China is developing a surveillance network that tracks people through phones, face recognition, and other things, and gives every level of the state total repressive control over everything people do.

Similar repression is coming to your country too, if you don't stop it.

The article doesn't mention tracking people through payments, but the state is working to make that inescapable too.

Some Chinese people object to this, but the crushing power of the state gives them little chance to oppose it.

To prevent that requires preventing anyone from collecting data about people's daily activities — where you go, what you do there, and who you talk with. Laws about how to use the data will prove in effective because the state will make exceptions for itself. (The recently proposed US privacy bill does not cover government activities at all.) The government will say this is to catch criminals or stop terrorism — and it probably will do those things also, but so what?