Do you have specific criticisms of the NYTimes piece? Reasons to think these particular claims are false? If you do, please do share, as it would be a substantial contribution to the conversation. Throwing aspersions or drive-by allusions of doubt is a primary reason why we're in the current situation where we can't seem to find agreement on so many things that should be facts.
Your links provide more support than you comments regarding folklore. Other cultures are no stranger to superstitions, quack remedies, and non-scientific religious practices.
China has also progressed quite handily economically and technologically, areas that don't admit to too much reliance on things that don't work. Cautious skepticism isn't the same as out-of-hand dismissal.
It's problematic to take scientific claims at face value, regardless of the claimants' ethnicity. It's also problematic to discount claims purely on the basis of the claimant's ethnicity.
AI/machine learning has slightly more accountability than many other scientific fields, in that unless you provide an implementation for people to inspect or your results are easy to replicate, people generally aren't going to be particularly interested for long. There are exceptions to that principle, like AlphaGo, but the tests of AlphaGo speak for themselves. It's a very results-driven field, where you're not going to be able to get away with specious claims for long.