The Chinese government, like the US government or any other large national government, is not monolithic.
Having information available for easy perusal via a commercial channel (which is potentially not even illegal) is very different from having information accessible via use of national-asset intelligence capabilities. Information which can only be obtained the second way is almost certainly going to receive different treatment than the first.
There is value in making information more difficult (and more illegal, and less socially and politically acceptable) to access, even if that control is not 100% effective or if there are still ways of getting around it.
Increasing the friction involved in accessing personal information is an imperfect win, but a win nonetheless.
For most users of commercial software, your system is penetrable and should be considered insecure against a nation-state level attacker willing to spend a 0-day on getting in. But that doesn't mean you should just leave everything hanging out in the open where any doofus can get to it, or voluntarily hand your information over to an unfriendly government's partner corporation. At least make them work for it.
The Chinese government, like the US government or any other large national government, is not monolithic.
In what meaningful way does one part of the Chinese government differ from another part of the Chinese government? Isn't Xi basically the supreme leader for life now?
Even assuming he is the supreme leader, he can’t be everywhere, know everything and oversee all aspects of the regime.
Every sufficiently large organization, such as a government, has delegated areas of responsibility to various sub organizations. Those scopes will have varying overlap with other sub organizations, where it will result in political battles. It is more like competing microservices than monolith.
Xi is head of state as president, but not head of government (like King of England).
Li Qiang is head of government as premier and is chief executive of the Chinese government.
If you ask a Chinese citizen what their biggest problem is, many of them would say too much federalism. Individual provinces have more individual authority than even US States and most controversial policies (1 child, social credit, lockdowns) you hear about are provincial and not federal policies.
> If you ask a Chinese citizen what their biggest problem is, many of them would say too much federalism.
Presumably that’s because protesting against the central government endangers not just your own livelihood but also the livelihoods of your relatives. Much safer to criticise the region next door.
There was (is?) a whole thing where local governments would kidnap people trying to petition the central government to crack down on some local government wrongdoing.
> Xi is head of state as president, but not head of government (like King of England).
Uhm: the king of England (which incidentally happens to be king of quite a number of other territories that have yet to fully emancipate themselves from monarchy) is NOT the head of government in any of the the territories he is king of, but merely the head of state… which in constitutional monarchies is a rather formal show pomp role with very little political power. Conversely, the head of government in the UK with actual executive power is the Prime Minister, not the king.
Having information available for easy perusal via a commercial channel (which is potentially not even illegal) is very different from having information accessible via use of national-asset intelligence capabilities. Information which can only be obtained the second way is almost certainly going to receive different treatment than the first.
There is value in making information more difficult (and more illegal, and less socially and politically acceptable) to access, even if that control is not 100% effective or if there are still ways of getting around it.
Increasing the friction involved in accessing personal information is an imperfect win, but a win nonetheless.
For most users of commercial software, your system is penetrable and should be considered insecure against a nation-state level attacker willing to spend a 0-day on getting in. But that doesn't mean you should just leave everything hanging out in the open where any doofus can get to it, or voluntarily hand your information over to an unfriendly government's partner corporation. At least make them work for it.