the article you posted

Wasn't me. I haven't read that article yet

It's in the article I referenced

As I obviously have not read yours. I will catch up on both. Thanks for quoting that anyways

NGO is some kind of CIA backed organization

I wouldn't be surprised. The CIA has a history of backing NGOs like this dating back to the Congress for Cultural Freedom whose goal it was to purge leftism in europe of communism. Nowadays they usually use the NED for that though

.. "Devil Eyes" .. is bit disengenious to bring up. .. they only ever built a few prototypes. .. I don't think we can really trust China's take on this.

Whether or not it is true they only ever produced prototypes I don't think its disingenious as my point was not the impact it made but how the CIA operates and this is a good example as it simultaneously needs to be: somewhat recent, yet not too recent so its publicly known (declassified or uncovered) and ridiculous.

I wanted to push back on your notion that something sounds too ridiculous for the CIA to pursue, which generally is just not a framework in which to understand the CIA.

The Chinese source was not "China's take on this" it was a source of the washington post in China where the CIA allegedly commissioned the dolls (which they did not dispute according to wapo).

But since you brought up the trustworthyness of a take: I wouldn't trust the CIAs take on this, which is the source claiming "too their knowledge" only 3 dolls were produced.

But personally I think its clear these dolls never got into the hands of many customers, its just such a dumb plan.

Antcedotally, I've heard other stories of China doing stuff like this

Historically many narratives about China have been proven false or misrepresented too (social credit system, authenticity of tiananmen papers,...) thats why I am sceptical.

Thanks to the illusory truth effect this anecdotal gut feeling is terribly vulnerable to manipulation. It happens in media all the time, i.e. some rightists believe the LGBTQ community is full of groomers bc its what they are told all the time (not sure if this is a good example, I just wanted to pick a partisan one)

If the targets voice is not represented its even worse bc the claims stay largely uncontested and false claims can stack up (one misrepresentation giving you the feeling "this is totally something they would do", strenghtening your misconception), creating a gut feeling in the population that is wrong. A fairly uncontested example for such a deconstruction of a foreign target through the media would be Iraq pre invasion. You can look up polls from around the time and correlate it with the reporting of the time. This is also the effect of filterbubbles of course filtering out the opinions you lose the corrective

Whether or not the CIA was/is involved in influencing public opinion like this (personally I have no doubt), this is absolutely what is happening WRT reporting on China ATM, there is no corrective and false claims just stack up.

Look at the histeria that an off-course weather balloon caused: people would line up at an event to scream at Biden about the balloon, even though the initial press release of the pentagon clearly states that this was not an uncommon phenomenon and that there is no threat associated with it (granted its longer than that and one can have a discussion about some of the wording, but this comment is long enough already)