The Chinese Room experiment has always been a hack thought experiment that was discussed in other forms before it was posited by Searle, most famously in Turing's "Can machines think?". Searle only superficially engaged with existing literature in the original Chinese Room paper. When he was forced to do so later on, Searle claimed that if you'd precisely simulate a Chinese human brain in a human-like robot, that brain still wouldn't be able to think or understand Chinese. Not a useful definition of thinking if you ask me.

From Wikipedia:

Suppose that the program simulated in fine detail the action of every neuron in the brain of a Chinese speaker.[83][w] This strengthens the intuition that there would be no significant difference between the operation of the program and the operation of a live human brain. Not a useful definition of thinking if you ask me.

Searle replies that such a simulation does not reproduce the important features of the brain—its causal and intentional states. He is adamant that "human mental phenomena [are] dependent on actual physical–chemical properties of actual human brains."[26]