If China is as good as other developing countries at protecting IP, why is the U.S. administration labelling China as a trade cheat?

Question

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/us-trade-hawks-exaggerate-chinas-threat/587536/

I was reading this article and read that China is not any different in regards to other developing countries in terms of IP protection and government subsidies, and that tech transfer is encouraged to happen between developed countries and developing countries.

But here, too, China isn’t doing anything exceptional. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which last year ranked countries on how well they protect the intellectual property of foreign companies, China scored fairly well among developing nations: just below Mexico and Malaysia but above Turkey, Brazil, South Africa, and the Philippines. A 2017 study of cases in which foreign companies sued for patent infringement in Chinese courts by Renjun Bian of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law found that foreign companies actually prevailed at higher rates than did Chinese litigants.

Other critics focus on the way the Chinese government subsidizes its industries, thus giving them an unfair advantage. There’s a germ of truth here: Beijing pours money into promising companies in ways the United States and most European governments do not. But this isn’t unusual among developing economies either. According to the Heritage Foundation’s annual index of “economic freedom,” which measures state intervention in the economy, China actually intervenes less than India, Vietnam, and Brazil, some of America’s best friends in the developing world.

So why is this idea that China is a cheat unlike other developing countries pushed by the current U.S. administration?

Answer 1

One reason is that they disagree with Mr. Beinart (the writer of that article). Several things that he presents as facts are disputable.

1. That other countries do the same things.
2. That China is at the same level of development.

One could easily argue that China is no longer a developing country in the same sense as Vietnam or the Philippines. Its per capita Gross Domestic Product is much higher.

There are also some additional reasons:

1. China has a massive trade surplus. As a country, it can afford to pay for intellectual property in a way that poorer countries cannot.
2. China is huge (in population). Only India is close. It has more than four times as much population as the United States (which is third). And more than twice the population of the European Union (which is not a country but still measurable).
3. For most countries poorer than it, it doesn't really matter whether they protect IP as they aren't big enough to matter. But China's economy is the largest in the world as measured by Purchasing Power Parity GDP, bigger than the US or the EU.

Looking specifically at Brazil, India, and Vietnam, only Brazil is comparable in PPP GDP per capita.