I understand the desire to get a zinger in your headline, but this a pretty editorialized and needs to be changed to the actual headline of the article. It's not what the article says and I'm sure China has parallel and ongoing efforts to work on the smog problem. This is not "instead of" it's in addition to. I'm not a fan of what I think is an invasive security system, but I actually appreciated the article's non-biased reporting.

A better use of the word 'instead' would be, for example, something like this:

Instead of fixing torture and global surveillance, US building laws to help it become legal.

As long as everyone is willing to pretend that the whole problem is the US then the entire West can continue their joint surveillance programs easily. Brilliant.

Good point, its the West indeed.

"Instead of fixing smog, China building surveillance tech to help see through it."

Misleading title; it presents false choice.

Fix this manipulative headline. The word "Instead" does not appear anywhere in this article.