This perspective relies on seeing Chinese lives as worth less than American lives. On average individual Americans contribute more to the problem than individual Chinese people.
One example is airline miles. Americans travel 2000 miles by plane every year. In China the figure is 1000 miles. So your argument is basically "sure, we could stop traveling by plane, but if Chinese people travel an extra 50 miles a year that wipes out our progress." But that's a pretty poor argument to justify continuing to do 2000 miles/year, if you genuinely think the problem should be addressed.
If both countries reduced to 100 miles/year, it probably wouldn't be enough. But this is an ongoing choice all around. It's not reasonable to suggest that Chinese people have less individual need for air travel. Looking at contribution per country and not per person is not reasonable.
> This perspective relies on seeing Chinese lives as worth less than American lives.
I'm not sure I follow this. If I was to summarise GenerocUsername's argument it would be "the Chinese government is less concerned with making their economy green, and if the US begins taking an economic/influence hit to make it's economy greener, it'll be yielding an economic advantage to China, which will canabalise more global industry in a non-green way, resulting in a net worse environmental outcome." They're claiming basically a fundamental ideological difference between the countries on climate change that, coupled with a claim of zero-sum international industry, means long term environmental outcomes are better if the US is a dominant international player today.
Sidestepping the argument itself which I believe has a number of key weaknesses (as outlined by others in the comments), can you go over how you're linking that to a devaluation of Chinese lives?