The experiment is neither a red harring or racist as Chinese was used as an example for it’s aforementioned difficulty and completely different set of characters to the English alphabet; requiring both syntactic and semantic understanding to truly speak it—impossible from just an instruction manual

Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment is an excellent example though, discussing how artificial intelligences lack ‘understanding’ while giving an intuitive example of speaking Mandarin (a notoriously hard feat for English speakers). Nagel and Putnam seem more irrelevant in this context.