Indeed, spies are just a single tool and have a very specific use cases — big-data, analytics and data science is where the big nation states are at nowadays.

Indeed, spies are just a single tool and have a very specific use cases — big-data, analytics and data science is where the big nation states are at nowadays. We don't know much about China's systems here, but looking at XKeyscore [0] (NSA, via Snowden leaks) is likely to be somewhat insightful re function and capabilities. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore