Public intellectuals complaining about the current state of the world is a classism thing that has thousands of years of history behind it, it's part of how they justify their existence to the common people. It's just historically the paragon they hold up is some mythical golden past in China's history. Ever since Opium War though they've had to change track and instead hold up foreign countries as the paragon.This does beg the question of what Chinese libs would do when China has unambiguously won — will they cling to the ideology that they’ve espoused for half their lives or flexibly leverage their proficiency in Chinese language to proselytize XJP Thought instead???
When the time comes and China has unambiguously won, I bet they will just change tunes and go back to using idealized Chinese past dynasties again. You can already see attempts at this with that lady talking up Ming-dynasty and claiming they invented everything including steam engines.