China has a great advantage in data mining: No civic rights and a collectivist regime. That is the perfect foundation for data mining. They can simply take everything they need and "only" have to build the servers and algorithms and feed them with as much and whatever they need to produce results.

The plus side is that given the vast size of China and its ambitions, we will all greatly profit from these developments. The negative one being a future that might look quite different from what liberal thinkers of the past had in mind when they created the foundations for freedom.