Providing vpn services is almost illegal in china. The party doesnt ask for logs; it shuts down vpn services and punishes the providers. So the odds of vpn provider sharing logs with the government is ironically low.

Well... if "dissidents" use VPN that you ("Chinese government") can't monitor, what's one easy way to continue monitoring them?

Yes, offer them free VPN, what good is encryption if you're connected to a server they own/have influence over?

The party doesn’t need to offer them free vpn. Instead, it figures out what vpn services they are using and shuts them down. It goes as far as using machine learning to detect vpn traffic.

I guess this is more effective because dissents is a very small subset of vpn users, and application layer encryption makes it hard to extract much information even if you can monitor vpn traffic.

Given the scale of VPN usage in China, it’s unlikely the party could do anything about it even if it got access to some logs. Vast majority of the users of these services inside China are most likely very educated group of people, like academia, software engineers, scientists etc. Large tech companies usually have some way for their employees to access banned websites in China, but mostly just for accessing tech related information. It’s just yet another gray area