A Western academic would phrase it very differently. If you read the paper, they claim that a document called the "Jiatu Zhijia" describes a very similar object

A Western academic would phrase it very differently. If you read the paper, they claim that a document called the "Jiatu Zhijia" describes a very similar object called a jiatu that supposedly resembles a divine turtle that caused legendary emperor Yao to abdicate to Shun, i.e. acting as a material carrier between heaven and earth. I can't actually find other English uses of that name, and while I can guess that they're referring to one of a small set of documents discussing the (possibly mythological) abdication of Yao, those documents were written thousands of years after the events. I'm not wholly opposed to the argument, but you should explicitly justify it in cases like this instead of accepting the symbolism uncritically.