The cover image is by photographer Wu Guoyong, part of his “China’s White Houses” (中国白宫) project. The building is located in a filming studio in Shijiazhuang.

Easting the West: Theorizing the Postliberal Conjuncture from China

Available now on Oxford Scholarship Online, print version forthcoming in June 2026

Also available to buy on Kindle and Google Play, where you can read a free sample

About

From intellectual history to the dazzling, chaotic, and jargon-laden world of digital culture, this book explores how ideas of ‘the West’ and articulations of China/West difference are produced and mobilized in Chinese political discourse. It foregrounds not only the co-construction and appropriation of civilizational binaries from the ‘peripheries’ of the international social order, but also the entanglement between ostensibly ‘pro-Western’ and ‘anti-Western’ narratives in Chinese nationalism.

The book offers an in-depth study of digital reactionary discourse on Chinese social media, analysed within globally interconnected and locally embedded reinvigorations of racial nationalism, authoritarianism, and backlash against social justice movements. Theorizing the postliberal conjuncture from digital China, Zhang delineates how postliberal political sensibilities converge across conventional geopolitical and ideological fault lines. Employing identity markers such as ‘East’ and ‘West’ as flexible transnational codes, geopolitically opposed actors capitalize on structurally similar narratives to justify oppression at home and perpetuate logics of civilizational rivalry through mutual othering. As the legitimacy of liberal orders erodes, the political valence of critique is unstable. The anticolonial language may be mobilized not for emancipatory ends, but to consolidate authoritarian control and legitimate violence against racialized and marginalized groups.

This book makes an original contribution to the international cultural politics of reaction by centring Chinese digital narratives as a constitutive site of ideological production in our shared global present. It deepens understanding of transversal alignment and the repurposing of critique in the postliberal conjuncture and in digital reactionary formations.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Constructing the West from the East

Part I Beginnings

2. Universalism, hierarchy, and the beginnings of narrating zhong/xi difference

3. The Cold War remaking of the idea of the West: Peaceful evolution and the co-construction of geo-ideological struggles

Part II The politics of difference in postliberal times

4. Self, other, and the international in digital China

5. Race, gender, and global imaginaries in the anti-baizuo discourse

6. Entangled colonialities and competing narratives of civilization

7. Epilogue: Unlearning binaries, after Westernness