Easting the West

Abstract This book intervenes in two interrelated conversations. First, it is concerned with the construction of ‘the West’ as a global discursive space and the co-production of hierarchical difference from the ‘peripheries’ of the international social order. The book examines how ideas of ‘the West’ and articulations of China/West difference are produced and mobilized in historically specific political projects in modern China. Extending the analysis from intellectual history to contemporary digital space, the book unpacks how the spectral presence of Westernness and dichotomous difference shapes entanglements between regime-aligned and dissident, progressive and conservative narratives across diverse contexts. Secondly, the book illuminates transversal alignment and the repurposing of critique in reactionary discourse by centring Chinese digital narratives as a constitutive site of ideological production in the postliberal conjuncture. This refers to the erosion of liberalism’s normative authority in both its heartlands and on its peripheries. The failures and contradictions of liberal projects are exploited to advance authoritarian, ethnonationalist, and masculinist politics. In this context, reading reactionary discursive formations in digital China offers important insights into postliberal imaginaries converging across 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. 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.