The Yankee propaganda machine is smooth and suave so we hardly realize it exists. It makes the Chinese look heavy handed by comparison, and our Overton window is much wider than theirs. But don't confuse that suavity and width with the absence of propaganda.
[0] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/16/hitler-in-holly...
[1] http://www.poynter.org/2014/covering-china-for-foreign-and-d...
[2] https://cpj.org/blog/2015/03/how-china-uses-j-visas-to-punis...
[3] http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/8/27/chinese-jour...
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/world/asia/china-blocks-we...
Want to get access to high ranking officials? Same thing.
Instead of throwing anyone in jail it's a matter of strangling them of access so competitors gets important information first or gets to be the ones askin their questions.
Occasionally it doesn't work. Like when a newspaper gets hold of something important enough to be willing to risk their access (such as the Snowden documents). But for tilting the day to day reporting of politics these methods have been honed to a level where they are remarkably effective.
An American reporter can freely be critical of the government. They can even publish Snowden documents, which put the government in a very bad light. Nobody even considers harassing them, let alone jailing them. (In fact, legally, they can't.) This fact is huge; it is an essential difference.
I think I finally figured out how the Communist Party deals with information control. They simply state whatever they wish were actually true as if it were true, and then bully, punish, jail, block or otherwise try to stamp out any other perspective.
So, they say "Taiwan is part of China" when it manifestly is not part of China, and they encourage an angry response to anyone who says it is not true. But other than national messaging, it seems like the State media actually does their own stories, because you often see it run a story which then gets deleted off the web site a couple hours or a day later, after the government decides what the message should be.
From the outside looking in, China and Taiwan are merely part of a long running civil Cold War.
I don't think you should read too much into names. Taiwan is neither internationally recognized as part of China nor does it function as part of China in any way.
Believing the proposition that one can control something as complex as an economy requires a certain amount of arrogance and/or hubris, neither of which are in short supply in the States. But from one naïve American's perspective, the Chinese leadership act like it's their divine right of nature.