I'm pretty sure that's the point of the whataboutism. China's rise is mostly a problem if you are aligned to the US or in direct conflict with China, otherwise their influence is not really materially much worse than that of the current hegemon.
> China's rise is mostly a problem if you are aligned to the US or in direct conflict with China
Oh not at all. The rest of the free world including unaligned folks are quite concerned about China and the CCP.
Things can get much, much worse for democracies as China rises militarily. Relative to China, the US (and several other democratic nations) have a free press, access to unfiltered information, constitutionally protected right to dissent, independent judiciaries etc. Those are important checks to have.
China could conduct large scale genocide and yet there would be absolutely no domestic pressure on the government. The worry is that as it grows stronger, international pressure wouldn't matter much either.
You seem to be under the impression that all of those things matter in realpolitik. They don't. No amount of public pressure prevented the Iraq War or the Vietnam War, both of which were started under false pretences the media and public free as they were bought. China, just like the US, will act in it's interest internationally.
Indeed, generally, domestic opinion is not the most relevant predictor of what a country will do abroad, it's quite minor as most people have little information about foreign policy and are pretty easy to coax into whatever opinion you want, free press or not (see the WMDs, the lead up to the Vietnam War, etc..)
So this is not actually a relevant concern.
Actually, there is a countervailing factor, which is that China will never become a hegemon, they will always be somewhat counterbalanced by the US. So in reality one would expect less bullying for non-aligned nations.
Generally, the US is seen as a bigger threat to democracy and world peace than China, internationally:
> Indeed, generally, domestic opinion is not the most relevant predictor of what a country will do abroad, it's quite minor as most people have little information about foreign policy
Public opinion (and draft, and casualties) did influence US actions quite a bit in the Vietnam era.
But that's not so relevant, because at its peak the cold war was a complex moral situation in which the path didn't matter as much as the goals. In the 70s, the NATO and Soviets were fielding 40,000 nukes and marking the world into two camps. But it'd be a folly to paint them both with the same brush - a world in which the Soviets dominated would be quite unpleasant to live in.
The problem is there’s way more countries in the world than China and America.