the speaker is a scholar, so he has some authority in the field of anthropology. See his wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott

He also wrote a well known book on the subject: 'against the grain', where this argument is put forth. Wikipedia has a summary of the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_Hist...

Note that James C Scott speaks specifically of the very deep pre-historical middle east. I'm not sure if the conclusions are generalizable to China, thousands of years later.

There are examples of large scale public engineering works with and without observable central authority throughout archaeological record around the globe. So just "having walls" is not sufficient implication of central authority attempting to control the population.

IMO in the specific example of Against the grain the central authority thesis is pretty solidly framed. But, it does not aim to be a generalizable theory, nor IMO should it be viewed as such.

The Sumerian city-states are past the prehistorical period. History started with the invention of writing, and they did invent record keeping and writing.

Now it is hard to argue for or against the application of any rule, there are exceptions to rules. However here you would also need to give some argument, as to why this kind of reasoning could not be applied to this case.