At nightfall on 20 May [1947], I had just left the site where we maintained our radio communications equipment and was on my way home when two comrades suddenly appeared and seized me as I passed the entrance to this building. They said: ‘You walk past here every day. Today we would like you to come in for a chat.’ Since we were close to a sentry point and they had already seized me, resistance seemed pointless, so I entered the building with them. By coincidence, our equipment had malfunctioned that day and I had not been able to send or receive any messages, so when they frisked me, they did not find any incriminating papers on me. I was then taken to another room and told to wait. The sudden and unforeseen turn of events had made me panic and tremble, and my heart beat like mad, but I now got a moment’s respite and did my best to calm down. Worrying whether the terror I felt would be obvious, I sought to compose myself. I also thought about how best to deal with the impending interrogation.

When he was arrested by the Harbin Public Security Bureau in December 1949, Yang X was thirty-one years old and working as a teacher in one of the most prestigious middle schools in the city. A former member of the Guomindang intelligence and security services, the Juntong, he no longer maintained any active links to the organisation that in 1946 had become the Republic of China’s Ministry of National Defence Protection of Secrets Bureau, but he remained in touch privately with some of his old colleagues. While he was in police custody, officers from the Political Protection Division developed a profile of him and, after just over half a year, they concluded that he would be amenable to an attempt to be recruited as an agent. Below is the handwritten memorandum deposited in Yang’s Agent Personal File that documents the hands-on advice his rookie recruiter took from a final pre-recruitment pep talk by a senior officer on how to conduct the all-important elicitation talk with Yang.

I will refrain from raising things I have already discussed on numerous occasions, but I want to further clarify a matter that has to do with agents.

In the past, we used to think of the term ‘agent’ as designating only (or mainly) turned elements from the antagonistic classes. It was not all-inclusive. We knew from firsthand operational experience that, in actual struggle, agents constituted covert assets employable in routine surveillance as well as in case-related operational activity. While we now allow ourselves to continue to recruit such assets from among the elements of the antagonistic classes, we should also, in the same way, proceed to recruit them from among the masses and the activists – or even from among Communist Party and Youth League members – as long as they possess the necessary qualifications. To assume that our agents may only be recruited from among the elements of the antagonistic classes, not from among our own base of masses and activists, or to maintain that only individuals from the antagonistic classes serving operational needs may be spoken of as agents (while individuals recruited from among our own base of masses and activists serving operational needs may not) is to have an incomplete understanding.

In November 1972, in the course of talking about public security and protection work, Premier Zhou issued important directives on reactivating and developing informants. Below are his key points (wording not checked by the Premier):

The Premier said the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution resulted in an ideological mobilisation and a mobilisation of the masses. The major weakness in our work now is that we are no longer sufficiently in touch with what is happening in society. The first issue that must be resolved is in the public security sector, where informants must be reactivated and results must be achieved before the end of this year. Our contacts among foreign expatriates, for example, were in some respects quite useful.

According to Dazai Shundai, the Way of the ancient Chinese sage kings was established for the purpose of practicing political economy. The methods of the sages can be found in the Six Classics of ancient China, but this is not to say that the government of the sages should be practiced in its entirety in the present with no changes, as their methods must be adapted in response to present-day circumstances. Political economy requires an understanding of the “times” that one lives in, the regularities in things represented by “principle,” the “force” that can temporarily overcome this principle, and the “human feelings” of the people of the realm. A key aspect of the “times” of Tokugawa Japan is its decentralized feudal system of government, which resembles the feudalism of China during the time of the sages. This is in contrast to the centralized system of government that arose later in Chinese history and that was also used in Japan before the rise of military rule.

How should we proceed in merging what [in Shenyang’s economic protection sector] are currently agents, informants, and confidential guardians and in designating all of them agents?

The creation of a single uniform designation calls for identifying the specific utility of each agent, carrying out individual validations, and deciding on the level at which the agent is to be run. (Note: below, informants and confidential guardians are all referred to as agents.) Agents about whom we already have a pretty good idea are to be examined in detail; agents about whom we still really do not have a good idea must be scrutinised in depth and exhaustively, and their recent records as well as their documented pasts must be appraised repeatedly. In the end, we must produce conclusive validation reviews to determine our decisions about whether to retain or to terminate.

