Propaganda is integral to authoritarian politics. Much of the literature on authoritarian propaganda, however, focuses exclusively on propaganda at the national level from state media. Little is known about the strategies and effects of propaganda at the local level. To probe into how propaganda works locally, we collect the entire universe of more than 1 million articles published by all Chinese municipal-level government official information accounts on WeChat from January 1, 2016 to December 1, 2019. Using Biterm Topic Model (BTM), we show that the magnitude of information on public goods provision is greater than, or at least on par with, that of information on local or central government officials on Chinese local governments’ social media accounts. The result demonstrates that, like their democratic counterparts, local governments in autocracies concern with public goods provision and actively share public goods information with residents. In addition to the descriptive content analyses, we further investigate the effect of public goods information on public opinion in China. Using the metadata of published articles (i.e., views, likes, shares, etc.), we show that hard propaganda articles, articles praising central or local governments or officials, receive more views/likes/shares if preceded by articles with public goods information. We conduct a randomized survey experiment in China to causally identify the effect of public goods information on the attractiveness of hard propaganda and regime support. The findings of this study deepen our understanding of the strategies and effects of propaganda at the local level and have broad implications for studies on political communication in authoritarian regimes.