Deepseek avoids topics that are usually considered political. AI as a hallucination machine is especially useless with political content as it is extremely polluted with propaganda and wildly different views on similar contexts, so it isn’t for censorship. And yes, the people in China know about and speak about their leadership.

Not a Chinese person, and I don’t really know much about their style, but if random guesses are ok:

It may have been turned off, due to the risk that politically motivated actors may use it to print out something and then use it for propaganda, saying that a Chinese AI has exposed the CPC n all?

Especially since the U S is a trade war with them and there has been usage of genocide propaganda^* against them?
* - Considering that the same people have no similar level of concern about Gaza

I think you should ask in some Chinese community. If not, maybe most of the answers would be similar to mine, guesses, which will mostly be our views rather than the fact whether the average Chinese person has info on their leaders.

@j4k3 Filtering out everything about them is the simplest way to block anything critical of them.