The Imperial Gaze: Affective Governance, Hybrid Cartography, and China’s U-Shaped Line

This article develops ‘the imperial gaze’ concept to explore how maps not only represent the world, but also do things in geopolitics, even provoking mass demonstrations. It examines China’s early-modern and contemporary maps to highlight how they create an imperial gaze that guides Chinese understandings of world order. If your cartographic ‘view of the world’ produces your ideological ‘worldview’, then it is important to see how China’s early-modern maps inform the PRC’s twenty-first-century claims in the South China Sea. The article argues that Chinese cartography does things in geopolitics by mobilising the affective governance of an assemblage of hybrid combinations of tradition and modernity, East and West, and Sinocentric and Westphalian conceptions of space. In this way, it examines how historical maps of China and contemporary maps of the U-Shaped Line in the South China Sea work with each other to provoke the imperial gaze that celebrates China’s territorial expansion, laments its lost territories, and fights to recover them. It concludes that the imperial gaze is not peculiar to the PRC, thus further comparative research will help to see how it works in other polities as well.