It’s more accurate to say the Chinese room computes results which humans recognize as successful translation from English to Chinese. The understanding is all on the side interpreting the output.
Data participates in human society and he has a human-like body. Data also has subjective experiences, as evidence by his dream sequences in one episode. Whereas the Chinese Room is just following a bunch of rules for translation. But Data doesn't merely translate from one set of symbols to another given a large set of rules. He learns by interacting with people and his experiences as an android. From that we could say understanding is the result of an embodied social activity that the Chinese Room completely lacks. Whatever the Chinese room is said to be doing, that's not the same as understanding language.
Another way to put it is that language isn't equivalent to symbol manipulation, even though it makes use of symbols, or a least since the written word was invented.
Unfortunately this is a recursive question, because the only device we have for exploring the difference between a brain and a computer is our brains. Thus, I believe the Chinese room experiment is rightly composed of as a thought experiment - what other means do we have for assessing our difference from computers other than our intuition?
