The researchers made clear that they are "independent of the government." They also assured participants that "we will erase all survey data if we are faced with political pressure to share the data with government or school officials."
They used email and WeChat (similar to WhatsApp) messages to communicate with the students and even hand out free one-year account of Youku (similar to Youtube) to obscure the study's explicit focus on censorship.
That doesn't mean they didn't get approval to do so. Obscuring the focus on censorship is just good study design, since they wanted to find out whether explicitly pointing out that foreign media report differently has an effect.
I'm not sure what their choice of communication method has to do with anything.
I just spent way too long figuring out the NSFC grant system, but I did eventually find the grant acknowledged in the paper. [1]
Turns out he got 2.8 million yuan from 2015-01 to 2019-12 for research on behavioral economics, which I guess is broad enough that he could have done the research without telling anyone at the NSFC about it. I guess we'll be able to tell based on whether he gets a new grant approved from 2020 onwards.
