The Coda foregrounds the literary implications of the book’s argument by reflecting on the idea of the Indian Ocean as a comparative literary space. Through an example from Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea (2019), it illustrates a comparative practice wherein the historical, the geopolitical, and the literary come together. The mutual imbrication of the geopolitical and the literary in contemporary Afro-Asian fiction generates the Indian Ocean as a space of comparison where historical relationalities become legible within the exigencies of the present.

This chapter considers the afterlives of slavery in the Indian Ocean through Mauritian writer Shenaz Patel’s Le silence des Chagos (2005), about the expulsion of the inhabitants of the Chagos archipelago from their islands in the wake of late twentieth-century Indian Ocean militarization. Images and narratives circulating in the global media often portray the suffering of Chagossians as a human rights violation, abstracting the event from the particular legacies of slavery, colonialism, and anti-Blackness that continue to weigh on the displaced community. By contrast, Le silence des Chagos tells the story of their expulsion by adapting Chagossians’ testimonies into a novelistic form. Patel’s testimonial fiction constructs a repository of images that enables a sensory and subjective experience of the past. As a composite of these images, the exilic consciousness uncovers Chagossians’ most recent experiences of exile as an extension of the racialized violence in the past. The novel remaps the Indian Ocean enabling a position to critique geopolitical networks of power in the region and identify convergences with Black diasporic accounts of Atlantic crossings.

The First World War generated multiple state and non-state humanitarian replies, encompassing not only material and financial donations, but also different forms of voluntary work. In colonial India, one of these relief activities was the formation and working of the ambulance corps. Staffed with (Indian) volunteers, the corps assisted wounded and sick soldiers of the British Indian Army in Great Britain, Mesopotamia and India. Corps members worked closely with, or as part of, the military. Their duties not only included the transportation of war victims but also comprised other tasks, such as nursing them, dressing their wounds, providing medical care as doctors, and interpreting and cooking for them. The male volunteers came from all over India, and depending on the nature of the corps, their religious, caste, educational and class backgrounds varied substantially.

Sources suggest that at least four Indian volunteer ambulance initiatives existed: the Indian Field Ambulance Training Corps (IFATC), the Indian Branch of the St. John Ambulance Association (ISJAA), the Bengal Ambulance Corps (BAC) and the Benares Ambulance Transport Corps. In Chapter 1 we have already read about the work of the ISJAA. This chapter sets out to analyse the Indian Field Ambulance Training Corps. Established in Britain in autumn 1914, the unit was, as far as I know, the only relief initiative organised by colonial subjects back in the metropole during the war. This does not mean that it was the only humanitarian endeavour organised by non-Westerners.

Analysing fascism in India has been rather unnecessarily polarized, both by Marxist approaches overemphasizing economic causality and by non-Marxist approaches overemphasizing ideology, politics, organizational aspects, and social psychology.1 This difference is important in the historical condition and context in which an analysis of the current regime in India is being made. Whereas Antonio Gramsci defined fascism on an international scale as ‘an attempt to resolve problems of production and exchange with machine-guns and pistol shots’, in India, the rise of an authoritarian regime with fascist tendencies is certainly not a result of the nation being caught up in an international war. It could be more significant to examine the social reality that lends consent to the authoritarian model of politics and governance and how the forms in which it surfaces exhibit fascist tendencies (Gramsci 1984).2 The fascist regimes during the Second World War were different from the post-war ones, specifically with reference to the experience of developing nations like India. In this context, the distinction between fascist movements and fascist regimes is important, and there seems to have been a right-wing extremist movement pushing for the rise of a regime in India (Dimitrov 1984; Reich 1980; Koves and Mazumdar 2005). If Narendra Modi's regime cannot be characterized as a fascist regime, it certainly has been an authoritarian one with fascist tendencies, and what needs to be explained is how such a regime manages to manufacture popular consent.

Xi Jinping’s drive for power has destabilized elite political consensus and dismantled power-sharing norms that evolved since the 1980s. By removing de jure term limits on the office of the presidency – and thus far refusing to nominate his successor for this and his other leadership positions – Xi has solidified his own authority at the expense of the regular and peaceful transfer of power. In doing so, he has pushed China towards a potential destabilizing succession crisis. This chapter assesses China’s possible leadership succession scenarios in the coming years. Is Xi akin to Stalin after the purges of the 1930s – a leader who has so thoroughly eliminated rivals and cowed the system that he will remain in power until he can no longer perform the duties of office, leaving a succession battle in his wake? Or will the system produce a reaction against his all-encompassing power, either forcing him out of office prematurely or at least pushing him to set a timetable for his departure? Alternatively, what are Xi’s options for presiding over an orderly succession in the next 5 to 10 years? Solving the succession problem will be critical for the party’s future survival.

