During the mid GOP primaries, Trump was starting to pull ahead, to the disbelief of nearly everyone. Newt Gingrich was on TV at that point and asked about the likelihood of Trump actually capturing the nomination, and he said, I think very astutely, "well, who is going to stop him?"

The same lesson applies here in terms of the nightmare of a surveillance that China is building out today: who is going to stop them? The people don't have the legal ability to do much about it, and have few individual rights, so there is almost no political or legal barrier here for China's government to do whatever it wants with its people. There is no real economic barrier any more because their economy is simply too large and, dare I say, diversified. There is no real technological barrier either on the hardware side or the software side, nor are the costs particularly prohibitive. China's neighbors are no real barrier either since they have little comparable military strength (short of US involvement and a general world war), and they all depend too much on China's economy anyway. And "the West" can't do much except scream and shout for much of the same reasons.

In short, there is really nothing that is stopping the Chinese government from rolling out the first, real, honest-to-god, 1984-style police surveillance state, and the potential capabilities are, frankly, terrifying. Those not involved in machine learning these days may not be able to appreciate it, but the tech is there for pretty much anything you can think of (as far as wide scale automated surveillance, tracking, etc. right down to the individual level at nearly every minute of the day at nearly any point in the country). It exists _already_, it's just a matter of investment capability and political will to make it happen, and China has both of those in spades.

We're talking surveillance of the individual via face tracking, but we're also talking about gait tracking, the tracking of facial expressions (and inference from there to emotion and thoughts), of eye tracking, picking up on little hesitations in body language, of the ability to tracking individuals vehicles, of tracking people as they enter a subway and then exit somewhere else entirely, of tracking of every financial transaction, of your network and cell usage, your power usage. Cameras, drones, and whatever else that will have the resolution to pick up on the text of what you're reading and carrying, of little patterns of evidence on your person. THe amount of enthusiasm you express at a political event or public sports event. Not just the content of your voice, but the tone, and what can be inferred from that. What you're reading, what you're clicking on, how long your mouse hovers over an image. And in all of these things, new inferences will be able to be made that weren't possible before, like estimates on your inner thought process, of intent, of you're long-term threat or lack thereof, all the things that you can currently hide away in private.

It's fucking crazy, and the tech for it, at least at the fundamental level, it's already here.

China will be the first state in history to actually pull off an actual 1984-style surveillance state, and to the detriment of every normal person there, and the eventual determinant to billions more once they start normalizing and exporting it.