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.
Despite the UK also using heavy public surveillance, it doesn’t monitor ethnic and minority religious groups like they do in China, to be fair. The surveillance state may be fine as long as you are what the CCP considers a model citizen, but if you are, say, a muslim living in Xinjiang, then it’s a completely different story.
https://theintercept.com/2021/02/03/intercepted-china-uyghur-muslim-surveillance-police/
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2018/11/6/in-chinas-xinjiang-surveillance-is-all-pervasive