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.

Agents constitute an extremely important instrument utilised in operational work and security protection of infrastructure development. To fully bring their utility into play, a system of orderly management must be introduced, agent activity must be properly handled, and work must be prevented from descending into a state of chaos. Based on the Central Ministry of Public Security’s Trial Measures Governing the Management of Agent Files, we have therefore drawn up the following temporary regulations.

Like the previous item, this one (dating from late December 1963) consists of two directly related memoranda documenting operational component chiefs addressing higher echelons. In this case, two HUMINT components located in separate divisions are each asking their division superiors to mediate and resolve a dispute over who actually ‘owns’ the Harbin Public Security Bureau’s prized Agent 151 (Yang X, whose closed Agent Personal File provided the records translated in Part V above) and whose information needs the agent was henceforth to prioritise. History is never irrelevant in disputes like this one and how far back in the past one is able, or chooses, to go in one’s argumentation can often make all the difference when it comes to staking a convincing claim to something in the present.

This chapter attends to the legacies of Indian Ocean migrations in Indian contexts, where nationalist politics also underwent a process of conflating national identity with not just territory, but with women as integral to that territorial sense of nationhood. Specifically, it examines queer desire and the gendered construction of the nation through Mauritian writer Ananda Devi’s novel Indian Tango (2007). Devi rewrites Satyajit Ray’s cinematic adaptation (1984) of Rabindranath Tagore’s influential national allegory Ghare-Bāire (The Home and the World) (1916) from a transnational queer feminist perspective. Examining the novel’s intertextual relationship with Tagore’s text, Ray’s film, and early twentieth century anti-indenture discourses, the chapter argues that Devi reorients feminine desire towards an erotic autonomy that reimagines diasporic affiliation and challenges the control of female sexuality within the heterosexual family as the basis of the nation. The assertion of diasporic connection through female erotic autonomy doubly deconstructs the Indian nationalist subject defined through the exclusion of the diasporic other as well as the queer female other.

In May 1966, Agent 594 had just begun his third year as a HUMINT asset of the Cultural Protection Division of the municipal Public Security Bureau on one of Harbin‘s college campuses. An ambitious teacher in his mid-twenties from a non-proletarian family background and engaged but not yet married, Agent 594 started out hoping his overall career would benefit from serving as an agent, but the head of the Cultural Protection Division had not been particularly impressed and informed the officer who had recruited him that ‘from the looks of it, this guy is willing to do the job, but he has only limited skills’. Agent 594 met his case officer regularly once a month and, on the whole, had very little to report, but suddenly all that changed in early June 1966 when the CCP leadership in Beijing announced that regular teaching had been suspended and students on campuses all over China would be called upon to henceforth concentrate full time on conducting a Great Cultural Revolution.

Chapter 4 examines how contemporary poetry plays with the world and necessarily puts its own relation to the world at risk, thereby making visible the fragility and creative potential of the world. I analyse wordplay, translational strategies and ‘drifting’ trajectories in poems by Hong Kongese Sinophone poet Xi Xi, contemporary French poet Valérie Rouzeau, Japanese-Francophone poet Ryōko Sekiguchi, Taiwanese Sinophone poet Hsia Yü and multilingual poet Caroline Bergvall. What makes these poets comparable, I argue, is their shared concerns about the poet’s relation to the world, about translational and translingual poetics, migratory and dispersive trajectories of language, identity and life. I examine how these poets employ ludic poetic language to incorporate and transform risk. A poetics of risk emerges from poetry’s performance of the precarious conditions of contemporary life and ultimately of poetry itself.

According to Dazai Shundai, the government of the sages uses laws and punishments with reluctance, but these still do play a necessary role. Laws are most effective when they are concise, easy for the people to understand, not frequently changed, and strictly and reliably enforced with appropriate punishments. Tokugawa Japan, however, lacks a proper system of laws.

According to Dazai Shundai, when the government of a country has deteriorated to the point that it can no longer be revived, it is best to follow the “non-action” promoted by Laozi and simply let things run their course. In order to understand the course of events and the times that one lives in, one needs to understand the system of divination represented by the Way of Changes, which shows that all things, including ruling dynasties, go through cycles of flourishing and decay. The non-action of Laozi is not an ideal method for governing, but like other non-Confucian methods of governing, it has its uses in times of crisis. These non-Confucian methods can be compared to medicines, which contain poison but can be used to treat someone who is ill.

Chapter 6 is devoted to the topic of Variable Interest Entity (VIE), which is widely used for overseas listings of Chinese companies. The legality of VIE has long been a subject of intense debate in China due to its alleged circumvention of China’s foreign investment law: The VIE structure allows foreign investors to participate in overseas-listed Chinese companies through contractual control rather than a shareholding relationship, thus bypassing relevant restrictions on foreign investment in China. This chapter argues that China adopts a policy of strategic ambiguity about the legality of the VIE structure, so as to balance the need to protect national security and the need to facilitate overseas listing of Chinese companies. There are institutional reasons behind this policy, including interest group politics of regulatory agencies and the rent-seeking activities of regulatory officials. The policy of strategic ambiguity will likely continue in the foreseeable future, and so will the uncertainty over the legality of the VIE structure.

Focusing on (auto)biographical modes of life-writing and how they engage with risky masquerade, Chapter 2 examines writings of avant-garde French writers Michel Leiris and Antonin Artaud, both dissident French Surrealists who took enormous interest and personal risks in exploring all forms of alterity. The chapter starts with Leiris’s writing on spirit possession in L’Afrique fantôme (1934). Leiris equates autobiography with ‘la tauromachie’ (‘bullfighting’), positing it as a deadly contest between the self as subject and self as object of writing. This notion is repeated and transformed by malleable bodies exemplified by the notorious Roman emperor Heliogabalus in Artaud’s hagiographical text Héliogabale (1934), who demonstrates the plasticity – namely, the capacity for transformation – of masquerade. Read together, Leiris and Artaud establish the masquerader as a recurrent figure in life-writing that generates a potentially infinite chain of mimeses. Through the figure of the masquerader as risk-taker and role-player, which also extends into Chapter 3, this chapter proposes the critical method of chain comparison.

Chapter 2 traces the evolution of the overseas listing of Chinese companies and its regulatory regime. It defines the main modes of overseas listings of Chinese companies, divides the historical development of the overseas-listing market into several stages and discusses how China has gradually established its regulatory regime in this area. It then focuses on the current regime, particularly the uniform filing regime introduced in 2023, including the key elements and their implementation issues. It also conducts an evaluation of the new regime and makes relevant comments.