Dahua $550 Million West China Gov Project

If China is invested into Hik, why would they use any cameras other than Hik?

Because provinces have latitude to make their own decisions. And corruption / bribes in China are widespread. And Dahua is big in its own right (~$2 billion USD annual revenue) meaning they have political power of their own inside China.

#1, debt is a critical factor in China keeping its growth rates up. And debt is growing significantly faster than growth which is unsustainable.

they are focusing outside China for survival when the bubble bursts

People who know the China market well have said that too. I don't think they would describe it exactly as 'survival' as much as 'diversification.' But the broader point is agreed that too much exposure to China debt / inefficient infrastructure spending is risky for them. 

Right now they are buying hearts and minds of both the consumers, integrators, and OEMs with low cost product.

I agree they are trying to buy hearts, minds and marketshare. I don't think they are being very successful at getting the 'hearts' of Western integrators and certainly not OEMs, who they are burning bridges with, even beyond the backdoor.

The main risk I see for the Chinese expansion is that their focus on winning buyers on low cost is dangerous since low cost buyers tend not to have brand / product loyalty, so it tends to be a bad investment.

Do you have any information if Dahua won a RFP or how Dahua was chosen?

I don't but these things are typically negotiated in China. It's not like I want X,Y and Z, who has the lowest price?

It's also described as a partnership and usually such partnerships are not a single specific defined technical project but an overarching agreement.

This is the day the Skynet Botnet started.

You are aware that in China they literally call their city surveillance systems Skynet? So technically it started a number of years ago.

I can't help but seeing that as Chinese propaganda

To the best I can tell this announcement was only directed internally to China, since I found it on a Chinese language portion of Dahua's Investors information disclosures. 

If they wanted to tout it internationally, they would have done it in English, got it distributed to press outlets, etc.

My gut feel is that Dahua and Hikvision prefer not to market these deals to the West. The reason being that they worry about the negative perception of "Oh look at these companies getting money from the Chinese government." For example, way back when Hikvision had negligible overseas branded sales in 2010 they announced an $800 million China city deal. Given how small they were then and lacked an international brand, it made sense. Since then, Hikvision has won many other cities but they never announce them (in English, to the West, etc.).