You are not fighting science, you are fighting politics. China obviously wants to forbid violent movies and games for minors, so they come up with these fantasy studies.
Very similar phenomenons also just happened in the west, where news and politics wanted to suppress critical scientists. News was stronger.
You also have to fight corruption all the time. Paid studies are constantly published to support some companies goals, with much better tricks and not so obvious flaws. Best is just to study the background of the authors and only accept independent research.
Finally someone is talking about the content of Zhang's "studies". Seems motivated to support predetermined policy, probably so the CCP can boast about their decisions being backed by science.
Makes sense overall, but why would they care about getting it published in an English-language Western journal? If they just want to convince their own people they can publish it in state-owned media, and it's not a democracy so it's not like they really need to convince anyone.
You underestimate chinese people. Not everybody is successfully brainwashed and believes everything what chinese media or science tell them. They are extremely critical internally, but would never admit that publicly. Their privacy standards are much higher than in the west for a good reason. They are really spied upon, in a much grander scale. Eg their social media profiles are never with real names, and are invite-only. Facebook or Google realname policies won't fly there.
So independent confirmation from westerners has its value.
Very similar phenomenons also just happened in the west, where news and politics wanted to suppress critical scientists. News was stronger.
You also have to fight corruption all the time. Paid studies are constantly published to support some companies goals, with much better tricks and not so obvious flaws. Best is just to study the background of the authors and only accept independent research.