Decolonial studies, initiated by Southern scholars, scrutinize the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being as a constitutive condition of Western modernity, and explicate otherwise suppressed non-Western onto-epistemes. This paper examines Chinese academia's 'building Chinese education' as a decolonial, 'self-awakening', effort against the Euro-centric global structure of knowledge (re)production. Reading into 334 journal articles published between 2004 and 2023 and housed in the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database, we first pinpoint a state-academia governing matrix that imbricates Chinese intellectuals as establishment and participative scholars. We next untangle three interpellations that scaffold the Chinese education construction discourses: (a) East-indigenization and West-globalization, (b) tradition-past and modernity-present, and (c) theory and practice. In so doing, we explicate eugenic disordering, representational signification, and theorycide as onto-epistemic flashpoints confronting Chinese academia's self-awakening efforts against Western modernity-coloniality. Zooming in on China, this case study complicates the knotty negotiation between cultural relativistic indigenization and globalization as a decolonial involution.