> I know very little about China, but the report mentions in passing that racism is pervasive in Russia where I was born,
whereas Western societies have done a remarkable job addressing racism.

I don't think that the report is saying "China is racist and we aren't." It's saying that the difference between the US and China is that the US struggles with its racism whereas China doesn't. Or, at the very least, that this is a defensible enough narrative that it could form the basis for US messaging on the issue of racism in international diplomacy.

> It is not obvious to me that the American approach of racial quotas in high education...

I think you may've missed the author's main point wrt Affirmative Action.

The only reason that Affirmative Action is even discussed in this report is because this is one of China's lines of offense.
The party will point to affirmative action and immigration quotas on Chinese as examples that prove the US is a racist society.

But the author's thesis is that the party's actual interest is in turning Chinese citizens against the US, not in proving their moral superiority to the US, and especially not in beating out the US on the racial equality front (witness: fucking eugenics...).

In other words, they have no qualms with racism -- only with racism against Han Chinese. And their focus on affirmative action (as opposed to Jim Crow or the highly racialized impacts of the WoD) betray this fact.

There are still people alive who fucking lived through Jim Crow.

The implementation of the War on Drugs is multi-decade all-but-overtly racist monstrosity.

So the US is far from guiltless, especially today. But Affirmative Action is somewhere near the mid-bottom, not the top, of a long list of very serious problems deeply rooted in racism.
Focusing on it to the exclusion of these other issues -- while at the same time embracing fucking eugenics -- belies a disinterest in actual anti-racism.

That is the author's point.

> It doesn't seem different from Israel's affirmative action where Arabs get preferential treatment at the expense of Jews, either.

On a similar note... Yes, clearly the exemplar of racism in Israeli politicsis preferential treatment afforded to Arabs at the expense of jews in college admissions processes! /s

I get that you're just discussing affirmative action. But if China wanted to truly critique western racism via Israel, affirmative action for Arabs would be a truly mind-boggling place from which to mount that critique.

Unless they didn't actually give a shit about racism and just wanted to demonize the US on the basis of a policy that happens to harm Han Chinese, that is...

> Perhaps it seems reasonable to some to blame Chinese for not having racial quotas which supposedly "address" racism

Again, the Affirmative Action stuff is really about how China frames its critique of the US to appeal to contemporary Han Chinese.
Not an actual discussion of the prevelance of racism in either society.

By contrast, it seems entirely reasonable for the author to point out stuff like ongoing 50's style racially-driven eugenics programs that were started in the mid-90's as evidence of ongoing racism in Chinese policy-making.

> Nor is it obvious to me whether the average Westerner of any particular group is more or less racist than a citizen of Russia, including both ethnic Russians and those who are not.

Indeed. Which is why the author identifies legal protections and cultural norms, and devotes an entire section to rejecting any hypotheses about differences in underlying psychology.