According to Dazai Shundai, systems of bureaucratic offices will inevitably change over time and must be suited to the circumstances of the present, but in establishing these, it is important to look back to the models of the ancient Chinese sage kings. In earlier times, Japan emulated these systems of bureaucratic offices from China, but even then Japan departed from the Chinese model by making offices hereditary. Since the advent of military rule in Japan, the situation has only worsened, with simplified military regulations taking the place of a proper system of offices.

This chapter turns to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Swahili coast narratives, focusing on his novel Desertion (2005), which tells stories about interracial intimacies between Indian, Swahili, and European characters across multiple generations in colonial and postcolonial periods. In the nineteenth century, colonial debates on Indian emigration to Africa insisted on a clear racial separation between “native” Africans and Indian “settlers.” Late twentieth-century East African nationalist discourses reproduced this racialized indigeneity as national identity. Gurnah’s critique of this racial nationalism lies in the novel’s experimental aesthetics, which involve perspectival storytelling, nested stories, and inclusion of multiple genres. The novel’s layered narration gives expression to abject, repressed Indian Ocean intimacies, reconfiguring colonial models of racial encounter as part of the longer history of migration and exchange in Indian Ocean. The melancholic return of Indian Ocean affiliations troubles both the racial-dystopic conception of nationhood in postcolonial East Africa and the utopic imagining of a multiracial community of the past or future.

According to Dazai Shundai, the original purpose of Confucian teachings is to aid in governing the state, but Confucians since the Song dynasty have lost sight of this goal, focusing instead on cultivating the individual heart. The same misunderstanding of Confucian teachings has appeared in Japan as well, so the aim of the current work is to restore Confucianism to its proper role in Japan as a set of techniques for government.

According to Dazai Shundai, regulations governing people’s dress and their ceremonial guards and retinues are a way to visibly display distinctions in status, but appropriate systems for these are lacking in Tokugawa Japan. The military is a necessary complement to the civil in governing, but the samurai of Tokugawa Japan, who have lived in cities for several generations while receiving hereditary stipends, have lost the qualities of true warriors and would be of little use in an actual battle. To remedy this, samurai should be required to train in the martial arts.

During much of the Cold War, HUMINT capacity building did not have to survive public scrutiny. In order to be positively assessed by national governments, behind closed doors, its end product had to satisfy no more than a single requirement. What the Swedish security agency chief cited earlier called the ‘spirit of the times’ prevented agencies from making that requirement explicit: only in works of fiction could it be acknowledged that in intelligence and national security, an operation was a good one as long as it ‘satisfied the only requirement of our profession: it worked’. On no side of the iron and bamboo curtains in the real world did additional requirements – party political, statutory legal, ethical, religious, and so on – ever acquire more than secondary status. As motifically encoded in Part II above, capacity building entailed a diachronic process of identification, endorsement, and promotion of agent running tradecraft aimed squarely at increasing the advance odds that HUMINT ‘worked’. In Part III below, the synchronic structure of corresponding relationships that ensued has been motifically encoded as best practice.

This chapter engages with the scholarship of legal academics Upendra Baxi and Ratna Kapur. In conversation with the academics, I read two of their texts: ‘An Open Letter to the Chief Justice of India’ (OL) co-authored by Baxi and his colleagues Vasudha Dhagamwar, Raghunath Kelkar and Lotika Sarkar; and Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law in India (SS) co-authored by Kapur and her friend and colleague Brenda Cossman. I look at how, while addressing questions of gender, class and caste, the formation of the OL inhabited conversations between Baxi, his colleagues, a judge, and a tribal girl named Mathura, drawing on whose experiences the letter was written, in late-1970s post-Emergency India. I draw out from these conversations how Baxi shaped his role and responsibility in public life as a feminist law teacher and how, in doing so, he shaped mutual ties with his academic discipline of law. I locate my reading of Subversive Sites in the context of the legal academia from where Kapur and her co-author, Brenda Cossman, conceived the ideas and practices that informed the writing of their book. SS inhabited Kapur’s conversations in the early 1990s after the economic liberalisation of India, with her friend and colleague Cossman and the Indian women’s movement. Through these conversations, Kapur shaped her role and responsibility in public life as a post-colonial feminist legal scholar, and in doing so, formed mutual relations with her academic discipline of law.