I'm fairly certain that China's sector-based foreign investment restrictions were allowed in its WTO accession agreement.

Whataboutism.

Pointing to another country’s human rights issues to distract from your own can be whataboutism. Everyone should strive to implement human rights regardless of what anyone else is doing.

Deciding not to strictly follow a trade agreement when the other party of that agreement is doing it all can to avoid the spirit and letter of the agreement is not whataboutism. That’s just a reasonable response.

My point was that WTO membership doesn't require countries to compromise their security. Neither the US nor China are violating the spirit or the letter of the WTO Agreement by placing national security restrictions on sectors they consider critical.

(Article XXI on security exceptions: https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/booksp_e/gatt_ai_e/art21_e... )

It's still the good old "but he does it too, so it's fine that I do it"

No, it's not.

We moved past that so we have an (in theory) independent arbiter, in this case WTO.

> when the other party of that agreement is doing it all can to avoid the spirit and letter of the agreement

I hear this claim often about China (particularly from Americans), but I think it's very far from being true.

China underwent massive, extremely painful reforms in order to join the WTO, on a scale that would be difficult for most Americans to imagine. For example, China basically built an entire intellectual property legal system from scratch. Or another example: China split up numerous large state-owned enterprises and forced the resulting companies to operate on a for-profit basis, which meant that tens of millions of workers lost their jobs and many more lost benefits.

I think most of the exaggerated statements about China not caring about WTO rules stem from a basic misunderstanding both of how the Chinese economy works and what WTO rules require.