Right. And you still know something is not acceptable by the people, and you probably wont go across that line. Same thing in China. Many of Liu's opinions are hated by Chinese people in general, not by the central power.
That is the exact consequence Liu got - he is never respected by the Chinese people in general. Why Chinese people should respect someone who openly suggested that they should be colonized by the west for 300 years?
For his sentence, no one in this thread ever supported that, for me, it is as bad as giving this man the nobel peace prize.