I lived and worked in both the US and China. My life was infinitely better in China. You don't even notice the cameras but what you do notice is that I can go to my café, leave my electric scooter unlocked with helmet on, get a table outside, put my laptop on it and then go inside to order coffee without any fear anything will get stolen. In the parks there are public coat racks and people put their jackets, backpacks and other stuff on without any hesitation. You feel safe at night walking down the street by yourself. This feeling I rarely have anywhere else. Delivery packages are left outside and gathered sometimes outside of the compound on the public walkway without being stolen.

Now whenever I travel to Europe, I have to totally reverse this behavior otherwise all my shit will be gone. That to me is awful.

I was specifically calling out the hypocrisy of the USA's excuses to do imperialism. With that said though, it is now clear as day that while China has the ability to do what the USA is doing technologically, they are using that surveillance more sparingly and for better reasons than the USA. It's not in China that masked thugs are scanning you with their phones hoping to lock you up in some undocumented place and then either keep you there or send you to a random country away from your family.

I'm not a fan of mass surveillance in any case, but it's just so hilariously ironic that the same people who fearmongered 24/7 in their media about China being this panopticon dystopia, are the same ones now exceeding this in every way imaginable, far surpassing the imagination of fiction like 1984 or Black Mirror.