Yep, someone was being genuinely racist, talking about how Chinese people live in filth and their infrastructure is held up with duct tape, that they eat fake meat and fake tofu, etc. There’s a difference between critique of the CPC and veering off into racism, which is why I reported the comments, and then got banned for it for a day. This was the comment:

Dont need to travel to see that chinese people live in poverty, anything can be done when you are a dictatorship, its corrupt and everything is a scam. Fake meat, fake tofu, tofu drag constructions, 4 billion on a road and all the village got was a gravel path. Where a state teaches kids to hate other nations and disrespect everything for something that happened 80 years ago instead of making sure this does not ever happen again. Where its a national sport to go abroad and harass others. Where the state doesnt care about your stolen things, but if you speak out publicly against it, you will be warned with a kind “take that down, or else”. If their electric cars are anything to go by, i dont even want to step on their most modern trains even if they give me trillions of GBP. If the regime is supposed to be an example of progress, well guess then we all should go back to european monarchy and imperialism. Europe thrived in the 19th century afterall. Just look at all those rich people living luxurious lifes. All the advancements in science, medicine, transportation, literatur, architectur, social policies, unification of people split appart and more. If i were to travel to china they would arrest me on the airport for critisising china and not seeing the CCP as legitimite and supporting taiwan, that being if i would even be allowed to enter the country. The USA train system is shit, yes, thats not even on debate. Against that even the russian train system is amazing. Also china didnt build its high speed trains on their own. They used EU and japanese tech. Japan has the best train system in the entire world, and that without being a supressive, all survaling dictatorship. OP here is comparing shit, scooped from the toilet, to a microwave meal, that got a mediocer plate up. Ofc then in comparison the microwave meal will look better.

The majority of the comment is baseless chauvanism of Chinese people themselves, not their government, such as when they say that the “national sport is to harrass other nations” or that “they eat fake tofu, fake meat, etc.” There were many other comments on that thread that weren’t thinly veiled racism, but still attacked the CPC, which I didn’t report, I reported this person specifically because the comment uses “criticism of the CPC” as a veil for racism. Even if the mods disagreed, reporting three such comments from the same person is not report abuse.

If you scroll to the bottom of my modlog, you can sse that I got banned from playstation@lemmy.zip for “racism.” What happened, was the moderator made a rant about DEI in video games, and I called them out on it. They threw a tantrum, banned me, then deleted their account, leaving playstation@lemmy.zip unmoderated and dead.

The point is, don’t trust the modlog too much, if no context is linked. Comment removals are trustworthy, ban reasons need more investigation if they aren’t accompanied by examples. In this case, I’d say the moderators actually outted themselves by punishing me for reporting content that can absolutely be seen as racist, even if they disagreed. They could have ignored the reports, but chose to say that it’s a bannable offense to report this content.