I did graduate work in Materials Science and the understanding in our lab was to be very skeptical of papers from China, particularly from the State Key Labs as they were very often impossible to replicate and ended up being useless. Seems relevant to this paper as well.
There are tons, literally hundreds of Chinese-Americans and Chinese-Europeans and Chinese immigrants living all over the world who do research, and their work is not at all suspect. The reason why Chinese papers are suspect has to do with the academic and financial incentives which exist in the modern day People's Republic of China. With that being said, it's definitely possible that Chinese papers are perceived as suspect for racist reasons as well.
Can you explain, in detail, why you believe that making a statement about the scientific output of a country, as measured by paper quality, is necessarily racist? In particular, I'm going to challenge you on this because the "racism" argument has been used as an easy cop-out to denigrate an opinion all-too-commonly.
Please just explain your thinking of why it's "racist". Assume your reader is aware of the effects of socioeconomic status, national ambitions to become a science powerhouse, and the incentives to publish groundbreaking work.
The criticism was on the country, representing its system of academic publications, not on Chinese people and characteristics unique to their genetics or similar.
Your argument is similar to calling anybody an antisemite who criticizes Israels politics. You're rightfully being downvoted.
