People are so exceptionally bad at making arguments. He wasn't saying this at all. He was, in fact, saying the opposite--that the economics shouldn't matter and that China has been deserving of the international community's ire for a long time already.

Under that logic, France and Iran, Iraq and Libya are in the same boat.

Germany and Assad must be in the same boat as well. The EU has a long history of trading with brutal regimes: is the EU now morally equivalent to the worst regimes on Earth? Germany and the UK were selling technology to the belligerents in the Iran-Iraq war, countries that used chemical weapons.

Trade with a country doesn’t imply endorsement of that country’s policies. If the US takes a stand and embargoes a country, much of the rest of the world gets mad and accuses the US of meddling, then when they don’t embargo, the US gets accused of supporting policies of a specific country.

There’s no way to win in the eyes of the world.

He's saying they've been transgressing in ways, like human rights violations (social credit and the Uyghurs in Xinjiang are a couple examples), undermining democracy outside of its own government (undermining Hong Kong's contractual right to independent democratic process, etc.), violating intellectual property, cyberespionage against US companies like Google, etc., which we would have likely already have punished if it weren't economically inconvenient to do so to this particular state, and that that's an unfortunate reason to allow foul play.

They do interfere with other countries, see the news agency they set up in London.