I doubt this piece was signed off personally by Xi Jinping or anything, but all these little details lodge subconsciously in your mind. Like, you might not specifically think of Chairman Mao as a poor rural dweller famous for his love of spice after reading this article, but after reading dozens of pointless details like it you might start to think he wasn't such a bad guy after all.

George Washington was so honest he could not lie about chopping down a cherry tree, so maybe you won't lie either.

This doesn't seem to be a literary habit particular to China.

It's propaganda though.

Some advertisers spend on relevant keywords, others pay for generalized brand awareness. Many do both.

Anything published by a government in a foreign language has an agenda. It's propaganda. In this case, "brand awareness" propaganda.

Maybe the goal is to promote tourism, or to give a boost to exports.

Maybe it's to keep the country/government in the front of foreign readers' minds, to foster a sense of commonality or appreciation.

Whatever. There's an agenda. It's worth discussing and thinking about.

Like with advertising, it's important to know what role you are playing in the publisher's agenda. Accepting the material uncritically is not a neutral position -- it makes you a unwitting player in their game.

You are completely correct that the US does it too, both internally (presidential mythologies, to use your example) and externally (Radio Free X etc etc).

Propaganda is common though. Many companies have their own newsletter and plenty do paid advertising, some in subtle ways. Plenty of scientific research is paid for by companies for their own gain. Authors are destined to propagate their own opinion and mind. That doesn’t however means anything that’s not complete neutral is pointless. An echo chamber is very much like propaganda, few people is going to speak out against the majority. Our training should be to obtain useful information from the massively available information, not disregard everything.

I'm glad you see it that way. My response was so flippant because I do think people often see China as personally run, in its entirety, by Xi. Any news coming out of China, from as grave as genocide to as minor as Olympics festivals, is seen as part of a single plan. The actions of the Chinese gov't and press can be just as much bottom-up as top-down, even if the top takes credit.

I got one a couple of years ago too. It's kind of mind blowing how powerful a few pieces of painted metal can be.

That's exactly how I feel too. I just started using neovim a few weeks ago. I'm using `nvim .` to get to a navigable tree, but have no idea if that's the right way to do it.