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.
Surveillance level is pretty high but China is also extremely safe. And not just compared to other developing countries.
I’m not sure how much this surveillance contributes to public safety but at the same time I’m inclined to not believe the picture of China that is painted by the West where paranoid authoritarian dictatorship is planting video cameras left and right to suppress dissent. Places like London also have a high concentration of cameras and they still have dangerously high rate of violent crime. They also suppressed a genre of black rap music called drill saying that it promotes knife crimes.
Most major cities and megacities in the world have CCTV networks. China has a lot of CCTV simply on account of China being a huge country on its own with lots of huge cities. Also China doesn’t really have many motivators for crime either.