> ... or, more likely, they consider U.S. surveillance unintrusive and Chinese surveillance intrusive.

Of course. What's the point of surveillance if you're not going to use it to enforce dogma? I think you can reasonably evaluate a country's surveillance by looking at the pettiness of the arrests & censorship they make.

See this chinese tech reviewer[1] being bullied by the government for putting a spotlight on chinese phone makers cheating about benchmarks. I'm not sure the US is at this point yet...

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1rfw6oj/hardware_...