Not really. American companies can and do defy the American executive branch. Rule of law and an independent judiciary are things in America. They are not in China.
A rule of law that is profoundly flexible to achieve whatever the US government wants to do. From secret courts and directives that you can't talk about, to the wholesale capture of telco traffic (with telco complicity, of course). And that rule of law allows the massive US intelligence establishment to do virtually anything internationally (which is the context that we're talking about), from sabotaging systems, performing economic espionage and stealing trade secrets, to murder.
Virtually the same trappings and illusions of controls exist in China as well.
Both countries do the same thing, and to an international country are interchangeable. The overall context to these discussions, however, is that the US is somehow good and China is somehow bad, so it's different.
Secret courts are a shame. Secret directives, on the other hand, can be compatible with the rule of law and an independent judiciary, provided they're lawfully authorized and can be challenged in a court.
At the end of the day, a private citizen (or foreign government) can challenge the U.S. government on equal grounds in a fair court. That is not the case in China.
I presume you also forgot to add this before challenged in a court...
> ..., whistleblowers are protected, and can be ...
You see, because that's the thing with secret directives, they're redacted from the public eye. The only way we get visibility into them isn't with FOIA requests, it's with whistleblowers who feel the government is doing things wrong, and if they're not protected, they rarely come forward.