The Epilogue explores the transformative impact of cartographic exchanges between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book adopted a "diving bell" approach to uncover the deep connections between Chinese and Western cartographic traditions, arguing that translation played a crucial role in shaping world geography. These exchanges led to hybrid maps and a global Renaissance, illustrating that knowledge was shared reciprocally. The chapter underscores the diverse motivations behind map translations, from territorial disputes to identity construction, and how these interactions influenced the perception of China and the West. Ultimately, the book reveals how these exchanges contributed to the modern world map and the global perspective we share today.

A key challenge for the party since 1949 has been to forge a new Chinese nation within the boundaries of a vast, ethnically heterogeneous former empire. The party has experimented with a variety of policies and mechanisms for securing the loyalty and obedience of non-Han groups, shifting between accommodative and assimilative approaches depending on the broader political climate at any given time. Frustrated by continued ethnic unrest, which the party sees as a threat to social stability and its political legitimacy, the party has, in recent years, sought to fortify the unity of the nationalities via increasingly coercive administrative and technological measures. This chapter examines the coercive measures implemented by the CPC to guide and control China’s minority nationalities. These include controls over religion, language, traditional practices, minority nationality regions, and minority nationalities who ventured to other parts of China. The controls are designed to prevent ethnic protest and to forge a common Chinese ethnic identity that subsumes all other ethnic identities and which is united by loyalty to the party-state.

The employer provided everything – wages, housing, post office, parks, canteens. Such a model of the “company town,” where a single corporation dominates in multiple capacities as employer, landlord, service provider, and quasi-regulator over a dwelling area, has endured across borders and time. The term can portray textile mills in eighteenth-century England or coal and steel towns in early twentieth-century America just as fittingly as it does today’s network of “supply chain cities” that span East and Southeast Asia and beyond. This chapter studies Inter-Asia’s supply chain cities – in particular, manufacturing sites in East and Southeast Asia. More than physical spaces, these sites represent a form of legal entrepôt, created by law and capable of shaping laws and norms through diverse pathways, including regulatory fragmentation and coordinated advocacy. In comparison with another gilded-age moment of industrial development – early twentieth-century United States – these modern company towns exemplify the uniqueness of Inter-Asia’s corporate forms, exercise of power, and regional integration.

This chapter examines the introduction of new lay participation systems in Asian countries. Focusing on Russia, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, I explore the social and political contexts and goals of the policymakers that motivated the incorporation of citizen decision-making into the legal systems of these countries. In each of the four countries, the adoption of new systems of lay participation occurred during periods of political democratization. Those who argued in favor of citizen involvement hoped that it would promote democratic self-governance, create more robust connections between the citizenry and the government, and improve public confidence in the courts. Policymakers drew on the experiences of other countries, including other Asian nations, to develop a distinctive model that incorporated some features of lay participation systems elsewhere, and modified them to suit the specific circumstances of their own countries.

This chapter analyzes how social policy in China has contributed to the well-being of the middle class and their trust of the government. The author argues that if we examine not just China’s earlier reform period (1978–2003) and the fast-growing era (2003–2012), but also the sharp Left Turn in recent years (2012–present), it is hard to fit China’s social policy into the theories of productivism or developmental welfare state that are often associated with the East Asian countries. China’s welfare system is an instrumentalist model which is centered on maintaining the leadership of the Communist Party of China. With this in mind, social policies have been actively used in the past few years to support two mutually independent but intersecting intermediate goals: maintaining economic development and social stability. Both are vital to the party’s authority.

Between 1499 and 1502, Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci surveyed unknown lands across the Atlantic, sparking European interest in new territories. His letters, describing a gigantic island, reached cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, who named the landmass "America" on a 1507 map. This story highlights the power of early modern maps to create realities through naming and representation. The Introduction to Connected Cartographies contrasts this model of discovery with the understanding of China, which was not "discovered" in the same way. Instead, knowledge about China emerged through cross-cultural cartographic exchanges, involving translations and synthesis of Chinese and European maps. These exchanges began in the late sixteenth century and continued into the nineteenth century. This process resulted in translated maps that combined features from both traditions, challenging the traditional narrative of exploration and emphasizing the importance of translation in shaping global geography.

With the invasion and conquest of Beijing by the Manchus the very same barbarians that the wall was meant to keep out, the limitations of the Ming state were superseded. Now the Manchu founded Qing dynasty sought new ways to understand where to draw the borders of their state to the North and West.The chapter covers the back and forth in cartographic translation between China and Europe during the eighteenth century, from the Kangxi era to the end of the Qianlong reign. This back and forth, it is argued, led to the creation of the Qing geo-body and the idea of the borders of China. The chapter shows that a notion of China’s borders first appeared as a result of cartographic exchanges between China and Europe.

The new nationalism of the Xi Jinping era, which has brought together political nationalism and cultural nationalism – two largely opposing streams between 1919 and 1989 – has redefined the CPC and the PRC. On paper, the party is a class organization while the PRC is a class dictatorship that sanctions class sovereignty rather than popular sovereignty. Since 2001, the party has been represented as a national party as well as a class organization. Representing the nation entails the promotion of national culture, and a major component of the Chinese Dream is cultural revival. Consequently, the CPC and the PRC are nationalized in a shift from Marxist classism to synthesized Chinese nationalism. Their class identities appear to be at odds with their national identities, but the tension is minimized as the party turns Marxism into an empty signifier and sinicizes it out of existence.

How does law travel in Inter-Asia? This chapter focuses on traveling law as an empirical event and does so to reflect on prevailing theories in comparative law that explain how law moves from one jurisdiction to another. The dominant paradigm in comparative law for traveling law is legal transplants, a concept that has generated a sprawling literature. The point of this chapter is not to say that Inter-Asia is aberrational regarding legal transplants; instead, the perspective is to use the Inter-Asian Law material, and specifically the fraught movements of Chinese law in Inter-Asia, to critically reflect on comparative law conventions. Whereas Inter-Asia is embedded within global trade and migration routes, it has also been populated by outsiders – pirates or jihadis – whose participation within those circuits creates contrast and distance, elements that are prerequisites to critical reflection. Chinese law may also be such an outsider that permits reflecting on taken-for-granted paths.

Focusing approximately on the period 1584–1610, this chapter addresses the contrasting question of the translation of European world maps in China. The chapter argues that the creation of Matteo Ricci’s world map, which was based on European and Chinese sources with text in Chinese characters and the use of Chinese printing methods and materials, was motivated by the need to create a new identity for Europeans in China; Matteo Ricci’s world map created “The Great West” as a geographical and cultural category. The chapter also explores the intricacies of cartographic translation and the back and forths between China and Europe, covering the activities of Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Neroni

How has the CPC maintained its organizational strength over time, especially during the period of economic reform? This chapter argues that the several important measures taken since the 1990s have reinforced the party as a strong organization. The personnel management reform since the 1990s has standardized the elite recruitment and provided a relatively fair channel of social mobility within the regime. The CPC has monopolized both the allocation of critical economic resources and appointments of key political, economic, and other societal offices through the Nomenklatura system, so that the party can distribute spoils of China’s economic growths to its key members and supporters in exchange of their loyalty. Since the beginning of Xi’s rule in 2012, the party has expanded the anticorruption and disciplinary body, committed more resources to campaigns of ideological indoctrination, increased the party’s involvement in daily policymaking and the private sector, and diversified channels of elite recruitment. These measures appear to have reinforced the party’s organizational capacity, but their long-term effects are yet to be assessed.