Tianxia and Its Discontents: Confucian Political Theology, Coloniality, and the Global Order (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-n