"And before you accuse me of things,"

You're using a moniker 'casualracism' trying to exploit the notion of a cartoon which has 'Chinese Characters' as inherently racist, even though that's entirely likely to be a weaponized use of the term given the political context.

"If you criticized China, you are Racist" is bad form.

It's a very easy and common method of CCP duplicity to simply blow the 'racism' dog whistle and have 1/2 of Westerners immediately lose context and get distracted.

There's no way what the PhD student did should lead to anything other than someone being trite on Twitter and that would be the end of it.