Tianxia and Its Discontents: Confucian Political Theology, Coloniality, and the Global Order (Routledge Contemporary China Series)

Across imperial histories and contemporary digital infrastructures, Tianxia and Its Discontents challenges the enduring assumption that the Chinese notion of tianxia-“all under heaven”-offers a benign or alternative vision of world order. It argues instead that Tianxia operates as a colonial dispositif: a mode of power that organises space, hierarchy, and subjectivity while masking domination in the language of moral inclusion. Rather than countering Western imperialism, Tianxia constitutes a parallel-and increasingly entangled-formation of global domination.In its contemporary mutations, it extends through biopolitics, the economisation of psyche, and regimes of algorithmic governance, where data infrastructures and predictive systems restructure life at a planetary scale.Beneath the rhetoric of harmony, connectivity, and development, the book exposes the emergence of a Digital Tianxia: an infrastructural empire sustained by extraction, illegality, and carceral controlacross transnati