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The proliferation of social media and digital technologies has made it necessary for governments to expand their focus beyond propaganda content in order to disseminate propaganda effectively. We identify a strategy of using clickbait to increase the visibility of political propaganda. We show that such a strategy is used across China by combining ethnography with a computational analysis of a novel dataset of the titles of 197,303 propaganda posts made by 213 Chinese city-level governments on WeChat. We find that Chinese propagandists face intense pressures to demonstrate their effectiveness on social media because their work is heavily quantified–measured, analyzed, and ranked–with metrics such as views and likes. Propagandists use both clickbait and non-propaganda content (e.g., lifestyle tips) to capture clicks, but rely more heavily on clickbait because it does not decrease space available for political …