This chapter tracks the importance and resilience of CPC ideology by examining the development of Mao Zedong Thought from his early Communist writings (1927–1940) through to Yan’an Rectification (1942–1945) and then during his reign as Supreme Leader (1949–1976). It then explores Mao Zedong Thought’s importance for the CPC today. CPC leaders since Mao’s death have invoked, and continue to invoke, Mao Zedong Thought for legitimation and to exhibit continuity despite shifts away from the ideology and practice of the Mao era. Mao Zedong Thought thus fulfills a legitimative need rather than a social one; CPC leaders must acknowledge, and often reference, Mao Zedong Thought to project continuity even if the ruptures since Mao’s death have resulted in an un-Maoist Party-state.

Judge Frank Easterbrook once argued that rather than establish narrowly defined areas of legal research, scholars should stick to the study of general rules, which can be applied to any number of subject areas. The specific target in Judge Easterbrook’s crosshairs was cyberlaw, which was ascendant in the 1990s. His argument, and the metaphor within, is worth quoting at length: Lots of cases deal with sales of horses; others deal with people kicked by horses; still more deal with the licensing and racing of horses, or with the care veterinarians give to horses, or with prizes at horse shows. Any effort to collect these strands into a course on “The Law of the Horse” is doomed to be shallow and to miss unifying principles. Teaching 100 percent of the cases on people kicked by horses will not convey the law of torts very well. Far better for most students – better, even, for those who plan to go into the horse trade – to take courses in property, torts, commercial transactions, and the like, adding to the diet of horse cases a smattering of transactions in cucumbers, cats, coal, and cribs. Only by putting the law of the horse in the context of broader rules about commercial endeavors could one really understand the law about horses.

The period 1966–1976 saw the rise and fall of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, China witnessed its third wave of decentralized industrialization and the fiercest protests of temporary workers of the Mao era. This chapter starts by providing an overview of the political, economic, and international circumstances of this decade. It then looks at how workers in different positions in the urban exclusion system, particularly precarious workers, protested to improve their conditions, and how these protests were quashed by the government. This is followed by an examination of how gains won from temporary workers’ protests – most importantly, the largest-scale regularization in the Mao era – were carried out in 1971 and 1972, and why temporary employment rebounded thereafter.

Inter-Asian Law is starkly absent from constitutional accounts of reproductive rights in Asia. Instead, Asian jurisdictions tend to draw from the Global North, with the United States Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade occupying norm status. To explicate the potential of Inter-Asian Law in transforming reproductive rights, an act of imagination is required, suspending Roe as the central comparative frame and introducing alternate, hypothetical referents from Asia. This chapter conducts this task at two stages. First, it develops imagination as a method of comparative constitutional law. Second, applying the imaginative method, it hypothesizes what reproductive rights might look like if Nepal served as a referent for India and India as a referent for Bangladesh. In documenting explicit shifts in the constitutional construction of these rights, the chapter cements the place of Inter-Asian Law.

This chapter explores the emergence of Inter-Asian Law (IAL) through the lens of multilayered investment agreements. It argues that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-centered regime has driven the normative evolution of IAL, which has diverged from Western approaches rooted in the Washington Consensus. The study examines how Asian countries are developing their own legal models, reducing dependence on American and European rules, and strengthening Asia’s influence in shaping international law. Focusing on investment law, the chapter highlights the pragmatic incrementalism of ASEAN and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in legal approaches. It analyzes the development of investment issues across three waves of global regionalism, as well as the evolving investment frameworks of the Asia-Pacific. Hence, the research demonstrates how IAL reflects Asian approaches to global governance and offers alternatives to conventional Western-dominated models for developing countries.

The counter-movement against commodification in the 1930s and 1940s reached a milestone on 1 October 1949 when Mao Zedong announced the founding of the People’s Republic of China. This chapter begins by outlining the fundamentals of the regime of marginal labour precarity in the Mao era, which took shape between 1949 and 1956 out of the ashes of the Republican era and remained in effect throughout the Mao era. It then narrows the focus to the period between 1949 and 1957. During this period, boundaries among labouring people took shape and were redrawn by swings in the industrialization path between centralization and decentralization, and in labour policy from promoting permanent employment to constraining its expansion and then to promoting the labour contract system.

Much of the book’s narrative is dedicated to trace the complex interactions between China and Europe since the sixteenth century, but how did these interactions affect Chinese cartographers and Chinese cartographic practice? The focus of this chapter moves to the perspective of Chinese cartographers, their attitudes and uses of world maps, as well as hybrid world maps created using Western techniques and Chinese elements. The chapter demonstrates that Sino-Western world maps prompted different responses, ranging from rejection to enthusiasm and adoption. Chinese cartographers incorporated elements from these maps, cited them in their own work. Beginning with the Qianlong period of the Qing, cartographers started working with Western cartographic techniques in producing new types of maps.