Tianxia and Its Discontents

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 dominati...