"citizen", "read their own constitution", "consequence of a personal act", we can safely put aside all this. I honestly think there's no need to pay people to flame forums, there's far enough people to do the job for free. Can be insecurity ("ho noes, my only pride is my nationality and they say bad stuffs !"), can be the pleasure of trolling.

I think the people paid for opinion control acts on media where a large portion of Chinese population read, Weibo and co. Small expat forum in English (few people read English in China), unlikely. The people who would come here to read in English are likely to be ambivalent to the CCP anyway. Not worth the effort.

I do not know how much it earns, I'd say not much.

From what I can gather, it used to be freelance stuff that was outsourced to students.

I remember in 2008, just before the Olympics and after some Tibet scandal broke in the western press, there was a huge wave of obvious propaganda popping in a selection of major media and forum. Most of it took the form of comments or forum posts, were largely untargeted (could happen in, say, cooking lessons forums) and worded the official line of the Party in quite bad Chinglish.

So, to me, looked completely like what you would expect CCP style bulk propaganda to look like.

Since then, I don't think I've seen cases of obvious online propaganda like this, just once or twice I've seen the channel Russia Today invite party mouthpieces on talk shows, but those guys were completely incapable of aligning two sentences that made sense regarding the focus of the debate ("China's feelins must not be hurt, China-this China-that", on global economic issues).

There is still news-comment propaganda going on in major news portals inside China, like Tencent or 163, but, yea, even in Chinese, those usually don't look legit a second, and are quickly being called wumaos by other commentors.

So, how much are they paid and what are they like today, well I'd say probably not much more professionnal than back then, but I doubt it would be freelance anymore.

There is some info about it here, no actual salary though. http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/07/world/asia/china-internet-monitors/ (I am guessing this article is mostly for people with VPN) 

It is interesting that there are more people policing the internet than defending the country. Shows who the regime sees as the enemy.