Many of the 'outrageous' things about this are already being done in the USA, but secretively. PRISM [1] in the USA, for contrast, is described in internal slides as a program that allows "extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information" with examples including email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats (such as Skype), file transfers, and social networking details. The secret court system that's supposed to be there for oversight is little more than a rubber stamp machine. In 10 years there were more than 20,000 surveillance requests sent to the secret court. It rejected 10. But regardless of how many they reject a secret court entirely destroys the point of oversight. It's one secret agency overseeing another secret agency where they are going to be deeply interconnected with 0 transparency.
People forget about these things because it's no longer headline news, but these programs are still alive and well - and almost certainly more expansive than ever before. And while China is completely open about spying on people and coercing companies, the United States instead lies about it and forces companies to lie about under threat from secret lawsuits from secret organizations with secret subpoenas, secret warrants, and secret orders, all originating from secret courts.
I would much rather have no surveillance at all. But should that option fail, I think open surveillance is a million times better than secret surveillance. Of course there is one interesting issue there. Open surveillance could never work in a democracy because people freak out about things and would actually do something about it, if they had any clue what was happening - which is why they're kept misinformed + uninformed. By contrast the people, on a matter like this, are completely powerless in China so their government can afford to be open.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%...