This concluding chapter first summarizes the main findings of this book, based on which it discusses the continuities and discontinuities in the transformation of labour precarity before and after 1949 and in the Mao era and after. It then engages with the paradoxes and debates introduced in Chapter 1 and discusses this book’s implications for labour movements and policy. Next, this chapter compares labour precarity in China with that in socialist and transitional economies and in traditional advanced capitalist economies after the Second World War to depict global trends in this regard. This chapter concludes by revealing the limitations of this book, and putting forward speculations for future changes in labour precarity and suggestions for future research about precarious labour in China.

The CPC presides over a large state-owned economy, which is a key pillar of China’s state capitalist model and a critical source of Party power. The party has adapted its governing strategies of the state-owned sector to maintain its economic dominance without stifling growth and innovation – largely by learning from outside. We highlight the importance of the international system as a source of both policy inputs and pressures to change. We find that in the early phases of China’s marketization process during the 1980s, Chinese policymakers looked to Japan and the World Bank as they restructured state-owned enterprises. In the 1990s, American, European, and Japanese policymakers’ pressure on China to downsize its state sector as a condition of WTO accession was a key consideration in Chinese policymakers’ efforts to build “national champions” capable of competing with foreign multinationals in domestic and international markets. We analyze Chinese leaders’ responses to successive challenges in the state-owned economy, and the resilience of state capitalism which buttresses party rule.

On December 6, 2023, the Indonesian Parliament passed Indonesia’s Criminal Code. The new Criminal Code replaces the Dutch-language colonial-era Penal Code and after fifty years of debate marks a milestone in Indonesian law. However, the new Code is controversial. It continues to criminalize interpersonal relations such as adultery and cohabitation. The framing of those offences is an accommodation of conflicting preferences among a wide range of domestic and international actors including those from the Islamic world, notably Saudi Arabia. This chapter examines the new Code as an arena of contestation, among inter-regional influences and between secular and religious actors seeking to shape Indonesian state law. It highlights three under-studied phenomena in Asia: inter-regional religious networks; their intersection with colonial legal legacies; and the migration of legal values, not only geographically or jurisdictionally, but also across internal domains within pluralist legal systems.

From Marxist revolution and the rejection of Chinese cultural tradition through market reforms and the embrace of Chinese cultural traditions, the party has repeatedly reinvented itself and maintained its monopoly of political power. Four decades after it abandoned communes and centrally planned economics, the party now sits atop a system of state capitalism and steers the world’s second largest economy. Confident in its success, the party now promises it will lead the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation – the restoration of China to advanced economy and great power status. This chapter reviews the multiple sources of the party’s strength and resilience in the second decade of the twenty-first century. It argues that the party’s strength lies in its adaptiveness and inventiveness across three dimensions: ideology, organization, and public policymaking. In doing so, the chapter provides a conceptual framework for the book and a launchpad for subsequent chapters which examine the multiple sources of CPC strength in greater depth.

This chapter explores how judicial mechanisms employed by apex courts have migrated across South Asia and Southeast Asia, using India, Pakistan, and Malaysia as examples. The chapter focuses on two case studies – Pakistan and Malaysia – to examine how judicial mechanisms, like the basic structure doctrine articulated by the Indian Supreme Court, have been strategically adapted by courts in Pakistan and Malaysia to strengthen their institutional power. This chapter considers the use of judicial rhetoric and constitutional comparativism in crafting opinions of popular salience by examining the distinct ways in which these Asian courts have engaged with foreign and comparative case law.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the rise of illiberal democracy and authoritarianism globally, granting governments unchecked power. In contrast, Asian jurisdictions like Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore have resisted this trend. This chapter investigates the respective constitutional foundations, jurisprudential developments, and democratic processes in Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore that enabled the varying degrees of resistance against the rise of illiberal and authoritarian governance during the pandemic. For example, in Taiwan and South Korea, democratic competition continued unabated during the pandemic, and rights assertions by affected individuals and human rights groups became stronger. In Singapore, albeit usually seen as an authoritarian constitutional polity, the government proactively sought community engagement and social support for undertaking pandemic measures, which were surprisingly less restrictive and more transparent. Moreover, nongovernmental organizations and courts provided counterbalancing forces, ensuring accountability, civic participation, and due process. These experiences show that tensions between the rule of law, human rights, and crises such as COVID-19 can still be mitigated democratically.