Michelle Nijhuis hasn't acquired a taste for Chinese alcohol:
Baijiu, usually distilled from sorghum, has been part of Chinese life for hundreds if not thousands of years. The reaction of the first laowai to taste it is lost to history, but for well over a century foreigners have described baijiu with escalating horror. “One can hardly imagine what pleasure the Chinese find in imbibing these burning drinks, which are absolutely like liquid fire, and, moreover, very ill tasted,” the French Catholic missionary Évariste Régis Huc wrote in 1854. Dan Rather, reporting on Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, described Maotai, a famous variety of baijiu, as ”liquid razor blades.”
But this doesn't prevent people from drinking it:
Among the business and government classes, baijiu is social fuel, used not just to loosen up a banquet crowd but to cement relationships and prove one’s mettle in China’s male-dominated power networks. Refusing any one of the dozens of toasts during a typical banquet is considered an insult or a sign of weakness — and definitely bad business. The result is that China is the only country where binge drinking increases with age.
The Dish 