The article which I hope is widely available at https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/11/256396-crowdsensing-20/fulltext?mobile=true also appears in a special China section of the flagship magazine of the American Academic Computer Society CACM - where as you might guess from my reading it and the focus on China American is coming to mean worldwide. As far as I can see, this is regarded by its authors as an achievement worth applauding and displaying.

Essentially, the idea is to harvest information from all of the mobile phones and other information devices carried by the Chinese people: "Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) presents a new sensing paradigm based on the power of user-companioned devices.11,12 It allows "the increasing number of smartphone users to share local knowledge acquired by their sensor-enhanced devices, and the information can be further aggregated in the cloud for large-scale sensing."4 The mobility of large-scale mobile users makes MCS a versatile platform that can often replace static sensing infrastructures. A broad range of applications are thus enabled, including traffic planning, environment monitoring, urban management, and so on."

This is eventually connected to a national five year plan "The availability of a generic crowdsensing platform such as CrowdOS also facilitates the research and development of MCS applications. Recently, the Chinese government released the "Fourteenth Five Year Plan and the 2035 Vision of China," where the development of "Digital Economics" and "Digital China" has become a core mission. MCS is expected to play an important role in the coming digital economics era."

This is clearly in the same line as Orwell's telescreen, but more complete - the spy movie trope of characters meeting in parks to avoid surveillance appears to be broken by this. It would appear that China, and perhaps the rest of the world, really are going to see a surveillance society.

I am also intrigued to see something as unpredictable as research factored into a five year plan. I predict that either the books are being cooked slightly - researchers producing plans only for tasks they have already completed so they can guarantee success - or there will be significant friction when what is discovered turns out not to fit into the plan - one way for the state leaders to lose credibility among at least the researchers in hard sciences.

(In case the link doesn't work the article title is "Crowdsensing 2.0" by Zhiwen Yu, Huadong Ma, and others - and it is at least semi-official: "This work was partially supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2019YFB2102200), and the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (61725205, 62025205)."