I'm not being intentionally disingenuous my model of the situation is the US does mass surveillance and China does it at a much larger scale with much less restrictions. For example, China and the US have roughly the same amount of cameras per capita... but the Chinese government generally owns all the cameras and can query across them while as far as I know it is relatively hard for US gov to get access to public cameras.

Could you point me towards something that corrects me where I'm wrong i.e. not that they both don't do it but that they are doing mass surveillance at similar scales?