P.S. I assume "Chinese room" is inspired by the term "Chinese wall" used by investment bankers and the like.

Sorry, no. It refers to a Gedankenexperiment in a 1981 paper by the US philosopher John Searle, at UC Berkeley, which is his attempt at a refutation to "strong" AI (i.e., that we can build machines that think). See:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/c/chineser.htm