The 'communist bureaucracy is corrupt and lazy' trope isn't novel. It has been on and off the boil as a major characterisation of China's government and work ethic across the years. So by 'entrenching' I probably should have said 'revisiting' or 'trotting out'. You only need to recall the pig iron example from the Mao era, where communues would under produce quality metal and officials would overrerport output to keep up with Five Year Plan targets. Libs are more than happy to trot that out (people lazy, officials corrupt) when critiquing the modern FYPs. They're reaching back in history to cherry pick the examples that they can then use to typecast the 'national work ethic' or trends to the current day.

Secondly, the characterisation of the current generation of Chinese workers as actively being lazy (偷懒/摸鱼/躺平 lie flat movement) has also cropped up recently, sometimes positively (people recognising they are in bullshit jobs and winning back their own time) or sometimes framed as quiet rebellion against the presumed crushing weight of the totalitarian system. I've seen more of the latter in lib media. They compare tangping lie flat to the Japanese hikkikomorri as an ipso facto symptom of a sick society, and then point the finger at the nebulous ills of the SeeSeePee. So the phenomenon is the same but the framing is different.

Libs will not allow themselves to be caught out by articles like this. This article itself has its own built in China bad through line. China is so vast that every criticism you can think has been leveled against it, and the right propagandists like James Palmer know when to take which one of the shelf to keep the main 'China bad' fire burning