If you are starting from the point of view that Chinese society is a panopticon, and that no other society has ever experienced or had to deal with anything com

If you are starting from the point of view that Chinese society is a panopticon, and that no other society has ever experienced or had to deal with anything comparable, but totalitarian laws are about to make it inevitable in the west, and therefore it's important for someone to ask questions on HN if people in China can obtain phones that allow them to avoid state spyware... I don't know what to say. The line of questioning comes across as nonsequitous in a discussion of the proposed regulations and how they might affect people in the EU. The answer you seem to be looking for is that in China, just like in every other country, there are devices that exist which do not come with a state spyware component that is constantly transmitting everything to the authorities. Some devices are locally manufactured, others are imported, some are regulated, others are not, and people communicate using those devices and others, across all forms of media, including face-to-face. To elaborate: China isn't a totalitarian hellscape where everyone has a gun pointed at their head and they're all forced to use the same, identical, CCP-branded phone or else face execution. It's a huge, diverse country filled with millions of hackers and entrepreneurs, people with different interests, people with different means. There are countless devices and app stores and popular trends. Regulations are often unclear and are enforced differently in different regions and by different layers of the bureaucracy. Not everybody's threat model is the same. Just as in the west, people find ways to communicate that meet their comfort level - sometimes that's through systems monitored by the authorities, other times not. There's no one special technology or technique. The main difference in China is that citizens can be disappeared without much recourse because the legal system is opaque and there is no free press or democratic process to hold the government to account. But that's not the case in most of the EU. There is certainly democratic backsliding happening in parts of the EU, but that's a separate discussion.