I’ve quite literally linked the conclusion of the article you linked while you continue to cherry pick in order to drive home your point (which the article not only disproves but eclipses with a different, more critical issue: the mass surveilance systems that already exist independently of SoCS in China).

The only people here that are delusional are you and the people upvoting you.

Perpetually failing to engage with the point, what a surprise.

Totally ignoring the conclusions in the article that you linked. I’d say I’m surprised but you’re a .mler - this is about what I expect.

All of this does not mean that the SoCS is benign. It also does not imply that China’s broader surveillance apparatus is a myth – quite to the contrary. However, public debates typically do not focus on these aspects. Rather, the interest in the system often stems from broader anxieties about digital technologies, as reflected in the UN pledge and similar actions taken by other countries. Often, the SoCS is merely invoked as a metaphor: either to depict some technological threat at home or to portray a techno-dystopian China.

This is symptomatic of a tendency to see China not as a real place with real people, but as an abstract “negative opposite” of “us”. While our discussions on tech in China remain overshadowed by largely fictional scoring, we ignore real threats of surveillance to exactly those people in China. And when we use the SoCS to invoke the image of a technological threat at home, we lose sight of potentially acute technological threats much closer to reality.

No your article explicitly states that the systems still exist they just don’t have teeth because of all the other covert surveillance systems China has in place.

So your argument sucks and so does your idealization of China.