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

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.

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 transnational zones. Combining theoretical innovation with historically grounded analysis, the book makes a distinctive contribution by developing the concept of surplus (yu ?) as a method of immanent critique, opening new pathways for rethinking coloniality, governance, and resistance. It will appeal to scholars and advanced students in global studies, political philosophy, Asian history, and media and technology studies, and is well suited for courses on geopolitics, digital governance, and postcolonial theory.