I'll break character for a minute and say something.
Rather than just all dismissing this as the slinging of mud, lies, and nonsense: Wouldn't it be interesting to apply some of those Cognitive Science concepts that I learned at Rice about assuming, for pragmatic purposes, that the speakers are somehow connected to reality and that their locutions are somehow a representation of their frame of reference.
What then?
Discerning anything useful remains problematic, even when making this assumption about the authors. At least, I find it problematic. The whole analysis begs the question as to the intent of the author in making this representation. Merely assuming that the statements are not meaningless is not enough to get us to anything useful.
So what's the way out? Is it more important to understand where these folks are coming from or what they are driving at?
I say "Neither! We must look at the rhetorical method."
It seems that I'm getting back into character, so we'll flow:
What's with this Chinese "Information Office" anyway? From the product (this "report") it must consists entirely of people who can do little else besides merely reading & clipping Google news. The "Washington Post says this bad thing" and "LSE says that bad thing." The whole report reads like one of my 9th grade English papers after I learned how to do block quotes and I learned how to use the school library's database resources of literary criticism and other secondary sources. The rhetoric is clunky and not very persuasive.
I am honestly disappointed, actually, because I "get" what they were going for. The whole Sun Tzu idea of "shooting your enemy with a quiver of his own arrows."
Maybe (just maybe) therein lies the insight: The Chinese "Information Office" officals do not "get" that the specific abuses of power, as documented in the "Western Free Press" do not impeach the credibily of the government. Why not? To state the obvious: because this method is a validation of the "Western Free Press" and "The Free World at Large and in General" (speaking in quotations is hi-larious)but more importantly (and maybe slightly less obviously) everything that China is saying in its report is (literally) old news; there few things less convincing than a rehash.
The US State department itself seems torn: split between its desire to see human rights abuses everywhere, as if it where the kid in the 6th sense, and decrying them versus its need to make Every Single Thing as boring and unreadable as possible through the imposition of "mad-lib" style forms.
The human rights record in (Country) is (pejoritive). Amongst the specific incident of the abuses: (Boy in room) was once (verb) in (awful location) for (odd number) days enduring (something painful)
My fill-in answers are:
All of that said, it is excellent that the US Government makes public it's feelings about how other countries handle issue of human rights. ("Feelings" its like therapy...) I also think that other countries have a right to take the US to task for our own human rights transgressions. Which brings me to my point:
the most devistating thing that China could have done, imho, is to have read the entire report (all of the countries) and then to have come back and said "Well, US Government, how do you square this representation of how you see the other countries with your bad treatment of countries that you see of as relatively good and seemingly unjust good treatment of countries of whom you see as relatively bad?" and then given specific examples.
In conclusion:
a) I think that China's rhetorical strategy (of shooting the US foreign policy with its own arrows) was ok, just poorly carried out (by relying so heavily on articles from US newspapers, rather than using materials from the US report itself). NITPIE as Louren calls it.
b) The US doesn't specifically need to have a strategy other than to let the world (including, and [really] especially, its own citizens) know what it thinks about the word, including the unflattering things.
c) Analysis of Rhetoric is fun.
