China deliberately withheld early signals on the virus and, of course, their press is anything but free. But I think we ascribe too many differences to the government's censorship versus their aggressive response. They leveraged significant personal detail including cell location data, financial transactions (they are an even more cashless society than we are), surveillance info and other things which we would not tolerate in addition to things we are doing (lockdowns) to contain the disease. We're seeing similar impact in South Korea. I work with teams in China (both expats and locals) and they are all back to work, even while they must always wear masks in public and their kids still can't attend school.

There are some things to learn from their response such as aggressive exposure tracing (albiet with some modifiers) so as to get people back to work.