The benefit of being a government that oppressing people who criticize it, is that they don't actually have to punish every single dissident.

All you have to do, is make the threat known, and punish enough people, that everyone else falls in line.

In this case, the behavior was directly caused by someone being justifiable afraid of something that could happen to them.

This is known as a "chilling effect".

So, yes, the CCP absolutely has something to do with the culture of fear that they created, that causes people to take these actions.