It is real technology. I think that people take absolute approaches to thinking about surveillance though and that is where they are making a mistake. Surveillance is just the practice of monitoring a subject over time. There are inevitably going to be higher priority subjects that the state would like to devote their resources to monitoring. For the rest of the people living their lives in China (and the US) the passive collection and profit motivated data crunching from the private sector is what is doing the heavy lifting of analysis. The government is likely recording and archiving all of the source data to analyze if it becomes relevant, but they’re primarily focused on maybe a few thousand individuals for active surveillance at any given time. China is obviously going to be about an order of magnitude greater in number due to population count so the equation may be a bit different for them on surveillance strategy but not hugely.