I am a bit confused as to why you are against labeling a character as Black or Chinese.

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Here is the first paragraph of Gone With the Wind, which I believe most would consider very well written (if extremely racist by today's standards):

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"SCARLETT O’HARA WAS not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin–that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns."

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Here, her magnolia-white skin is very clearly mentioned. Why not mention Black or Chinese features in this same way?

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I would say that it is very important to make it very clear what race, gender, sexuality, etc., your characters are. Every written work is propaganda, including history books, medical texts, etc. Every writer chooses to leave certain details in and exclude others. Every writer chooses how many words to allot to one subject.

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So let's assume we live in a racist society, which is racist in a way we cannot see. If we write a book where all of our characters are cisgender, we are in some way being bigoted towards transgender people, because we are going with the cultural default, and that cultural default is transphobic.

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There is no neutrality, or centrism. You can only be racist or antiracist, anti-transgender or pro-transgender, etc., and by not pushing the envelope in terms of making strong characters who are Black, LGBTQ+, disabled, etc., you are making an argument in favor of the norm which is White, Cishet, abled, etc.