Thing is, the Chinese companies who do shady things absolutely get punished. Not just slap-on-the-wrist fines, but jail time and sometimes death penalty. Legal precedent is not why legit founders get harassed for being Chinese.
We're not talking about well-thought-out questions about legal precedence, but random trolls calling their products 'cheap Chinese knock-offs' even when they are original, and even in cases where it's a similar version to something, if it's made in the U.S.A., we call that "private label" or "white label." Or "generics."
Secondly, when one company gets away with something in the US, we have a fairly good reason to believe that other companies could get away with something similar. So, if I were a person in any country (even the US), and I needed to decide whether or not I could trust a US company not to do something to me, legal precedent in the US would actually be very relevant.
To make this concrete, I bet Europeans have become rightfully wary by now about the data privacy implications of banking/shopping or otherwise making an account with US business.