Where do people get the idea that JGY’s watchtowers were a harmful form of surveillance? As far as I can tell everything in canon suggests that the watchtowers did a lot of good and saved more lives than any previous efforts.
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, this one's CQL's fault.
(Negative discussion of CQL follows, fair warning. Specifically about the ending and some of the JGY changes.)
In episode 31, when WWX is buying the pendant for Jin Ling en route to the naming ceremony, he overhears some conversation.
-Jin clan has come across a series of happy events. Little Childe Jin is about one month old. All Jin clan are over the moon. I hear His excellency wants to set up lookouts around the land.
-Lookouts? Recently several clans are arguing over this. Is there an agreement?
-What is to argue over? I think the lookout is a great idea. On one hand, it can monitor situations from place to place. On the other hand, it passes messages immediately. I don't know what they are arguing about.
-What if...it would become another Wen's Supervisory Office?
-Are the two the same? Jin clan is only in charge of building lookouts. They are managed by all clans.
-Be that as it may, managing it jointly will finally turn into managing it alone by Jin clan of Lanling.
-I hear the idea was proposed by Jin Guangyao. Even if Red Blade Master disagree with building lookouts, he is supposed to attend first-month celebration of Jin Zixuan's son.
And then the conversation switches to gossip about the Jin and Yanli and did you know that WWX was invited to the naming ceremony!!!
So, you know. Narrative/framing-wise, in CQL it's very much set up as something sketchy, and something JGS is pursuing—and which NMJ opposes, too, let's throw everything in there why not. Then later, as far as I can tell (and I could always be missing something), we don't get LWJ having explained them to WWX, or Wang//xian's apparent approval, nor do we have LWJ's explanation of Rusong's death after WWX runs into JL and Jin Chan in Carp Tower (in which the towers feature prominently), nor does SLY mention it when discussing Rusong's death, nor is it mentioned when people are suddenly gossiping about all the terrible rumours about JGY at Lotus Pier after the second siege.
I don't want to sound too bitter, but honestly I am fairly bitter about this. Not only are the towers framed as sketchy initially, they're totally removed from the subsequent narrative—we don't at all hear about the good effects they have, we sure as hell don't get a sense of the immense undertaking it was and how difficult it was to get it going, politically speaking. Not to mention the secondary effects. In MDZS, we initially get this explanation of Rusong's death, from LWJ:
Back then, in order to build the lookout towers, Jin GuangYao not only faced quite a number of opposers, but also displeased a handful of sects. One of the opposing sect’s leaders lost the arguments, and went into a murderous rage, killing Jin GuangYao and Qin Su’s only son.
And of course we'd already heard in a previous chapter about how long and hard it was to set up, and the arguments around it. Without all this context, all we have is QS' doubts, and then CQL SLY's description of the conflict around Rusong's death as being about JGY's promotion to Chief Cultivator! So CQL just up and erases some of the evidence for the idea that the people who ostensibly killed Rusong were in fact the people who actually killed him.
And, you know, the total removal from the story of JGY's huge, wildly impressive and difficult political project, that saved so many lives and would have saved many more. That too.
Ultimately I think the political happy ending of CQL, LWJ as Chief Cultivator, just doesn't work the way it wants to if the previous Chief Cultivator was not only devoted to the public good, but also (and there's really no question about this) a much better manager and politician than LWJ is. I think this is one reason people often write JGY as being up to terrible stuff during his reign as Chief Cultivator, even though—I could be misremembering, but I don't think CQL really suggests that? (Though of course there's also the general desire to make the protagonists perfect and JGY the MANIFESTATION OF EVIL, and/or your shitty ex or some bullshit, and things along those lines; I certainly don't mean to suggest that it's the only reason.) Honestly, we killed the guy who was doing a better job than I ever could and certainly than I can right now because we were investigating some stuff he did way back when and things spiralled out of control, and also he had to die for WWX to live, and now I'm going to do the best I can even though I'm worse at it than he is and my brother is totally broken—that would be a really interesting ending, I think! Certainly a complicated one. But it's not the one that CQL's ending wants to tell; CQL wants Chief Cultivator LWJ to just be uncomplicatedly good, morally speaking. Finally, says the framing, an actual good guy in charge! Things will be better now!
(This desire for lack of certain kinds of complication is also, I suspect, one of the reasons we never hear about LXC again after the temple, in CQL.)
Though to return to the conversation about the watchtowers WWX overhears in ep 31, it's interesting to see the conversation from MDZS it displaced:
One of them asked, “Chief Cultivator? Seems like the big sects have been arguing over this for the past while. Have they come to a conclusion yet?”
“What is there to argue about? We can’t be a heap of loose sand, a group without a leader forever, can we? To set a cultivator who watches over all of the sects—I don’t see anything wrong with that.”
“It’s not that good, is it? What if another QishanWen Sect…”
“How could that be the same? The Chief Cultivator is elected by all the sects. They’re different, they’re different.”
“Hah, they say it’s an election, but everyone knows in their hearts. No matter what, it’s the same few people who’s competing, isn’t it? Is there any space for others?”
“ChiFeng-Zun is quite against it, isn’t he? He’s tried to stop Jin GuangShan so many times, implied or otherwise. In my opinion, there’s still a long time before they finish mulling over it.”
“And there can be only one person who sits in the position of Chief Cultivator. If it really passed, whom exactly the person should be would take another few years of arguing over, I suppose.”
“It’s the worry of those who sit at the top, anyways. None of our business. It’s not like little shrimps like us could have any control over it even if we wanted to.”
Someone suddenly changed the subject, “Did any of you attend the completion ceremony of the Cloud Recesses’ Library Pavilion? Well, I went. I stood there and looked, and it was the exact same as how it was before. A difficult undertaking indeed.”
“Yeah, very difficult. It was such a huge cultivational residence, an ethereal realm of hundreds of years old—how could it be rebuilt in a short amount of time?”
“Speaking of it, there’s been a lot of joyous occasions these days, hasn’t there?”
And then we're back onto discussion of Jin Ling's celebration, etc.
So some elements are preserved in the transition to CQL. There's the discussion of something JGS is agitating for, that NMJ opposes, the discussion of whether it might be like the Wen—but in MDZS, it's the creation of the position of Chief Cultivator under discussion, not the construction of the towers. And you'll note in this case we're not told JGY proposed it. (In CQL, of course, the position already existed, and WRH was the previous CC.)
But there's another element, one that CQL removed entirely: we also learn about the reconstruction of Cloud Recesses. If they've just finished the Library Pavilion, then at the very least they only just finished rebuilding, and it seems likelier to me, from the information given and from how highly we know the Lan value their library, that they're rebuilding still. And we're told how impressive it was that that they managed to completely rebuild the Pavilion, to just how it was before, and that on top of that they managed it impressively quicky, too: "It was such a huge cultivational residence, an ethereal realm of hundreds of years old—how could it be rebuilt in a short amount of time?"
It's a question you might not even realize at the time it has an answer in the text—until LXC is tricked into stabbing JGY, and JGY gives his final speech:
… Back then, when the Cloud Recesses was burned down and you fled outside, who was the one that saved you from all the danger? And when the GusuLan Sect was rebuilding the Cloud Recesses, who was the one that helped with everything he had? In all these years, when have I ever cracked down on the GusuLan Sect, when have I responded with anything but support?! [...]
(ER, ch 108; emphasis mine)
We have that part of the speech in CQL too, and I'm very glad for it! But we don't have this evidence of the importance of JGY's help that we get in this small bit of overheard conversation, ages before we understand all of its relevance.
