A good microcosm of this is iPhone. It took four years for the government to bless iPhone for Chinese people to use... Even though it is nearly 100% made by Chinese people in China. That rigid disparity between what people of a country WANT and what they MAKE doesn't exist like it does in China anywhere else. That's what makes China such a tough nut to crack.. The near absolute control of what the people are "allowed" to like and buy.
No spite/sarcasm intended - I am genuinely trying to be helpful.
A more useful illustration is the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) attitude towards civil society (per Wikipedia, "the aggregate of non-governmental organizations and institutions that manifest interests and will of citizens"), it must be extremely limited and restrained, and there are no extremes including mass murder to which the CCP is not willing to go to keep it that way. See the Falun Gong for the most recent severe example, and I've noticed recent headlines WRT to some Christian "sect" and 1,000 people arrested.
No doubt the CCP knows their history, see for example the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Turban_Rebellion and the general history of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Lotus , and that their control of their sprawling mainland empire is fragile, as it also historically has been.
In that context, smartphones, which can communicate in ways less subject to surveillance than say SMS, are an existential threat to the CCP, potentially as dangerous as guns.