(edited becoz i worry it sounds mean but i really admire you for your patience)

these would be people that simply cannot interact with reality, so high on their own supply of propaganda. first of all. london is smaller than china. by... quite a lot. so it makes sense that there would be less cameras in london than in china. like i dont know if they meant beijing but they understand china is a region, right?

secondly well surveillance isn't ontologically bad. if their allegation is that if the evil chinese cameras will explode anyone who so much sneezes weird you can just be like "i don't know if you're actually living in reality with the rest of us." because they don't really have any evidence to that claim, the burden of proof is on them unless theyre ogling to say No information escapes china which is fucking ludicrous and proves they truly cannot conceive of people outside west as human beings with agency. sorry im not mad at u im mad at them. which is funny bc theyre rhetorical in this instance.

(+ yanks have secret police just like us, + palantir + snowden whistleblowing case. so it's throwing stones from a glass house. either way i'd rather have these powers in the hands of state cracking down on anti-people reactionaries and not, you know, the overlords of capital)