‘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.

This chapter begins with Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s decision to privatize his country’s rice parastatal, rather than liberalize the rice trade. In the late 1990s, Mahathir formed a new entity, called Bernas, whose shares were traded on the country’s stock exchange. Through dense patronage networks, and despite Bernas’s “public” status, amplified capital accumulation remained closely tied to the state and its ruling party, UMNO. After Mahathir retired in 2003, the party-state complex went a step further to allow the country’s richest non-Chinese businessman, Syed Mokhtar Albukhary, to delist Bernas by purchasing its shares to become the principal owner. As a result, this one tycoon has since controlled some seventy percent of the country’s rice supply. The political opposition cried foul, and when it shockingly won the 2018 elections, it studied ways to reform this arrangement. But the coalition government was toppled by a party coup in 2020 and the more pro-Malay regime that succeeded it swiftly reached a new accord, extending Syed Mokhtar’s rice import monopoly permit to 2031. Malaysia thus stands as instructive case of near-miss institutional change.

The word agent, so the dictionary says, ‘usually names the one who does the work as distinguished from the one who wills, plans, or orders’. It presumes a motive – be it an emotion or a desire, which operates on the will and definitely moves it to activity. In the mind of the lexicographer who merely seeks to discern and define the meanings of words, neither the meaning of agent nor that of motive is likely to trigger problematic or irksome associations. In covert human intelligence (HUMINT), however, things are different. ‘He’s an agent. He’s a man to be handled, not known’ is how a senior intelligence officer in John le Carré’s novel The Looking Glass War replies to a junior colleague’s inquiry about a man he has just been told ‘is not one of us’. When the junior officer goes on to suggest that loyalty must be behind the man’s readiness to act as an agent, he is told that ‘I mistrust reasons. I mistrust words like loyalty. And above all … I mistrust motive. We’re running an agent; the arithmetic is over.’

The boundary that circumscribes the subject matter of this collection of translations traverses the desk of the head of the organisational component operating sources/agents/informers. On that desk, to cite the second half of Donald Rumsfeld‘s famous elaboration on how to tell intelligence from fact, ‘there’s judgement involved’ and ‘a lot of conflicting facts and information are brought together’. Beyond it, HUMINT has ceased to be an intelligence activity and become but one of many different and competing products on the basis of which timely and accurate – alternatively, late or wrong – decisions will be taken by political leaderships.

Agent Work Files document how agents executed their missions, but they reveal precious little about the agents themselves. When properly maintained, they indicate neither an agent’s real name nor any biographical information about the person behind the code designation. No pre-recruitment profiling data of the kind called for in , for example, is included in the Agent Work File, nor is any information on the agent’s post-recruitment circumstances, such as what kind of life he or she led when not performing agent duties. The retired Swedish security-agency chief who boasted of his nationwide Cold War ‘web of agents’ said it had included, in addition to ‘pillars of society’, men like the ‘local convenience store manager [ICA-handlaren], bank clerk, or factory employee and active member of the village bandy team’.

According to Dazai Shundai, celebrations of deities and worship at ancestral temples are key aspects of the government of the sages, but these are not practiced properly in Japan. People in Japan neglect the methods for these established by the ancient Chinese sages and instead hold such erroneous beliefs as that Japan is a “divine country” that should adhere to its own native traditions of worship, or that Buddhist services are sufficient to honor one’s ancestors. The promotion of learning is also a crucial element of government. Confucian learning should occupy the primary place, but military learning and various types of literary and artistic learning are also valuable. The Tokugawa bakufu is praiseworthy for its promotion of learning, but it should make more effort to reward officials for their learning, as well as to recognize the accomplishments of skilled individuals rather than leaving arts to families of hereditary practitioners.