Tiger Money-Mum.

Maternal love is neither proportional nor even entirely rational. It is a constant fact of life on this planet, like hurricanes or gravity. I admit there were times in my youth when I wished my own loving mother had as much money as Mrs Zhao.

I am also loathe to condemn Stanford or almost any school favoured with large donations from grateful rich Chinese.

And not just from China, as a matter of fact: crazy rich mothers – both Asian and non-Asian – have been writing out big cheques for as long as I can remember. God love them. It’s not an Asian thing, it’s a mothering thing.

To be sure, institutions of higher education do have to protect their admissions process. They would not merit their phenomenal reputation were admission simply for sale to the highest bidder.

But, at the same time, let’s be real: not everyone on the Stanford football team was granted admission because they were absolute shoo-ins for a Rhodes Scholarship.

Mums know higher education is a treasure, and America’s universities are among the best that can be had.

In fact, our best undergraduate institutions convert young people who enter as freshman thinking they know everything into young citizens upon graduation who can actually think through complicated things. Such a magical transformation alone is priceless.

These days, alas, trans-Pacific tension is poisoning what had been a stellar staple in the fraught China-US relationship.

At my current university, Loyola Marymount University, smaller and more personal, the Chinese students entrusted to my care add powerful value to the education of all my students (and sometimes their professor).

On the contrary, our students from China – and from Indonesia, the Middle East, India, Korea, and so on – make our educational life in America less provincial, more cosmopolitan.

Government officials on both sides of the Pacific Ocean do future generations an unforgivable disservice by flashing “national security” and “spying” red lights to eviscerate university internationalism that has the potential to help youth generations understand each other better and elevate the perspective of our future leaders beyond provincial nationalism.

Mrs Zhao, in her defence, claimed she had been told that her largesse would help provide more scholarships for students in need and help fund university programmes.

Since universities do need money to survive, much less thrive, we must be careful not to condemn those who have wealth simply because it is so very unevenly spread out.

After all, America, with its many great universities, is the most capitalist of countries.

Sure, on the surface, chequebook parenting can seem vulgar and inarguably unjust, but all good mothers want the best for their children, just as all serious universities want the best for their students.

While we need to push our university administrators to eyeball those gaps in their admissions process that can be exploited by vipers, there is little value in criminalising that relationship.

Surely it’s better for mum’s big cheque to go to a serious university, for a new microbiology lab or a boatload of scholarships for the not-so-wealthy, than to a certifiably crooked “charity” or crackpot evangelist.

So, based on what I know as of this writing, I’m sticking with Mrs Zhao as my candidate for mother of the year.

As for her daughter, Yusi, having been forced to leave Stanford for all the negative publicity and questions about her application’s veracity, this promising young woman will surely better understand her mum – and life itself – when someday she herself becomes a mother. It’s a very special and often difficult job.

Tom Plate is the distinguished scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies at LMU (Loyola Marymount University) and the author of seven books about Asia