Liberals are always going to have this fundamental problem when it comes to attempting to understand China, as you have laid out by paraphrasing Jacques.

There's no outside of that liberal hegemonic worldview unless you escape liberalism or you're a Sinologist/historian, and even then there's no guarantee that this hegemonic worldview won't persist.

I've seen liberals use the accusation that China is ethnonationalist by throwing the term "Han supremacist" around. To anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with China, this is laughable because "Han" is less of an ethnicity than it is an umbrella term for a melting pot of ethnic groups.

Now I'm not making the claim that Han Chinese people, or some of them, don't see themselves as somehow superior or better than other ethnic groups but to make an accusation like that and to import the notion of white supremacism over into China and to project that onto Han people is just... idk it's just political fiction dressed up and being passed off as some sort of deep wisdom in the world where facile political analysis goes from Harry Potter analogies to analogies based on real-world western politics and no further.

I think that you're not going to find any rich discussion on China in the west outside of a few little niches here and there.