No nation genuinely cares about human rights, especially the US. They have toppled way too many governments and installed way too many dictators to claim otherwise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...). The US is relatively "nice" right now, which means that we're skip the second step of appointing a dictator. Even then, it's not because American leaders suddenly became nicer, it's because unlike their Chinese counterparts, they don't have any real long-term goals. If they get into another Cold War or feel the need for a canal in another nation, they'll go right back to being evil again.
China's long term goal is to become the top superpower. USA's long term goal is to stay the top superpower. Everything else flows from this but it should be very clear that "staying in power" is very much a real goal on any horizon. It also involves a lot of military, economic, and political effort. As a democracy the US can't have an equally concentrated aim but as the saying goes, getting to the top is easy, staying at the top is hard.
The biggest difference is really that the US is already in a top position, and a good chunk of the world, particularly the EU, have interests that are mostly aligned with the US. When they're not it usually takes no more than a bit of economic and political pressure from the US to get the desired results.
China does not have this support. The Western world does not have any reason to trust them, no real "relationship", and no guarantee that China would be a "benevolent dictator" like the US. I say "dictator" because the US successfully imposed its views/demands on the Western world almost whenever this was needed by dangling a tiny carrot and a giant stick, a situation most of the world is more or less comfortable with. So no reason to take chances on a country that could forgo the carrot completely, or just have completely misaligned interests.
To the point, people are arguing that China could use Chinese companies to undermine a foreign country, clearly making them a no go for anything secure. In contrast we also know that for all intents and purposes the US can do and did the same with US based companies. It's just about picking the view that supports your personal beliefs and interests. As a regular person, would you rather be spied on by the US via Cisco or by China via Huawei? As the US government this understandably isn't even a question.
Parent's point is that US wants IP laws mostly because it has a trove of extremely valuable IPs and is in the leading position far ahead of any other player.
The same way Disney wants strong copyright and trademark protection, with low labor protection, lax tax enforcement etc. They would have different demands and priorities if they were still scrapping existing IPs from the public domain.
https://www.ft.com/content/c78b69e3-82bd-4f72-881c-12b2ca1ce...
Those agreements really only got started with the Berne Convention-- mainly creative works-- and the Paris Convention-- basically industrial patents. (Yes there were some other smaller agreements before, but these brought things into much larger scale with many, many more signatories to the agreements)
Besides, your line of reasoning amounts to "Other people got away with bad things so it's not fair that I do to" As a parent, I spot that line of logic often in with my kids, and it doesn't hold together very well there either.
China definiately has the upper hand when it comes to exploiting the natural human resources that would otherwise be thorns in the political landscape.
So no it is not "whataboutism", which a bs term anyway because it is almost always used in situations where someone implicitly claims that the US cares about human rights and that's why US atrocities must be brought up as counterargument.
I also think the comparison is wrong to begin with: I doubt you will find prisons in China that allow inmates to have a TV in their cell, or access to Xbox or other videogames.
How about Taiwan or New Zealand? Can we vote for Spain?
The US wants to keep a lock on all future innovations. They want to maintain their seat. They want to create any barrier to entry that will help them keep living high on the hog. But if an HIV vaccine were invented in China today, the USA would do everything they could to steal it or invalidate any patents on it. The U.S. is opposed to Chinese stealing ideas from a U.S. company. Except for the part of the U.S. that didn't own stock in the U.S. company but does own stock in the Chinese company. And of course everyone in the U.S. who can buy the Chinese product cheaper than the U.S. product.
This seems to not match the behavior that we actually see in other fields. In the situation of folding smartphones, for example, the first manufacturer was Korean. The Chinese solution was to poach staff and steal trade secrets from a contract manufacturer, while the US solution has been to just buy the resulting devices as consumer products.
Why cant we just acknowledge that both are bad.