According to Dazai Shundai, ritual and music are essential elements of the government of the sages. They complement each other, with ritual drawing strict distinctions of status and establishing ethical standards for different types of human relationships, while music functions as a gentle force for bringing people together in harmony. Compared with other methods of governing, the superiority of ritual and music lies in their ability to enter people on a deep level and transform their customs, creating long-lasting stability without the need to rely solely on explicit laws. In order for ritual and music to work properly, though, they must be established by rulers who look back to the traditions of the ancient Chinese sage kings. In earlier times, Japan learned such ritual and music from China and used these to govern, but in recent times, vulgar ritual and music have arisen from among the common people, with detrimental effects for Japanese society. To remedy this situation, vulgar ritual and music need to be suppressed and replaced with proper ritual and music.

At 1 p.m. on Friday, 6 January 1956, at the premises on Third Street, [Political Protection] Division Chief Lu Bo and [Political Intelligence] Section Chief Lu Junjie met with Agent 371.

At this meeting, Division Chief Lu issued instructions in preparation for the agent’s upcoming visit to Tianjin.

Chapter 5 turns to intermedial comparison between word and image, taking the image-text as an example to examine how ludic strategies of representation create intermedial experiences of risk. In the chapter I compare Xi Xi with contemporary French poet Michèle Métail. Both poets have created a substantial number of image-texts. I first examine how they employ ekphrasis – the verbal representation of images – to explore the tension and complementarity between language and visual media and emphasize the risks of aesthetic experimentation and mediated perception. I then discuss their use of the parergon, understood as the concrete borders of an artwork (the ergon) and, figuratively, as a cognitive framing and recontextualization of literature that questions what the literary work is. Gregory Bateson argued that play is a ‘cognitive frame’ (1972). In this chapter, I argue that the parergon is a ludic method that suggests the transgression of frames and puts the artwork (ergon) at risk. Image-texts show how risk is shaped by medium-specificity and technologies of mediation.

The introduction presents the main theoretical and empirical justifications of the book. It begins by highlighting the longstanding problem governments face as they puzzle over securing adequate amounts of staple foods: either to grow more of the foodstuff or purchase it from abroad. This historical and contemporary food security dilemma sets the stage for introducing the three primary cases of this study, those that struggle to find that ideal balance between promoting expensive domestic rice cultivation and buying cheaper foreign imports. It then explains how success in the Green Revolution radically shifted the views of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia of their position along this continuum. The introduction establishes the significance of the Green Revolution, substantiates its success, and addresses how this legacy over decades has shaped acute rice policy debates – and hence larger questions about rural development, poverty alleviation, and national food security. The introduction closes with a brief recapitulation of the main argument and an outline of the book’s chapters.

‘Undercover cadres’ and ‘agents’ are the products of the Liu [Shaoqi], Deng [Xiaoping], Peng [Zhen], and Luo [Ruiqing] counter-revolutionary revisionist line and its aggressive promotion of ‘isolationism’ and ‘mysticism’ in the public security, procuracy, and legal sectors. So-called undercover cadres and agents are, for the most part, landlord, rich peasant, counter-revolutionary, bad, Rightist elements, renegades, tewu, Catholic priests, monks, imams, senior officers in Chiang Kai-shek‘s bandit army, core elements in reactionary political parties and organisations, or degenerate [Communist Party] elements. They form a counter-revolutionary fifth column created to prepare in organisational terms for the restoration of capitalism. From what the masses have brought to light, when utilisation of ‘agents’ peaked in our province, their number in the province as a whole exceeded 28,000. According to the original Public Security Bureau statistics for the second half of 1965, the total number of ‘agents’ in the province that year totalled 2,581.

This chapter lays out the overall rationale for the book, elucidates some of its key aspects and situates the book in relation to a scholarly field of feminist jurisprudence in India. It introduces the established convention of diversity in the field of Indian feminist jurisprudence, which this book joins with and expands. The chapter offers an illustration of the field by introducing the body of literature that the book is drawing from and contributing to and foregrounds that there are different voices in the field each of which speaks from a different locus both within and outside Indian legal academia. Simultaneously, the chapter explains the relevance of caste and how it hierarchically organises the field of intellectual labour in India.

Chapter 1 focuses on fictional narrative and gameplay. The novel, understood as a game space, provides an apt literary form to probe the distinction between, and interpenetration of, fiction and reality. My discussion addresses how risk is hypothetically imagined in a future-oriented sense and counterfactually in a retrospective sense, as something that has already happened but can be overwritten or reinvented by fiction. In either case, risk transforms the experience of literature and the world. Through horizontal comparisons of approximately contemporary works, I read together Sino-French and Hong Kongese Sinophone writers: Shan Sa with Dorothy Hiu Hung Tse and Dai Sijie with Dung Kai-cheung. This comparison brings together, for the first time, Sino-French and Hong Kongese Sinophone writers who share Sinitic linguistic and cultural heritage as well as an insider–outsider relation to national Chinese literature.

To the heads of operational line sections, economic protection sections of municipal district branches, and protection sections (sub-sections) of factories and enterprises:

We recently discovered that Comrade Piao Wenxiang in the Economic Protection Section of West of the Tracks Municipal District Branch, in the course of his work of operating agents, for fear of jeopardising secrecy by having face-to-face meetings with them and with the permission of the protection section chief, Comrade Deng Shirui, ordered agents to send their reports to him through the post in the form of ordinary letters. On 10 August, agent Zhang X’s report on the activities of a suspicious element went missing, and despite repeated inquiries with the post office, it still has not been located.

The introduction sets out the central question and critical framework of this book. It presents the debates around the book’s three keywords: risk, play and Franco–East Asian literatures. It proposes a new comparative reading of world literature that is not based on canonicity, the global circulation of literature via English translations or identity categories.