Waaaay back when, I guess summer of '82 to summer of '83, I spend a year teaching in Beijing. This was of course pre-internet (and internet censorship), and of course the usual media was as controlled as you'd expect.
But china is big, huge actually, with lots of mountains, too. And given that, the best kind of radio for that (bang for buck/yuan) is shortwave. So everyone there had a shortwave radio (I got one, too), kind of like now everyone has a TV (at the time there was one TV in the four-story building I was in, an during the few broadcast hours in the evenings, people there would gather in the guard office, where the TV was, to watch, sometimes 20-30 people, all watching a small B&W screen).
Anyway, the radios were tune-able (unlike DPRK), so besides chinese stations, everyone would also listen to VOA, BBC, and also Radio Moscow. My students then were older, late 20s and 30s, who had sort of been selected as prospective 'foreign experts', who would later maybe be traveling to the west for education (grad school). These folks were great, probably the best students possible--extemely bright, very eager to learn and go, and so on. Scary good sometimes.
I also had one class of older students. I was young then(!), this group, men and women both, were in their 60s. So think about that--and I mean really think about that. Someone who was 63 in 1983 was born in 1920, was 36 in 1956 (the Hundred Flowers), was 38-41 in 1958-61 (the famine), and was between 46-55 during the years of the Cultural Revolution, and since they were educated by then, they were sent to the countryside (to learn from the peasants) for at least part of that, and certainly subjected to intense criticism for that (part of which was knowing english, vs russian, and I think there had also been some missionary contact or schooling for a few as part of their early years). An aside, but I wish I could have been more aware of and appreciated the experiences of this group at the time.
Anyway (again), everybody l taught listened to VOA and BBC every night. In a day's class I could ask about what's happened, and these folks knew all the world news, almost as it was happening--far better than I did.
'Political study' was common/mandatory for everyone then, one afternoon a week (free time for me). Rather than simple indoctrination, the chinese way seemed to be to debate something so thoroughly as to 'rationally' prove it wrong, to defeat it that way rather than just repeating the approved message over and over. My students were excellent debaters, since during political study, like a debate team, they had to take one side or the other, try to prove/argue for it being right, and then switch roles and argue for the opposite side. They were excellent at something called perspective-taking, where you put yourself in the other's shoes to understand their mind (so as to prove yourself right, and 'defeat' that other point of view).
Blah, blah, blah...
Oh, and I often listened to
Moscow Mailbag, with Joe Adamov. There was a lot of subtle humor in his shows. Moscow also broadcast some good jazz.