China has state run Telecom companies providing all the eyeball access, so it's relatively straightforward to ensure outside connectivity goes through the great

China has state run Telecom companies providing all the eyeball access, so it's relatively straightforward to ensure outside connectivity goes through the great firewall. Hong Kong has multiple private companies providing eyeball access. It would be far more difficult for the Chinese government to get all of their compliance. If they just wanted to get traffic information, it would be far easier to just collect a statistical sampling collected from flows data on core routers for general info or to monitor specific IP's using rulesets without the massive undertaking needed for always on firewall capabilities on every single packet.