Stop trying to sound smart, Godric. The US government is owned by capital. Profit based journalism is still 1/3 smaller than profit-based Public Relations. And that doesn't cover the defense budgets for propaganda, the State Department, and other government agencies.

You’re right, the US government doesn’t give much of a fuck about public opinions so they don’t need to force the media to run only pro-government stories to stay afloat

They run constant pro-capitalist stories, orientalist stories, Russophobic stories, anti-Iranian stories, anti-south-american stories, and on and on and on. They've been manipulating their school curriculum across all grade levels for over a century. The West has been using manipulated narratives to justify invading foreign nations since at least the British launched the opium wars against China.

In a capitalist society, the government is literally the apparatus by which capital coordinates its global class warfare. You can't separate them by saying "oh, capital owns the media, the government doesn't", when quite explicitly it's both/and and also there is no difference between capital owning the media or the government owning the media.

The reason the ruling class needs to propagandize its own people is to prevent revolt. That's why people think China propagandizes its own people, right? To make them content with their situation? Capital, since the merchant class launched the first tri-color revolution, has also needed to suppress revolt in its people, and they use domestic propaganda for the same reason. However, they also use violence.

The politicians are incentives to care more about their constituents than the country as a whole, and it functions, in a way.

Princeton University demonstrated that there is no real way to construe the US as a democracy, that is, a government run by the people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6w9CbemhVY

In China, however, the politicians have incentives to care about all the people in the country. The indigenous populations in China are given autonomous zones, similar to how the USSR maintained autonomy for different nations. In the US, there are many indigenous languages with fewer than 10 fluent speakers, not a single institution uses those languages, and the people who are trying to learn these languages are mostly extremely educated. In China, Tibetans speak their native language from grade school all the way through university. There is no ability for the majority ethnic Han Chinese to impose cultural genocide on Tibetans the way the US does to its native population because the Chinese government understands that maintaining the interests of the state, the nation, and all of its peoples are required for a functioning society to eventually become sustainable.

What are the incentives that Chinese politicians have that US politicians don't? Chinese politicians know they are nothing without the support of the people, while US politicians know they are nothing without the political will to launch wars of aggression and starve millions of people to death with sanctions. So, will China use domestic propaganda to increase the support of the people? Absolutely! And the US will use domestic propaganda for the same reason, because if the people revolt they won't be able to continue war profiteering. And yet, despite the US having the most powerful and most effective propaganda in the world, they can't convince even a simple majority of their population to support the government, whereas in China 95.5% of people support how their federal government governs the country.

I don't know how much back bending you have to do to try to square this in your head. The Tienanmen Square incident is a classic study in US propaganda and if you actually read the news wires from the US reporters who were on the ground at the time you'll see that you have to choose between the propaganda and the facts. And no one should forget that Hong Kong was literally a British colony until 1997, and under colonial rule Chinese were second-class citizens while Brits were immune to Chinese to law. The protests were literally about whether or not criminals in Hong Kong could be tried under Chinese law and the youth who were fighting were literally fighting within the historical context of maintaining British colonial structures, which is why the parents of the youth who were protesting would literally kick them out of the house because the parents knew that life under British rule was absolutely terrible and that integration with the mainland structures is critical for establishing a stable society. The youth, however, have no context for this and only see that the UK turned Hong Kong into a global financial center that creates narratives about the freedom to become land-owning millionaire financiers and rentiers. Again, it takes a special kind of gymnastics to look at a youth protest seeking to maintain British colonial structures that were imposed after the British completely destroyed China by getting 40% of their population addicted to opium and then launching a devastating war after the Chinese tried to outlaw opium and seize the drugs at the port. The results of the war gave Hong Kong to Britain, as well as other territories, and in all of those territories Chinese law was suspended for all foreign merchants (literal immunity) and China was required to legalize the opium trade. The protests in Hong Kong were literally against the incremental dismantling of those colonial legal structures. But go on about how China is bad because they had protests just like the US had a BLM movement.