China is always used as the primary example of a surveillance state, people constantly talk about how dystopian it is and how everything you do in public or online is tracked. I have always been skeptical about these claims and know how hypocritical they are because of the amount of surveillance that happens in the west but I want to know if China is really that bad in regards to privacy.
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.