American democracy, as the past few months have shown, can be a messy affair. In a one-party state like China, the elections-equals-chaos narrative has been avidly embraced by the state-run media, which sought to paint this year’s hurly-burly presidential race as evidence that the American political system is deeply flawed.

“All this weirdness not only clearly shows the predicament of the U.S. political establishment, it also points straight at the corrupt practices of the U.S. political system,” People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party, said in a commentary last month. “For a long time, the United States has boasted about how its extremely lively election is a sign of the superiority of its system, and has even used this to willfully criticize the vast majority of developing countries.”

Over the past week, however, a small coterie of Chinese journalists has been traveling across the United States, courtesy of the State Department, as part of a program that seeks to give foreign journalists an up-close view of the presidential race in the hopes they will send home dispatches that depict the process, both warts and glories.

For Effy Zhang, a 24-year-old reporter for one of China’s biggest online news portals, the past few days have been exhausting, exhilarating and nerve-racking — because she is never sure her articles will pass muster with Beijing’s censors. Along with 47 other visiting journalists, three of them from China, Ms. Zhang has attended a Hillary Clinton rally in Miami, interviewed die-hard Donald J. Trump supporters at Trump Tower and waded through enthusiastic voters at a polling site in Lower Manhattan.