Dear List members,

My book, Imperial-Time-Order: Literature, Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire (Brill, 2016) also touches upon the concept of tianxia in the twentieth century, formulating an imperial way of thinking centered on time:

http://www.brill.com/products/book/imperial-time-order

“Imperial-Time-Order is an engagingly written critical study on a persistent historical way of thinking in modern China. Defined as normalization of unification and moralization of time, Qian suggests, the imperial-time-order signifies a temporal structure of empire that has continued to shape the way modern China developed itself conceptually. Weaving together intellectual debates with literary and media representations of imperial history since the late Qing period, ranging from novels, stage plays, films, to television series, Qian traces the different temporalities of each period and takes “time” as the analytical node by which issues of empire, nation, family, morality, individual and collective subjectivity are constructed and contested.”

Kun Qian <kqian516@gmail.com>
University of Pittsburgh

Here’s a new publication, by list member Marc Matten, on the tianxia ideology in twentieth-century China.–Kirk

Imagining a Postnational World: Hegemony and Space in Modern China (Leiden: Brill, 2016)
Marc Andre Matten, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg

This book analyzes the historical significance of rivaling concepts of world order in 20th century East Asia. Since the arrival of European imperialism in 19th century – coupled with its different schools of political philosophy and international law – China has struggled to combine ideas on national sovereignty, spatiality and hegemony in its quest of either imitating or replacing European norms of world order. By analyzing Chinese visions of regional and international order and comparing them with Japanese proposals of that era, this book discusses in detail the relationship of territoriality and political rule, discourses of amity and enmity, and finally the role of hegemoniality in the process of imagining a possible postnational world in 21st century East Asia and beyond.