> After all the reasons you give for treading carefully against China all apply to the US and the west just as much.
That's not true. The US is susceptible to humiliation and reputation erosion when it comes to human rights. China, largely, is not. The Muslim prisoners - Abu Ghraib - being tortured wearing black bags, the infamous photos that were leaked (and sparked large protests across the Middle East), was an embarrassing scandal for years in the US and globally. It rather painfully tarnished the US when it comes to having authority to speak on human rights. And that's just one of several prominent examples from the past 20 years.
Obama promised to close Guantanamo specifically because of that type of reputation damage. Guantanamo is an issue about 1,000 times smaller in terms of impact, than what's going on in Xinjiang and yet it was a huge human rights scandal for the US that persists in tarnish to this day. It's routinely mentioned even now and the US gets lambasted for it. These things are a big credibility destroyer for a liberal democracy.
Go watch footage, or read polling/surveys, of what Western Europeans said and thought about the US from ~1948 to ~1991. Then compare it to today. That's the reputation hit the US has taken, the moral ground it has ceded. It has a tangible negative impact on the ability of the US to operate as a superpower, when your allies question your moral standing.
The US went to war, in Europe's backyard, to stop a genocide of Muslims with the Kosovo War. The positive reputation gain that you acquire from doing something like that, is largely wiped out when you do something like torture Muslims in those infamous photos at Abu Ghraib.
China does not operate on any reputation basis when it comes to human rights. They do not depend on US-style allies, of which they have almost none. They almost entirely disregard such reputation concerns. Quite the opposite, they defend their authoritarian approach with direct threats to anyone that opposes how their government does things.
