This chapter first sets the scene by depicting the persistence of labour precarity in China in the past century. Second, it juxtaposes such persistence with Marxism and the modernization theory to raise the research question and introduce the two debates with which this book engages. Third, this chapter reviews the previous scholarship, based on which it defines key concepts and proposes an analytical framework. Fourth, it explains the research strategy of this book and the periodization method. It concludes by outlining this book.

The key question posed by this volume’s Introduction is: What happens when Western law is no longer the default referent for legal modernity? This question has implications for such fields as comparative law, international law, and law and technology. “Inter-Asian Law” points to an emerging field of comparative and international law that explores the legal interactions – historical and contemporary – between and among Asian jurisdictions. These interactions – through diverse actors, intermediaries, processes, and methods – may lead to several important formations including legal transplantation, law and development, multilateralism and trade blocks, global value chains, transnational orders, judicial networks, legal educational exchange, and digital integration, to name a few. After providing definitions for core terms, the Introduction provides an analytical framework that guides the subsequent chapters including types and methods of interactions, actors and intermediaries, and effects, consequences, and conflicts. A description of the organization of the book follows.

Why were Chinese world maps translated in early modern Europe? This chapter answers this question by focusing on the story of the 1584 map of China, Chinae, olim Sinarum Regio nova descriptio by Abraham Ortelius. This was the first popular and widely disseminated map of China and it was based on a translation from Chinese sources. In discussing this map, the chapter will cover the period between 1550 and 1584. It will argue that the European cartographic interest in China was motivated by the rivalry between Spain and Portugal around the controversy about a line stretching from pole to pole demarcating their territories in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

The 1958–1965 period witnessed the rise and fall of the Great Leap Forward. During this period, China saw the second and most radical switch between decentralized and recentralized industrialization in the Mao era, and a further swing in labour policy towards promoting temporary employment. This chapter begins by presenting an overview of the economic and political circumstances of this period. It then examines how the rise and fall of the Great Leap Forward, combined with the shift in labour policy, dramatically redrew the exclusion system, thus affecting the scale and conditions of those in precarious urban employment.

Various cities across the world have been engaging in smart city projects, seeking effective solutions to various urban issues (such as traffic, waste, and housing) as well as global issues (energy, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic). This chapter explores Asian models of smart cities by analyzing how Japan and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are engaging in smart city projects. In particular, this chapter highlights the role of Japan in shaping the ideas and norms of smart cities by exporting smart solutions. Exporting the ideas of smart cities can eventually affect urban governance, including legal infrastructures. This chapter also looks at China’s smart city model, associated with large-scale overseas capacity building, as a rival of Japan. Several methods of interaction exist via exporting smart solutions, including development cooperation, diffusion of ideas, and regulatory competition, and this chapter examines strategic differences among countries engaging in Asian smart city projects.

Chinese and European maps displayed divergent and sometimes overlapping mathematical, visual and functional aspects. European maps continued the tradition of Ptolemy, applying the mathematics of heavenly bodies to the Earth’s surface. Each point on Earth was made to correspond with an overlapped grid of latitude and longitude coordinates. In China, while the idea of a spherical Earth and the notions of latitude and longitude (the warp and the wheft) were used in astronomy and astrology, cartographers operated with different notions. Chinese maps assumed the Earth to be square and flat, covered by the canopy of heaven. Respecting certain principles of cartographic drawing, maps ensured accuracy by overlaying a grid specifying distances between points.

The contemporary expansion of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in Asia has been unparalleled in the world. While London and other traditional forums remain a vital jurisdiction for Asian parties, those constructing ADR regimes in Asian jurisdictions increasingly turn to their neighbors – other Asian jurisdictions. This chapter analyzes the interactions between the prominent ADR hubs in Asia and their neighboring jurisdictions. Topics include the race between Singapore and Hong Kong for the crown, Singapore’s impact on Vietnam, and the implications of Singaporean promotion of mediation on the practice of ADR in Asia. The chapter argues that ADR centers, viewed from the perspective of legal transplantation, provide successful models for secondary markets, although such transplantation is far from seamless. This chapter suggests that Singapore and Hong Kong, as established hubs, will remain influential and play a critical role in shaping ADR legal developments in Asia, although competition may result in disparate effects.

How should we measure the time of a Maoist campaign? What is the legacy for its authors and for China today? This concluding chapter reviews the major themes of the book. It also explores the tensions between linear and circular conceptions of time, how they shaped the Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist campaigns, and what this watershed period in modern Chinese history can tell us about the agency of the writer in contemporary China and the role of literary circulation in the perpetual reimagining and rewriting of the Chinese state.

Can individual writers change the national climate? Following Mao’s comments on the “poetry case,” Liu Shahe and Shi Tianhe took divergent paths in dealing with the local literary establishment and finally with the shift from Hundred Flowers to Anti-Rightist campaign. Their strategies in response to the unfolding campaigns reveal that the year 1957 marked a critical transformation in the way Chinese writers perceived the relationship between their own use of language and the social reality of which, and into which, they wrote. The “poetry case” also taught Mao and the Party leadership that a liberal policy toward literary production and loosened censorship did spur creativity but fostered the growth of linguistic and social networks that they could neither mediate nor compete with in kind.