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.