It works the other way around as well, American lack of cultural understanding of China also makes American influence operations seem very stiff and ineffective. I remember seeing a pro-democracy speech given by some Sinologist at an American University, the audience of which was mainland Chinese people. It was full of Americanisms and cultural elements which I assume would be very offputting and ineffective.

As for the Russian operations, the writer in the article briefly touches an aspect which I believe has the essence of why some of their operations work so well: it seems like the employees at the Internet Research Agency are having lots of fun subverting America. A few weeks ago I saw that one of the front organizations that claimed to be from somewhere in the US had an acronym that translated into something like "fuck" in Russian. I can't imagine the Chinese bureaucracy would allow such childish pranks to be part of a state influence operation, but paradoxically allowing your employees to mess around like this has a strong effect on the efficacy of your operations.

This actually mirrors a lot of what Paul Graham says about procrastination, and Jordan Peterson about play being an essential human activity. Simply put, if you don't feel like you're playing, you'll never get into a flow state where you can do your best work.