The better a country becomes at using surveillance technology, the better it also becomes at hiding that it does. Until recently, China has had very little such experience, and thus everything it did was in plain sight. While in the West, intelligence agencies were already watching your moves, listening to your phone calls, and evaluating your metadata through your appliances, you could still see the massive security cameras from the past century on Chinese crosswalks. This is not a question of ideology or economics, every major country and organisation will inevitably try to keep pace as best it can with the evolution of vulnerabilities and threats. The perception of being a surveillance state, on the other hand, depends on the aesthetics of its technology, on the degree that you have the feeling of being stared at by it. Once China replaces the last of its last clunky old cams with more elegant models, citizens and tourists will eventually let go of that perception.

I dunno, I think having the US as an enemy would certainly make me hypervigilant.

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I can’t imagine how the surveillance in China could possibly be worse than in the west. We have CCTV cameras everywhere, the government has a backdoor into every major software platform, smart devices are passively listening to everything we say and do, feds are constantly reading social media and infiltrating message boards, etc. It’s probably the same in China, but the idea that our dystopian panopticon is meaningfully less intrusive than China’s dystopian panopticon is cope.

Western media loves writing stories about things that happen in China that are not unique to China, but that are bad and scary because they happen in China.