Mao said that the first step in a succesfull revolution, was to kill all of the librarians and then famously (silent im) killed or re-educated all of the acedemics, with instructions to rebuild all modern technology and knowledge useing the chinese language and invent a whole new vocabulary for science and engineering but useing accepted international measuring systems, and latin for biology, called that one "the cultural revolution" The resulting edifice, now proving to be quite secure from outside observation. Early "travel writers" functioned as reliable spies, with many of them bieng, young, out of work,recent science graduates. Even Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle has hints. One of the bigest secret's the British maintained was determining a countrys hydrocloric acid production capacity, and as still the worlds most used industrial chemical is a reliable proxy measurement of a countrys total industrial capacity. The final piece to the British empire was the invention of the escapement, which gave them the abilty to out navigate anyone else, and thereby co-odinate military actions and concentrate forces where and when there targets were vulnerable. The current information wars are floundering due to a greater and greater difficulty in getting anyone to believe anything and are instead amusing themselves with cat memes, which the chinese residents of "red book" are demanding as proof of bieng a tictok refugee, which if provided ,they then offer to act as there personal spy.