The conventional wisdom often associates democracies with redistribution, but leaders in autocracies—both historical and modern—often publicize their redistribution efforts in their political communication. one potential explanation is that autocrats use such propaganda to boost their democratic legitimacy. It works because people often put a non-negligible weight on social equity in their understanding of “democracy”

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp1274

The theory also builds on past work, especially in the Chinese context, that state media play an important role in generating policy feedback effects on regime legitimacy

Particularly, in a preregistered experiment conducted in China, redistributionist propaganda boosted respondents’ evaluation of China’s democracy.