This is one of the best summaries I've seen about democratic governments as they contrast to 'soft' totatalitarian countries like Russia and China. This is why we all want to live in democracies.
https://warontherocks.com/2018/01/contrasting-chinas-russias...
The operational differences, for all their practical implications, may be less important than the simple recognition that Beijing and Moscow both approach influence operations and active measures as a normal way of doing business. The United States approaches covert action as something distinct from the routine business of foreign policy, requiring special authorities and oversight or legal arguments over whether Title 10 or Title 50 applies. This is simply not the case for the contemporary Chinese or Russian states. They still bear the hallmarks of their totalitarian and Leninist pasts.*
I was going to comment on The Epoch Times and China Daily (two English language papers that are tools to run influence operations), but let's leave that one for another day and just recognize that we need real, honest, truth-seeking media to have a democracy, and democracies need to figure out how to deal with our new media environment that is penetrated by disinformation.