I read a short article by a Chinese woman who worked in the west and China, describing her own and daughters and own mothers experience with technology and the state.
The long struggle from subsistance agrairian village life, to the beggings of modern convienience and liesure, culminating in her daughters life where she can walk onto high speed rail to travel and shop seamlessly with facial recognition and all encompasing apps taking care of everything, the state itself is mostly invisible for those(Han, chinese) who work hard and enjoy what the rewards are.
But we all know that China is for the Han, and does have it's dark represive aparatus
to supress dissent.
What the US is headed for is nothing like China and has no possibility of achiving any portion of the success of China. Simply , demographics and law, is against a state controlled and run system of identity, banking, and access to services.
The US system has created a situation where most people in power are puppeted by various backers, but the puppets have teeth and are always selling controll of this or that string to whoever has the deal, and currently they are making a lunge at world power by holding oil and banking hostage, the survielance technology bieng used as clumsy threat and the vast VAST majority of dissent is bieng expressed by people just getting on with making it through another day of chaos, while Chinese men and women glide onto shiny modern high tech bullet trains on there way to wherever such things go.
We lost our slow move towards laissez-faire, the live and let live, democratic, law and rules based culture and are now grinding towards some viscious vulgar dirty re imagining of race and class based feudalism, as done with technology, the overwhelming majority want nothing to do with it, but here we are.