the sad thing about american propagandists is that they willingly participate completely free of pressure from their government

That's a very charitable take.

My take is that his objection to a Chinese repressive regime isn't the repressive nature, it's that he's not part of the class doing the repressing.

Don't generalize. You have "principle propagandists" who just prosternate for free and become someone else's mouthpiece because their propagandist upbringing taught them so. But what you're replying to is nothing like that, it's the propagandist who does it for personal (and massive) financial gain.