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Notes -
This is one way to look at it. You could also ask if maybe the double standard is what's causing the hostility in the first place.
If you immigrate to China, say "abolish the Han nation" and when called out on it say "I just mean the Han should stop persecuting the Uyghurs, why I am always being scapegoated and blamed for everything," that might not be the best idea.
There are plenty, including within China, who want to see “the Han nation” — as in, a national self-understanding in which Han people are believed to be the central example of what a Chinese person is, in which their language and their customs are given pride of place, and in which they are “supreme” over other ethnic groups within the borders of the country” — abolished as such. This can be true even while also believing that every individual Han-descended person should live a happy, thriving life as a deracinated invidual.
I agree that this would be a foolish thing for me to advocate were I to move to China. It would also be laughable because I have no power whatsoever to effect such an outcome in China. Ignatiev does believe, with some justification, that he can do his part to move the needle closer to that outcome in America. He has been extremely open about that, and has also been equally extremely open about not wanting to replace the cold American white-centric paradigm with a new Jewish-centric one. He is, so far as I can tell, a sincere believer that the entire concept of a hegemonic “national ethnicity” should be abolished everywhere. This inherently means taking power away from hegemonic groups; there’s no time-sensitive reason, and therefore no reason to expend any political/intellectual capital, in also trying to abolish the folkways of minorities whose ethnic preferences are already not given pride of place within America.
Ignatiev does not expect to live to see the day when any non-white ethnic group(s) have achieved hegemonic dominance over America (and I assume he believes that such an outcome is both implausible and undesirable) so why would he waste his time distracting from the far more urgent need to discomfit and dispossess (culturally and otherwise) the dominant group? Thus, again, the “double standard” makes perfect sense and is entirely intellectually justifiable, given Ignatiev’s priors.
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