I read somewhere that the UK has the most security cameras per capita than any other nation.
I remember reading or hearing that, too. I wonder if it's up to date now.
It's plausible, given that the UK, or at least England, is one of the most densely populated industrial countries on earth. What people don't realise about China is that there are vast areas of it that are very sparsely populated. And I wouldn't think it's worth the Chinese authorities' while to put up many surveillance cameras in rural areas, still less in semi-desert areas.
However, when it comes to urban China, I'd sort of be surprised if there are more surveillance cameras
proportionally in the UK than in China. So overall, for the population, yes, wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. Also, depends what you're doing with your surveillance cameras. The Chinese are the world leaders in developing software not simply for facial recognition, but for judgement of a person's attitude or internal state of mind on the basis of interpretation of features at any given moment.
As I say, I'm not naive about China. It's a vast prison camp, with a “soft” area of it, that allows people to consume in peace so long as they don't get political in any way, and a much “harder” area, i.e. Xinjiang, where people are rather tired of having their rights trampled over.
But I don't think we should be naive about US hegemony either. The US sees itself as the global US marshall. That means, in effect, protecting the interests of “friendlies” (that can shift in surprising ways, as the US found to its cost in relation to Iraq), and above all, looking out for its own interests. Nothing new about that, you'll say. The big nations have always done it. What's changed is that the US is armed in both traditional weapons and the newer sort to a degree that is entirely unprecedented.
Both gulf wars were entirely about US interests. They neither of them had anything to do with human rights.