Thanks, Mossy! Very interesting! I'm struck by the apparent lack of stealth.
1: I mean to include this paragraph from the story.
Ominously, Lin promised the PI that "we will have a lot more, more of this [work] in the future... Including right now [a] New York State legislator." He was quite explicit that he was working for the CCP, telling the PI several times that he needed approval from his superiors in the party.
I like how China has an intelligence community that apparently learned about American private investigators by watching tv shows.
3: In general China's propaganda is hilariously terrible. It all sounds like MASH versions of whatever the Korean equivalent of Tokyo Rose was--super unsubtle and also mangling the language.
Yggles has talked about going on a sponsored trip and being fed just egregious nonsense by the flacks, stuff nobody could take seriously. IIRC his theory on the bad propaganda was that, while many Chinese are familiar with American/Western culture and have spent time abroad, few of those people go into propaganda, and none of them become the higher-ups whose approval is needed. Like, there's simply no incentive to make it effective upon Americans, because the bosses won't recognize it.
Ona related note, I've been watching "Enemy At The Gates", and the whole thing with political officers barking propaganda through old-fashioned megaphones to get soldiers to run head-first into machine gun fire is just wild. I know it's both exaggerated for Hollywood effect and basically true.
5 What was highly exaggerated was depicting the NKVD political commissars shooting Red Army soldiers retreating, even going so far as to setting up a Maxim gun well behind the line of attack to mow down retreating Soviet soldier.
Maybe there's trying to be obvious enough that Americans start to distrust Chinese immigrants as potential spies and thus hurt their job prospects?
Dictatorship in all forms is on the move today. China is probably the bigger long-term threat.
4: To be fair, American propaganda aimed at Americans is also often quite ridiculous, even if the grammar is sometimes more polished.
I bet more people are drinking bleach because of propaganda than believe what the Chinese government says about the Uyghurs, for example.
If not bleach, then horse de-worming medication. Which, I've heard, comes in apple flavor.
That's a bummer alright. Still, falls a bit short of murdering the wrong guy in Norway.