Tianxia and Its Discontents

Across shifting empires and todayâs digital frontiers, Liu examines the Chinese concept of tianxiaâ"the ancient vision of âall under heavenââ"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 Yizhiâs dialectics of surplus, Zhang Taiyanâs anti-theological ruptures, and the artistic interventions of Xu Bing, Wu Tien-chang, and Chen Chieh-Jen, which expose the cracks inside empireâs 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 Chinaâs evolving modes of powerâ"its cosmic dreams, material infrastructures, and contested futuresâ"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 empireâs 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.