Typically not, the imperial Chinese of the Han Dynasty were nothing if not almost insufferably self-aggrandizing. Han China was seen as literally the font of all culture and learnedness - the literal centerpoint of the link between Heaven and Earth... it's not for nothing, after all, that China came to call itself 中国 - the Middle Kingdom - whose monarch ruled over 天下 - "all under heaven."

All told, the Chinese weren't particularly interested in the cultures of the peoples who surrounded them- what could be worth learning from those lesser than themselves, after all? This is why, for instance, we have not idea what the "Xiongnü" actually were called - the Chinese simply didn't care to bother writing it down, instead uniformly sticking them with their own sneering epithet, the "fearsome slaves". Likewise, we have virtually nothing in the way of actual ethnography of the (almost certainly) steppe confederation, since that just was simply not in the the realm of Chinese purview. Instead, the only real interest typically taken was in two aspects:

1. How could/did a periphery people contribute to China's greater glory via proper tribute?

and/or

2. How might they be militarily overcome and forced to pay their proper tribute to the Light of the World?

That second point became of particular interest in the later half of the Han Dynasty, since it became just ridiculously clear that they were militarily outmatched by the steppe-riders. And so the Han emperors conquored enough of the Far West (as far west as Ferghana, as well as what is today much of Xinjiang) to secure access to horses capable of - at least on paper - matching those of the Xiongnü.

This, somewhat durin the Han, but way more during the Tang played itself out to its logically-insane conclusion with the complete adopting of the 以夷制夷 policy: AKA "Use the Barbarians to Deal With Barbarians". Tang Dynasty armies became more-or-less solely agencies of the sinicized "barbarian" peoples... a process facilitated by both the non-Chinese peoples who sought to emulate the great civilization, but also by the Chinese themselves, who regularly followed the policy of taking captured or surrendered populations of "barbarians" and relocating the within the empire to "cook" and take in the "civilizing" influence of their own civilization. Korean generals commanding Turkic troops, or Turkic generals commanding Xianbei troops, etc. ... meanwhile the Han Chinese (or at least those claiming to be so) disentangled the idea of nobility from martial prowess, disdaining military service altogether and collectively deciding the "one does not use good iron to make nails" (meaning: we civilized Han can't be bothered with the loathsome and lowly art of war... we have poetry to write and watercolors to paint instead).

That - inevitably - came around to bite them square in the ass in 755 when the Turko-Sogdian Governor-General of the North, An Lushan, decided that he was going to take his - the greatest army in all of China - and march on the capital... sparking a war that would see China's population pretty much halved in the course of less than a decade, a blow from which, even in eventual victory, the Tang Dynasty would never recover.