While I do think human rights are a good idea, the focus seems to be carefully selected to as to make "bad" countries look bad and western countries look good. For the US, it's OK to kill people as long as you do it a bit randomly in a war instead of being too targeted, or as long as you do it to foreigners not your own citizens and you try to kill them quickly instead of using deliberate torture. If you do use torture, it should be psychological (solitary confinement) rather than physical. It's also OK to kill people by leaving them in an unsafe environment surrounded by killers (poor neighborhoods) without providing enough security or enough income to buy their way out. It's also OK to kill them in the name of economic progress by allowing cars to drive at speeds which regularly cause death. Somehow we accept these things as tolerable or even necessary but we don't realize that classic "bad country tortures dissidents" human rights abuses are equally necessary - they do the same thing wars do - secure the positions of governments against people who want to take them over. Even the name "dissident" is misleading - If we called Falun Gong members "traitors", that might make them sound like bad people and engender less public sympathy.
I think building a mental model of "bad," countries vs. "good," countries is over simplistic and not really useful when comparing China to the United States. The two entities are two of the largest countries in the world both by wealth, population and area. What troubles many Chinese about the Falun Gong and American society is the instability and inherent threats that it causes to Chinese society, by way of potential destabilization of the Chinese Communist Party's central authoritarian rule. What troubles Americans and more pluralistic societies is that they believe that only through a pluralistic, representative society can human rights abuses be brought to the forefront and eliminated. What the thought is, while America has many problems and human rights abuses, China is likely perpetrating far more serious problems under the surface, on a regular basis, due to a fundamental, "Who watches the watchers?" problem inherent in a vanguard movement as opposed to a pluralistic society in which titans can hypothetically point fingers at one another as they battle for power, leveraging the common folk's sensibilities to de-seat one another.
It also completely ignores the fact that local and state governments in the US regularly try to reduce speed limits which often leads to higher accident and fatality rates.
I'm not disputing your comment, but can you provide a citation for this? I did a quick google but the only reference I could find was a report (editorial?) in the Wall Street Journal called "Highways are safe at any speed".
I'm just exploring other things that we seem to take for granted despite them being terrible. Of course China has that too but it's a huge "unexotic" problem in most countries.
Cartoon about our patriotic biases: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/03/glorious-leader-wicke...
That said, it doesn't stop human rights abuses being wrong too.