1% in a big country is a lot of people, but the trick is that if it needs to expand to 2% it gets completely overwhelmed. Capacity matters, retaliation is difficult, and unrest spirals out of control all the time in oppressive nations.
(That said China is WAY better at this than most)
mixin gets into the specifics of how the surveillance state is intimately tied to the CCP as an institution in ways that are incomparable to the US and the degree to which actual agents are relied on in a way that trump simply cannot manifest given his fight with the FBI
They've been using that tech for years to map out terror networks but the problem is that it produces a shit ton of data *that still requires a person to analyze*, and then you still need trained people to actually act on the intel. The limit on surveillance has been human decisioning for a while.
Like, you can monitor all the video, all the audio, all the text... but then you need to send the goon squad to someone's house. And there are only so many goon squads. And a lot of goon squads aren't trained well, so they fuck it up and get themselves hurt or killed. Goons cost money!
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(That said China is WAY better at this than most)