China is leading the way in the use of snooping + big data for social control. The problem is that the rest of the world is steadily catching up. Once upon a time the great firewall of China looked very outlandish, however with the snooping laws in the UK i wonder if that will be the next step: of course we do need a national firewall to protect us from cyber terrorism/state sponsored attacks, any objections? Now lets imagine another real estate crash - of course we will need an aggregated credit rating after that.

Not to mention that China has a real problem with bad credit, the technocratic solution is to look at snooping & big data as the fix: a very modern approach.

Also i don't think that the technocrats who are ruling China have much in common with the cultural revolution: for example Deng Xiaoping was purged twice during the cultural revolution (i wonder how he survived the first purge).