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by gumby 1474 days ago
Wait, what? So Jim Crow or Apartheid were not racist because they were promulgated by governments?
4 comments

I think you've misunderstood the GP. The Chinese students are claiming the people criticizing the Chinese government are being racist. The GP is saying criticizing a government (and not the people) is not inherently racist.
No, it's more like this:

    if you criticize certain policies of the Chinese government:
      if you are not ethnic Chinese:
        you are racist
      else:
        you are treasonous
Remove the negation from the else please, otherwise LGTM
GP is saying that if some is criticising the Chinese government, it does not imply that they are being racist towards Chinese people. But these students try to muddy the waters by conflating the two issues.
Sounds like the “criticise Israel and you’re anti semetic” thing
Not really. When someone is very anti Israel, more often than not, if you dig a little deeper you find an antisemite.

But when people criticize China, they criticize the politics and you almost always find them praising Taiwan and Hong Kong, invalidating the idea that they're racist.

Different people have different motivation: among people who criticize Israel there are people driven by antisemitism. Of course not all critics are antisemitic. The same with China - some can be right (in critics of CCP) for wrong reasons (xenophobia/nationalism). Or one can criticize specific policies for good reasons and be labeled as a racist.
For context, in the article the mainland Chinese student association leader mentioned that by the mere mention of Xinjiang and the CCP’s culpability was seen as being racist toward them as Chinese people.
Did we read the same article?

William Wang, president of the program's student government body, drafted a letter that was signed by more than 80 Chinese students in the program and sent to the administration on Thursday evening, then sent to all program students on Friday.

"We left today’s colloquium because we felt that the atmosphere in that room was extremely hostile towards us," the letter stated. "At that moment, we were not sitting in a classroom; we were crucified in a courtroom for crimes that we did not commit."

Yes we did.

“we were crucified in a courtroom for crimes that we did not commit.”

These students are confusing criticism of a government and leadership with criticism of an entire race of people. Either that or they’re being disingenuous.

Saying that Xi Jinping and the CCP have terrible policies is not racist.

For the record I am also Chinese.

Since we’re on the subject, Jiang Zemin is more fit to rule. That’s something a lot of different factions both inside and outside of China can agree on. Xi Jinping is a disaster not just for China, but the entire world.