CHIPS, INFRASTRUCTURAL POWER, AND HOMOTOPIC AUTHORITARIANISM: DIGITAL TIANXIA AND THE REACTIVATION OF IMPERIAL LOGICS

This article argues that contemporary digital governance is structured by a morphological homology between population management and military deployment. Enabled by chip-based infrastructures, this homology operates at an unprecedented scale, transforming population governance into a continuous, real-time, and anticipatory form of logistical control analogous to military operations. Rather than merely expanding surveillance capacities, digital technologies fundamentally reconfigure the relations between security, territory, and population, thereby enabling a renewed rationality of authoritarian governance. Situating this argument within the broader context of twenty-first-century authoritarian resurgence, the article examines how chip-based technologies intensify both the ambitions and technical capacities of governance across diverse political systems. Developments such as the United States’ Project 2025 and China’s Fifteenth Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) illustrate how digital infrastructures sustain and deepen new configurations of power, including racially differentiated modes of internal control. While these formations take heterogeneous institutional forms, their underlying logic reveals a persistent attraction to totalising modes of population management—what may be conceptualised as an enduring Tianxia ambition as discussed in Tianxia and Its Discontents (Liu 2026): a mode of power that organises space, hierarchy, and subjectivity while concealing domination through the language of moral inclusion.