The last bit strikes me as dubious, considering the Snowden revelations.
Yeah, sure, I'd guess that what China does is at least an order of magnitude worse, and sure, because they're less democratic, but also because they are much often behind - and let's not kid ourselves, in the situations the US feels it's behind, it's also using the widespread backdoors they have access to (Crypto AG, Cisco routers, Juniper Networks, Windows, Intel&Ryzen CPUs...)
Yeah, sure, I'd guess that what China does is at least an order of magnitude worse, and sure, because they're less democratic, but also because they are much often behind - and let's not kid ourselves, in the situations the US feels it's behind, it's also using the widespread backdoors they have access to (Crypto AG, Cisco routers, Juniper Networks, Windows, Intel&Ryzen CPUs...)