My kid's school is international curriculum but local kids. I'm the only parent in his class (there are some others in the school) who's not a native Canto speaker. My wife is local and speaks Canto - would be hard to send a kid there otherwise.
It's Hong Kong, so there's a ton of kids and parents at the school who turn out to also be citizens of US/Canada/UK/Australia etc.
The kid has too much homework but he's not "deprived of childhood." He's deprived of a certain amount of play time, and I wish he wasn't, but it's not like they're chained to their desks all day at school.
Sorry if this winds up making a non-political post political, but you can get a good sense from the protests of what sort of skills the kids here learn. Want a 4-piece chamber music group playing Glory To Hong Kong? No problem. They all take instrument lessons. A 6-person team for neutralizing tear gas canisters, each with their own specific task? Sure. Chem lab stuff, I guess. I was surprised by all this - I associated the local schools w/rote memorization and a lack of initiative/creativity from the students, but turns out I was wrong about a lot of stuff.