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This article engages with transformations in media politics under Xi Jinping through the lens of digital propaganda. While recent studies underscore media crackdown as the key policy under Xi, the party’s large-scale media digitalization experiment aimed at recapturing public opinion online, has thus far been largely absent in the analyses. This study examines this experiment: the emergence of the Shanghai-based model, a digital-only news outlet, Pengpai, and its diffusion across different regional contexts in China. We argue that the synergy between local-level officials and media entrepreneurs has facilitated Pengpai’s emergence as a model in digital journalism. We further demonstrate that while a cross-national attempt at diffusion of this model has been made, it achieved ambivalent results due to a number of factors, including superficial commitment by local officials and media professionals. These findings question the authoritarian resilience paradigm in thinking about propaganda in contemporary China, and demonstrate that decentralized experimentation is a volatile approach in the sphere of media policy.