- China: records are centralized - Elsewhere: records are fragmented

Although Meta is trying to "fix" that last part of course.

TBF it took China decades to centralize the data. Back in the 2010s you can technically marry two persons in different provinces because the system was fragmented along the provinces. I think they finally solved the problem 10 years ago.

China is actually far more fragmented than some people thought. The central government isn’t that all powerful. I mean even today, let alone 20 years ago. It is actually the big businesses like Ali/Tencent that are centralizing the data they collected — exactly like what US corporations are doing.