Tianxia and Its Discontents

Confucian Political Theology, Coloniality, and the Global Order
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-041-04574-8
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 322 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Routledge Contemporary China Series

Across shifting empires and today’s digital frontiers, Liu examines the Chinese concept of tianxia—the ancient vision of “all under heaven”—as it promises harmony while organizing domination.

This book moves through maps, rituals, frontier conquests, and data infrastructures, showing how moral order hardens into territorial ambition and how cosmic unity becomes a machinery of control. It traces a continuous lineage from imperial political theology to twenty-first-century logistics and algorithmic governance, revealing the colonial grammar that joins Confucian virtue, Legalist discipline, and infrastructural power. The book also explores the resistances within this terrain, examining Fang Yizhi’s dialectics of surplus, Zhang Taiyan’s anti-theological ruptures, and the artistic interventions of Xu Bing, Wu Tien-chang, and Chen Chieh-Jen, which expose the cracks inside empire’s total horizon. Through debris, trauma, and displaced bodies, it reveals how inherited orders can be re-sensed, re-named, and unsettled. For readers seeking to understand China’s evolving modes of power—its cosmic dreams, material infrastructures, and contested futures—the text offers a critical cartography of domination and its possible undoings. The work demonstrates how worlds built on harmony and hierarchy can be opened from within, and how coexistence might begin where empire’s claims to universality falter.

Accessible yet deeply grounded in scholarship, this is an essential book for scholars and researchers in global studies, political philosophy, Asian history, and postcolonial thought, as well as to anyone seeking to understand how power, technology, and moral order shape the world we inhabit today.

Zielgruppe

Academic and Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Liu, Joyce C. H.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Sonstige Religionen Östliche Religionen Konfuzianismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Sozialphilosophie, Politische Philosophie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Historische & Regionale Volkskunde

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgement

Note on Earlier Versions

List of Figures

Introduction: Inside the Shadow of Tianxia

Part I — The Order of Tianxia

1. What is Tianxia?

2. Tianxia versus Nomos of the Earth: The Material Basis of Tianxia’s Colonial Character

Part II — Beyond Empire: The Persistence of Tianxia Structures in the Modern Nation-State

3. When Enlightenment Mutates: The Great Transformation of Tianxia and the Semiotic Syncretism of Knowledge

4. Mental Force and Ethical Political Economy: John Fryer between Enlightenment and Confucian Political Theology

5. Waves upon Waves: Confucian Revivals and the Authoritarian Desire for Legitimacy

6. Heaven and Humanity as One: Civilisational Fallacies and the Afterlife of Tianxia

Part III — Digital Tianxia: The Algorithmic Empire and the Return of Harmony

7. The Rise of China in the Twenty-First Century and the Transformation of the Tianxia Order

8. The Digital Tianxia and the Upgrading of Colonial Despotic Techniques

9. The Darker Side of Tianxia and Its Underground Rhizomes

Part IV — Outside of Tianxia? Cracks, Surplus, Beginnings

10. The Struggle between Confucianism and Legalism: Rethinking the Limits of Confucian Theology and the Possibility of Internal Critique

11. The Antinomy of Tianxia and Coexistence: Fang Yi-Zhi’s Continuous Critique from Within

12. Artistic Decolonization: Xu Bing, Wu Tien-Chang, Chen Chieh-Jen

Epilogue — Coexistence Without Capture

References

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Joyce C.H. Liu is Professor Emerita and Director of the International Center for Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. Her research spans geopolitics, biopolitics, internal coloniality, and Chinese political thought. She is the author of One Divides into Two and The Topology of Psyche.