Five works in the China em Foco series

Shuchen Xiang challenges the claim that colonialism, racism and violence against the other are universal features of human nature: they are, she argues, culturally contingent. Drawing on Chinese processual holism and its non-dualist metaphysics, she shows why applying the Western discourse of race to the Chinese tradition is a category mistake, and what that tradition offers to contemporary questions of pluralism and decolonisation in a multipolar world.

Zhao Tingyang takes the classical concept of tianxia, “all under heaven”, and turns it into a philosophy of world order. Against an international system that starts from the state, and therefore from the notions of foreigner and enemy, he proposes starting from the world: an order without exteriority, governed by a relational rationality that puts reducing mutual hostility before maximising exclusive interests. It is one of the few non-Western theories of world order available to the global debate.

Yuk Hui rejects the idea of a single, universal technics and proposes the concept of cosmotechnics: the unification of moral and cosmic order through technical activity. He traces the historical transformation of the Chinese categories of qi (tool) and dao (way), and China's relationship with technological modernisation since the Opium Wars, to formulate a Chinese philosophy of technology and, with it, the possibility of multiple technicities in the face of global technological hegemony and the challenges of the Anthropocene.

The book proposes a post-Western sociology: the co-production of knowledge between Western and non-Western sociological traditions, against epistemic injustice and Eurocentrism. Its focus is the relationship between Chinese and European sociology, and the theoretical and methodological shifts required for common concepts to emerge from that encounter.

Based on lectures by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the volume examines the digitalisation of Chinese society and its effects on governance, the economy, labour and generations: from the response to Covid-19 to rural poverty reduction, and from cognitive labour in the age of artificial intelligence to the new inequalities that technology produces.