[hga]

If you change the item from smartphones to firearms, the PRC is not at all special, besides Mao's infamous revealing quote, "Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

A more useful illustration is the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) attitude towards civil society (per Wikipedia, "the aggregate of non-governmental organizations and institutions that manifest interests and will of citizens"), it must be extremely limited and restrained, and there are no extremes including mass murder to which the CCP is not willing to go to keep it that way. See the Falun Gong for the most recent severe example, and I've noticed recent headlines WRT to some Christian "sect" and 1,000 people arrested.

No doubt the CCP knows their history, see for example the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Turban_Rebellion and the general history of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Lotus , and that their control of their sprawling mainland empire is fragile, as it also historically has been.

In that context, smartphones, which can communicate in ways less subject to surveillance than say SMS, are an existential threat to the CCP, potentially as dangerous as guns.