Talk about being watched, holy molly. But I think that our credit cards, phones and apps, etc. track us just the same. The only difference is that in Western countries, the spying is done mainly to collect data for AI software building or to resell to businesses and some government agencies, whereas in other parts of the world, it seems like the "monitoring" is actually done directly by the governments.

I think China is worried about the Islamic minorities in the west of the country having an uprising or something, hence this data collection on the citizens and particularly on the journalists.