OK, let me unpack a few things here.

1. It is emphatically not racist to criticize a government's actions.
2. It is emphatically racist, however, to assume every (perceived) citizen of a government's nation is uncritically accepting of their government.

And here's where it gets messy.

The China Watchers™ crowd always says they "hate the government, not the citizens". (The fact that this echoes extremist Christian bigotry with "hate the sin, not the sinner" whenever they go on rampages against every social group they disapprove of is a feature, not a bug. They know their audience well.)

Yet...

Ask anybody with a (perceived) Chinese name how often they have been called upon by China Watchers™ to personally account for the Chinese government's actions. You will likely get a shock by how often these people who "hate the government, not the citizens" take perceived citizens to task for their government's actions (while at the same time, in a stunning display of utter hypocrisy, refuse to take responsibility for their own governments' actions despite (technically) having a say in who that government is (which Chinese citizens don't have).

Chinese citizens. People of other nationalities resident in China. People with (perceived) Chinese names or looks. These all get hounded by the "hate the government, not the citizens" crowd with a zeal that puts the "not the citizens" part of things in the firm category of "blatant lie".

And that is just flat-out racism.

So while yes, technically, people criticizing the Chinese government aren't being racist (and holy fucking SHIT are there good reasons to criticize them!), the reality is that most of the people doing so are hiding behind that technicality and are being racist as all fuck, so often, in fact, that it's my default assumption unless I see evidence to the contrary.

You don't like that default? Well, here's a bit of sage advice I got from an activist friend of mine in the late '80s: "Rein in your crazies or you'll be mistaken for them."

I don't expect you to understand. Liberals literally have no concept of the past, everything is just the here and now and whatever's in front of them at the moment. Try to bring up anything more than that they just get confused then plug their ears to lalalalala to make it stop.