In conversations with sex workers and members of VAMP, this chapter engages in the reading of activist texts published by VAMP. The reading and conversations about the texts are located at VAMP’s collective organisational site in Sangli, Maharashtra. Like DMSC, VAMP also emerged through a specific set of conversations between sex workers and others. These conversations were held amongst sex workers, a non–sex worker women’s organisation called Sangram, Dalit and non-Dalit feminist groups in Maharashtra, and Dalit and non-Dalit men’s groups in Sangli. The conversations consolidated women’s collectivisation in Sangli as businesswomen, or dhandhewali, which was achieved through the formation of mutual relations between sex workers’ lives and law. Thus, the sex workers formed VAMP as a registered NGO under state-authorised rules. Through the process of registration, the women shaped their role and responsibility in public life as dhandhewali, and reorganised their specific hierarchical relations of gender, class and caste in Sangli. Simultaneously, sex workers’ relationship with the state, mediated by the reorganisation of hierarchies in their community, attained a form that was distinct from their state-authorised criminal status and conditions.

Chapter 3 investigates the reasons why many Chinese companies have decided to seek cross-border listings in the past three decades. It examines a variety of relevant theories, such as legal bonding, private benefits and market fragmentation and evaluates the extent to which they may apply to the case of Chinese companies. The overseas listing of Chinese companies offers a good case study due to the apparent disparity between China’s regulatory regime and those in the listing places. However, existing empirical research shows ambiguous or, at best, weak effects of legal bonding. This calls for a closer examination of how to interpret these empirical results and why the legal bonding effect is not as strong as expected.

In the two memoranda below, HUMINT component chiefs addressing their immediate superiors request endorsement of particular courses of action proposed by their case officers. The courses of action are to further missions already known at the superordinate division level. In the first memorandum, the head of the First Section of the Political Protection Division of the Harbin Public Security Bureau is given permission to proceed with arrangements for an intimate dinner party to be hosted by a case officer’s agents (one male, aged forty, and one female, aged thirty-three, married and operated by him as a pair) for two targets (a Chinese chemist and his Japanese wife) in order to proactively ‘increase the intimacy of the relationship’ between the two couples and, in this way, to ‘create conditions for operational work in greater depth’. In the second memorandum, a course of action of dubious legality proposed by a different head of the same section is ultimately vetoed by a deputy director of the Harbin Public Security Bureau.

This chapter offers a description of the method. Elaborating on the tradition of adda, the chapter explains its significance within post-colonial thought and life in India. It then explains how adda is shaped as a method in the book by drawing on and joining insights from the works of scholars who are located within the disciplines of law and/or the humanities. The chapter provides a detailed description of how diverse scholarly works of post-colonial, feminist and jurisprudential thought are brought together and then enacted as field research for this book.

Chapter 1 is a general introduction to the book. It sets out the research context, key research questions, research methodologies and other relevant information about the book. This sets the stage for the discussion of substantive topics in the following chapters.

While their class natures (class essences) are fundamentally different, our agent work and the tewu work of capitalist countries differ in other principal respects as well, such as agent tactics. The roles of our security agencies differ from those of the security agencies of capitalism. While the purpose of operational activity in capitalist countries is to protect the interests of capitalism and consolidate capitalist rule (and for that purpose to employ all available means to suppress progressive figures, workers, labouring people, revolutionary elements, and all progressive organisations), the purpose in our case is to suppress all counter-revolutionary elements, protect the interests of the people, and consolidate the People’s Democracy. Our agent work, in other words, has a different essence with respect to its operational aims and tactics.

This chapter examines the applicability of the term “cosmopolitanism” to Indian Ocean contexts through the question of language, asking: How does one represent a multilingual past using the medium of historical fiction? It examines the use of multilingualism and translation in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (1994), novels that draw on multilingual nineteenth-century sources to tell stories of cross-cultural encounters in the Indian Ocean. These novels use various textual strategies, such as direct inscription of multiple languages or indirect description of linguistic difference, to portray a multilingual Indian Ocean encounters. Closely examining these textual moments alongside the novels’ sources reveals the limits of liberal cosmopolitanisms constructed both within and through the texts. They articulate a politics of language that shapes cosmopolitan intercourse in the Indian Ocean, and in doing so, self-reflexively critique the Anglophone text as a medium of cosmopolitan exchange today.

Chapter 9 examines the issue of whether and how foreign civil judgements against overseas-listed Chinese companies will be recognized and enforced in China. As overseas-listed Chinese companies usually have their main assets located in China, it is important that Chinese courts recognize and enforce foreign securities judgments. However, there are many difficulties in this area, which undermines the efficacy of the regulation of cross-border securities transactions. In quest of solutions, this chapter assesses the possibility of suing Chinese companies in the offshore financial centers where they are incorporated, finding that there would be similar issues with judgment enforcement in China. It also examines the viability of using arbitration as an alternative, arguing that arbitration may only supplement, rather than substitute, court litigation for resolving securities disputes.

Due to ideological numbness and carelessness on my part, I committed the error of misremembering the location where I was supposed to be on 17 January and, as a result, I failed to report on my work. The reasons for this error, for which I must criticise myself, are that subjectively I have failed to give sufficient priority to [operational] work, and I have allowed myself to become ideologically numb and careless.

Section chiefs Wang [Zhendong] and Jiang, once you have read and issued your instructions, please present this to the division chief to read and issue his instructions. I agree with the suggestion [of the case officer] to direct the agent to focus on the circumstances of problematic individuals in the Five Antis [Socialist Education] Movement.