Being a fluent Chinese reader due to immigrating as a preteen to the United States, I delved back into an interest in Chinese history while studying historical linguistics in college. I have been frustrated by the number of politically charged modernist histories available in my local Chinese bookstores and in public libraries, and have been unable to really get into many details of the subject due to not knowing where to begin with Chinese sources.
While working in an academic library cataloging Chinese books, I did encounter a number of interesting primary sources, but I am looking to source some books in Chinese, with large overview or specific eras of Chinese history, so I can dig into it a little more.
I no longer have access to university credentials and I'm not sure where to begin and I was hoping there might be enough Chinese-reading historians who can point me towards some resources.
I have the geographically-opposite problem. Living in greater China as a historical linguist, I actually make great efforts to stay away from Chinese scholarship when possible. That's "Chinese" as in "from the People's Republic of China"; I have no qualms with Mandarin-language publication coming out of Singapore or Taiwan. Of course, in both of our situations the problem is the same: The heavy influence of political pressures on academia in China – and by extension Chinese-language imports to the US – means that a lot of the material is just not of the level or neutrality that you'd really want.
My answer is actually to use Chinese sources when dealing with primaries, but to otherwise be okay reading the overview-type texts in English or another language. China's not a mysterious faraway place that we only know through drunken evenings at tattoo parlours just off campus; There's a lot of good scholarship being done in languages other than Mandarin which does a good job of dealing with the subjects. You can then use Mandarin to follow up on these if you choose by accessing the primary sources upon which they may be based.
For the record this doesn't actually work for linguistics, because the data is being done in China, in Chinese, by members of departments at Chinese universities. I still use those texts constantly as data, but then skip over the analysis in favour of my own.
Many Chinese musuems and archive of eletronic scans of primaries that's availiable upon request. For secondaries, they can be brought through normal channels like amazon and abebooks at flated prices or can buy then on chinese site vis shipping agent. (If are okay with ebooks, they can just buy them direct). Douban has a large list of them with reviews, reading list etc.
However, if you choose to ignore these sources, then that's your problem.