Abstract: In premodern China, as in our contemporary world, the emotions were a topic of enduring philosophical concern, representing a major battleground in which competing accounts of the good life and of the proper ordering of the world were played out. My paper examines how emotions were theorized during one of the most transformative periods of political and cultural development in China – that of the rise and consolidation of empire in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE – in two ambitious, encyclopaedic works of political strategy, the Lüshi Chunqiu 呂氏春秋 (c. 239 BCE) and the Huainanzi 淮南子(c. 139 BCE). Tracing key developments in the conceptualisation of the all-important term qing, as well as in the discourse surrounding love and desire, my paper shows how the distinct ways of mapping and construing emotions in these texts, and their corresponding visions of cosmic resonance, reveal a complex, contentious history involving high-stakes ethical and political debates about the sources of order and unity in human life, as well as about the locus of agency, power and control.
