When pressed, after other employees labeled the publication as "new media" and "news agency". There are several passages that characterize Lin as annoyed, irritated, angry etc with the interview process to the point of claiming “Can’t I just tell you that I was being a fucking idiot?”. Decontextualizing the nature of the interview and soundbite into a headline is not responsible journalism IMO, especially when it is well understood that a around half of most readers typically only consume headlines. Hence the response article labeling the original piece as a trap.
As for the balancing Chinese perspective, it was one paragraph of people who are disturbed that the publication is "synonymous with government propaganda" and a more detailed examination of one named individual who is apathetic towards the role of journalism to further support the narrative that Chinese students are "melon-eating masses". These accounts hardly encapsulates the amount of distaste among the Chinese diaspora for the publication, who regularly shits on the journal for being a clickfarm the same way many called out Buzzfeed or Gawker in the west, tacitly endorsing the generic Chinese as a monolith trope. There are plenty of Chinese students / general diaspora members who are high-information consumers that have a rational basis to support (and not support) the CPC whose world view is informed by both Chinese and Western sources and experiences. And unsurprisingly there is a conspicuous lack acknowledgement of their existence in western MSM, which is a shame because their perspective is worth understanding.
Anecdotally, there's many highly educated Romanian and Chinese immigrants up in Canada that escaped repressive conditions of the old country. You won't find many Romanian nationalists in the diaspora, and very few who returned. Not so with China. It's worth understanding why and I surmise the answer is more nuanced than these folks are brainwashed.