That’s true—Hua Chunying tweets are for Chinese audience as much as for American audience. But then again, who are these Chinese Twitter users? Twitter is banned in China after all, so why will the CCP devote so much time and effort to cater to a small segment of politically active VPN users + overseas Chinese? I feel like the propaganda’s primary audience must be westerners, given how small their possible Chinese audience is (half of who might be wumao anyways).

That sort of orientalist nonsense about the incompatibility of Eastern values with Democracy is nothing knew—Lee Kuan Yew was promoting that for decades, and before that Imperial Japan. But I agree that there’s fertile ground for CCP to lean into identity politics to get sympathy points from some members of US activist left. Unfortunately for CCP, the Battlelines of the US culture wars are so complex and nuanced that I don’t think they’ve really capitalized on this potential to the fullest extent. Hua tweeting “I can’t breathe” to respond to a US diplomat comes across as really ham handed and an obvious attempt at deflection. If the morally relativist positions regarding China is becoming more prominent in the West, I believe that is a self-inflicted wound caused by culture wars rather than the outcome of concerted and effective CCP propaganda.