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...until you get outside of the cities with the infrastructure to support a constant surveillance system. Which is to say, most of any given country, including China.
Smart city technologies are indeed a significant counter-insurgency technology. They are not, however, the end-all-be-all, particularly if you have to fight your way into a country to install your own. 'I won't have this problem if I set up a nation-wide panopticon' still requires you to set up a nation-wide panopticon, and those are expensive even without active local and regional resistance, let alone global support flows from cyber attacks / satellite communication support / sanctuary and safezone logistics / etc.
Seeing as drones are proliferating on the battlefield, in 20 years a platoon is going to have an APC with a server rack with more intelligence than an small office building of west pointers and a dozen recon drones in the air at all times.
Between everyone having a phone which can be easily turned into a snitch that keeps track of where you go and military drones, keeping the population surveilled and preventing it from feeding or aiding guerrillas is going to be a lot easier.
They were doing this in Xinyang. Every single person had to use a phone with a tracking app, they were also checking in arrivals at every single building, probably noting who was in close proximity. This isn't even SF, this is present day counter-insurgency
Tell me, how are there going to be 'cyber attacks' when the army will go around methodically securing or destroying all satellite comms on the grounds of them being security risks ? And the national fiber network is of course not going to be left in place, it's going to be severed from the internet and any channels going in or out are going to be approved by some paranoid AI system ?
Setting up a nation-wide panopticon is only as hard as is forcing the population, at gunpoint, to install the right brand of spyware app onto their phone.
Not very hard at all. They need the phones for most financial operations and they use either android or apple, so you need two kinds of apps to use lol. Verrry difficult. I'm sure there's going to be 3-4 Chinese vendors of such apps fiercely competing with each other over features.
With global IQ of 90 and AI, spyware apps are probably going to come into fashion to prevent silicon mischief.
And if we ignore all the other requirements, it's only as hard as the exceedingly hard and expensive part that will take a substantial period of time and be subject to all sorts of expensive disruptions.
Which returns to assuming the conclusion, or rather assuming you have the police state in place to pre-empt the problem that could prevent the establishment of the police state following an invasion.
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