I don’t fully understand your argument. Because China has the great firewall they’re worse? I don’t really see how the firewall relates to surveillance in this way. I agree the firewall is a human rights issue in the way that US prisons are a human rights issue, but I’d be hesitant to say that because China is bad in this one way, the fact that they perform surveillance is made worse. The US is the global leader in surveillance as far as I’m aware. We keep 0-day backdoors in computer hardware that was designed here, and there’s some uncertainty as to whether we arranged for those backdoors or only found them (NSLs make it difficult/impossible to know).
Further you dismiss the parent comment as implying the US and China’s surveillance are equivalent, but I don’t see that as the claim. There is a lot of shocked surprise in the news when we find that China is doing something we don’t like with our data or computers, but we ignore that the NSA builds massive data centers for data on the global population, we kill people based on that data, and we also engage in a global hacking war. And I think it’s important to make sure that when we talk about China, we’re also willing to talk about the US. If we never talk about what we do, someone else’s bad behavior will look warped.
The US and China are not equivalent, but it’s hard to talk about one fairly in this context without mentioning the other.