I think what you're perceiving as happening in HN comments is a consequence of the macro social/geopolitical trend. There is a growing rift between the West and China, and especially between the U.S. and China. It has complex interactions with growing political divisions in the West (and especially the U.S.). This cluster of topics is being increasingly covered in Western media, in an increasingly polarized way. HN users are not coming to HN to talk about this stuff from a blank slate—they're coming with pre-existing views that are conditioned by whatever media and online sources they're engaged with, as well as by their own life experience, as I described above.

What all that means is that we're likely to continue to see more pro- and anti- comments on China-related topics, for reasons that are easily explained by the dynamics in our own societies. Reaching for "CCP shill" as an explanation is unnecessary, and to some extent is harmful because it reflects an assumption that no one could hold certain views in good faith, when we know for a fact that some people in fact do hold those views in good faith—again, for reasons of their own life experience.

This does not imply that we're closed to investigating claims of abuse and manipulation. On the contrary, our contract with HN users is that if someone is worried about abuse, they're always welcome to let us know at [email protected] and we will always take a look. I wrote new code the other day to help with such investigations. Another part of our contract with HN users is that we will tell the truth about what we find. The truth is that we haven't found even a trace of anything like that on HN—just a lot of human beings with very different backgrounds and very strong feelings. There's more about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23839602 from a couple days ago.