There is a tendency among Chinese to do the same – any critism of the Chinese government is based on a “lack of understanding of China”, and often also a supposed anti-Chinese attitude that many Chinese think is widespread i Western countries. Instead of answering to critisism in a proper way, Chinese all to often hurl these accusations on anyone who dares to critise their “Zuguo”.

Instead of using this tactic, Chinese who wants to answer to Western critisism should try doing to avoid getting hotheaded, and save accusations of rasicm for cases where racism is indeed involved.

Westerners generally don’t understand how much the chinese people support their government, or identify their government, their country, and their people as being three aspects of the same thing. They are baffled when chinese people take criticism of the chinese government as a personal attack. And they are generally uninformed about europe’s destruction of china under colonialism.

Yeah, not some idiot shooting his mouth off, and later clarifying what he said.

As for attempting to copy organisations like the Anti-Defamation League, well, I don’t see it working. As long as Tiananmen remains in the public memory nobody is going to interpret criticism of the Chinese government as ‘racism’, nor do the vast majority of people shy off criticism of Israel’s policies in the Palestinian areas and Lebanon through fear of being accused of anti-semitism, even if a certain fringe of the Jewish policy interprets all criticism of Israel as such.

“我在国外发现，很多知识，甚至是左翼知识分子，在西藏问题上都是跟着主流媒体走的。他们问我怎么看，我会告诉他们，西藏的事情从来不止是西藏与整个中国的事情，一定要在全球格局和殖民历史的上下文中来看”
“While I was outside China, I discovered that most intellectuals, even left wing intellectuals, have the same views of Tibet as the mainstream media. They ask me what I think, and I say that the Tibet issue has never just been an issue between China and Tibet. Rather you have to see it within the context of the history of [Euro-American] imperialism and globalisation.”

True enough, but what surprises me, is that despite being well connected with those non-PRC China scholarship, Liu still doesn’t see the Chinese (Qing) Empire as something that could have actively participated in Empire building (in Tibet), in the same ways as the Britih, French and Russian empires that she mentions.

If even people like Liu don’t see the Qing as an Empire, will the Chinese Empire every be written back into the PRC narrative of history?

[I]t is not mere kvetching that has made even a hint of antisemitism unacceptable in polite society in the West, but rather the legacy of certain historical events.

This statement seems to suggest that the legacy of historical events alone “has made even a hint of antisemitism unacceptable in polite society in the West,” which in turn suggests that the this legacy acts with equal force on all societies within the West.

Accepting at face value the statement that kvetching is a non-factor, are you suggesting either that (1) anti-semitism is uniformly unacceptable throughout the West (but how then to explain differing degrees of tolerance for “anti-semitic” practices between, e.g., the U.S. and France?
); OR (2) Western societies differ in the degrees to which they tolerate anti-semitism?

And, where (a) the legacy of certain historical events acts with equal force on all societies within the West and (b) kvetching is a non-factor, IF (2), THEN how?

Full disclosure: I am not a Jew.