I get that it isn't the exact same imperialist cancer but it is there and growing and will end up with similar results. Western imperialism in the 20th and 21st century is economic coercion backed by (primarily US) power projection. The Chinese lack the ability to project military power globally at this point but they have started to spread their economic hegemony to the global south. They are actively building up their naval power, thus improving their ability to project power globally. With the active abdication/eradication of US soft power by the Trump regime China has started to fill the void as any rational actor that wants to be a global superpower would. That is the imperialist cancer I maintain is growing in China, it is implemented in a different order and wears a different ideological cloak but the outcome will essentially the same. We'll know for sure in a decade or two.

As for surveillance, I understand why a nation state not aligned with western capitalism would feel the need to defend itself against the CIA and its ilk. I don't like it and don't agree with it on a moral level but intellectually I can understand why Cuba feels the need to have its security state. China's surveillance state is on a different level. The "Great Firewall" got thoroughly infiltrated by a group with state level capabilities and they published all of the exfil'd data. Just on a technical level the amount of effort from all sectors of the Chinese state (Academic, Military, Corporate, Intelligence) to restrict access to information is staggering. Their internal censorship is also above and beyond what can be reasonably be explained as hardening against CIA propaganda. We've seen corporate influenced algorithmic behavior modification over the last few years with the rise of "unalived" instead of killed or "PDF File" instead of pedophile. It is immaterial if there are any consequences beyond having a post deleted under their current internal censorship program, for most people the threat of getting a post deleted is enough to modify behavior and speech.

I've seen in a few places in this thread that the social credit score was a pilot program that has been discontinued. I don't trust governments and corps to be honest if there is data to be harvested but lets say they really did discontinue the program. I can all but guarantee you that a mountain of data was collected and is still being analyzed, the source code and infrastructure plans still exist, and any modifications to physical and digital infrastructure are still in place. Governments do not give up power or control willingly without a way to trivially undo the changes. There is still infrastructure from the FBI's Carnivore/Omnivore program in most ISPs and almost all the world's government are unwilling to move away from the legacy PSTN standards from the 70's because of the ease of SS7 based surveillance. The Chinese literally chose to use a variant with these vulnerabilities despite the opportunity to innovate a new secure standard.

Let's imagine a glorious future where China is the world's sole superpower. The world is living in a state socialist golden age. Now is the time to end the dictatorship of the proletariat and fulfill the promise of full communism. Based on all of human history what are the chances that the President for Life will make a speech to the Politburo dissolving the government, ordering the military to lay down their rifles and take up a factory or farming job, the political elite to leave their positions of wealth and privilege, and the state corp C-Suite to toss the factory keys to the nearest machinist on their way to their new life of working a collective farm? Governments and the craven ghouls who control them never give up power willingly. That is the fatal flaw of state socialism or for that matter any state. Human nature, especially the nature of humans that desire power over others, will almost always prevail over their espoused ideology when faced with the chance of losing their power and privilege.