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Paper short abstract

This project examines how authority in China emerges within everyday life. Based on ethnography in Beichuan New County, it explores Tianxia as a logic of elastic, overlapping temporalities, showing how political belonging and legitimacy are co-constituted through circulating, relational practices.

Paper long abstract

This research investigates how the Chinese state is experienced, enacted, and legitimized through everyday moral and relational practices rather than through explicit institutional domination. Focusing on Beichuan New County—a centralized resettlement site established after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake—the study examines how post-disaster governance operates through symbolic inclusion, affective alignment, and what I term an ethics of placability: a mode of political integration that prioritizes accommodation, moral resonance, and relational continuity over coercion or ideological consensus.

Conceptually, the project reinterprets Tianxia as an empirical analytic rather than a civilizational ideal, emphasizing its elastic boundaries and capacity to absorb difference without fully resolving it. Methodologically, it employs long-term ethnographic dwelling, participant observation, and recursive interviewing to trace how kinship, memorialization, and everyday encounters with state practices produce a suspended space in which authority is neither fully internalized nor openly contested. By situating the state as a relational node activated through collective practice, this research offers a non-sovereign account of governance and advances anthropological understandings of legitimacy, morality, and state–society relations in contemporary China.