It is fairly standard to write press releases in advance that contain quotes from important muckymucks. This happens all the time in the US. We all write scripts before we say anything.
It’s important to remember that the Chinese Space Program is also like the Chinese Space Company, and it wants to market its success. And, in China, business and government often go hand in hand. So the government is also marketing the success of the space program as much as the program, itself, is.
It’s propaganda, is what it is. Journalists have been known to make up dialogue before, and who know how prevalent the behavior is. Maybe more so in China than in the US, but still, it happens here, too. For every journalists who makes up stuff that is caught, who knows how many go uncaught?
In China, they don’t have a set of professional journalists, yet. Journalists are used to asking their bosses what they should say. The space agency was happy to tell them. Journalists don’t know how to go out and ask their own questions and find out their own information.
So this doesn’t surprise me at all, and it seems rather normal, given China, and given the nature of the relationship between business, government, and news. Propaganda is alive and well.