The treatment the plant in the picture received is called "air layering" that is used for propagation. You wound the stem you want to propagate, then wrap it with something moist. This leads to roots developing on that stem while it is still attached to the larger plant.
I'm not familiar with using this method to induce fruit production and it didn't look like they used air layering in the paper.
Here's the paper in the meme.
You give too much credit. I think it's pretty safe to assume no one but socialists and historians care (or know) enough about Deng and Zhao outside of China so they aren't likely to weigh in. Now if the question included the tinyman trigger-word, you'd have people jumping all over this post saying China bad and quoting Wikipedia until their fingers bled.