This chapter charts Philippine presidential wrangling with the rice question, particularly via the National Food Authority. President Macapagal-Arroyo abused rice imports to generate the economic rents to keep her government of dubious legitimacy in power; these machinations exacerbated the 2008 regional rice crisis. Benigno Aquino III reined in his predecessor’s egregious corruption, yet allowed excessive smuggling in order to suppress prices as a means to boost his popularity. Genuine reform had to wait for Aquino’s successor. In late 2018, Rodrigo Duterte took the stunning step of liberalizing rice imports by revoking the NFA’s monopoly import permit, disrupting the steady march of post-Green Revolution institutionalization. This chapter analyzes the move’s short-term effects and how they have hamstrung Duterte’s successor, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The son of a prototypical production nationalist has balked at rolling back liberalization, despite campaign promises to do so, because of the lower rice prices the policy change has brought in an era of high inflation and mounting worry about the long-term effects on global food prices due to Russia’s war in Ukraine. The chapter ends with a discussion of the factors that enabled President Duterte’s reform of the country’s rice import trade in comparative historical perspective.

This chapter reviews how the Green Revolution unfolded in each of the three countries. It does not shy from reporting the mistakes and mishaps that transpired, from corruption and the hubris of policymakers to pest outbreaks and coercive policy implementation, on the ground. Crucially, the program’s legitimacy was saved by the state-managed, and western funded, rice imports in overcoming food shortages of the early Green Revolution. The chapter then covers how the cultivation surge finally came to fruition, birthing the production nationalists. Two of the more famous examples include Indonesian president Soeharto and Philippine president Marcos. In this way, rice imports, and later Green Revolution production, were decisive factors in prolonging the rule of each of these pro-West, conservative regimes. The chapter is also arranged per case study and chronologically within each case.

Agent 151 started out being operated by the Third Section of the First Division to work on the democratic parties. In 1961, we discovered that Agent 151 and counter-revolutionary element Zhao XXX, who had been plotting to restore the old order, taught in the same middle school. In order to keep all of Zhao’s ongoing activities under surveillance, on 3 July 1961 we borrowed Agent 151 for operational use. Judging from what has been learned in this case from our direction of Agent 151 for more than five months, and the intelligence we have been able to develop, Agent 151 has already been able to connect with the target, maintains a positive relationship with him, and is able to obtain information on his activities.

According to Dazai Shundai, the provision of food and goods to all the people is an essential element of good government. Wealth as measured in food and goods will then lead to a strong military. Some have considered the ideal of “enriching the country and strengthening the military” to be contrary to Confucian teachings, but this is mistaken. Currency should be seen as secondary to food and goods and does not in itself represent true wealth, a fact that many have lost sight of in Edo and other urban centers of Tokugawa Japan. In farming, it is crucial to extract the full productive potential of the land, which requires an understanding of the different types of land and the uses that each of these serves; an ignorance of these different uses has led to harmful policies that try to convert all land into paddies. The stabilization of prices is another important role for government and helps prevent merchants from exploiting price fluctuations for private gain. A system of government-managed granaries can be used to stabilize rice prices, provide relief in times of famine, and provide low-interest loans to samurai in times of need.

The conclusion recapitulates the book’s primary arguments; it extends them to two more rice sector cases in Asia (Japan and South Korea); and it offers some preliminary thoughts on the future viability of the rice industries in importing Southeast Asia.

According to Dazai Shundai, establishing institutions to handle various affairs is the foremost task of government. These should be fixed in place for a long period of time and be strictly upheld. In earlier times, Japan had proper institutions based on models learned from China, but with the advent of government by warriors, such institutions fell into disuse and have been replaced by provisional measures. Tokugawa Japan lacks proper institutions for a wide range of matters, a key example of which is the absence of institutions to regulate kinship relations.

In the wake of the big round-up that we carried out after entering Shenyang in 1948, we proceeded to intensify agent work capacity building while stepping up efforts to combat collaborators and root out enemy operatives. Agent work required tailoring the approach to, and the management of, each target individually and the setting of priorities with respect to the target’s exploitation, cultivation, training, and utilisation. As a general policy, furthermore, it entailed painstaking operation and prolonged utilisation in order to allow agents to successfully infiltrate or approach and strike at the enemy and to perform their vital role in combatting collaborators and rooting out enemy operatives.

According to Dazai Shundai, techniques of political economy must be based on the models of the ancient Chinese sage kings. In order to apply these models to present-day Japan, it is important to draw proper analogies between ancient Chinese and later Japanese phenomena and to use appropriate terminology in describing Japanese phenomena.

I met with 107 on 20 September. She now has misgivings and is depressed. She does not think she can provide us with anything, and she fears that the government may have overestimated her value. She recently noticed that, unlike herself, some former members of reactionary organisations have already managed to find employment. Every time she meets with us and is unable to provide us with anything, she finds the criticism difficult to take.

I should explain that 107 has a petit bourgeois background and does not take direct criticism well. Under the circumstances, I have opted for education and encouragement, and I have tried to explain to her that her own past crimes were the result of Guomindang society and that she should bring herself to see clearly what they amounted to, and today she should stand on the side of the People.

The Coda foregrounds the literary implications of the book’s argument by reflecting on the idea of the Indian Ocean as a comparative literary space. Through an example from Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea (2019), it illustrates a comparative practice wherein the historical, the geopolitical, and the literary come together. The mutual imbrication of the geopolitical and the literary in contemporary Afro-Asian fiction generates the Indian Ocean as a space of comparison where historical relationalities become legible within the exigencies of the present.

This chapter considers the afterlives of slavery in the Indian Ocean through Mauritian writer Shenaz Patel’s Le silence des Chagos (2005), about the expulsion of the inhabitants of the Chagos archipelago from their islands in the wake of late twentieth-century Indian Ocean militarization. Images and narratives circulating in the global media often portray the suffering of Chagossians as a human rights violation, abstracting the event from the particular legacies of slavery, colonialism, and anti-Blackness that continue to weigh on the displaced community. By contrast, Le silence des Chagos tells the story of their expulsion by adapting Chagossians’ testimonies into a novelistic form. Patel’s testimonial fiction constructs a repository of images that enables a sensory and subjective experience of the past. As a composite of these images, the exilic consciousness uncovers Chagossians’ most recent experiences of exile as an extension of the racialized violence in the past. The novel remaps the Indian Ocean enabling a position to critique geopolitical networks of power in the region and identify convergences with Black diasporic accounts of Atlantic crossings.

The unjust court sentencing and execution of poor peasant Dong Changbao and his son, Dong Renhuo, in Yongkang county in 1958 was yet another heinous crime committed by the handful who held power in the old public security, procuracy, and legal sectors and who relied on agents to subject the labouring people to blood-stained oppression. It is also ironclad evidence of the old public security, procuracy, and legal sectors enforcing a bourgeois dictatorship.

In order to determine how to carry out agent contingent downsizing and rectification even more prudently, we conducted trial runs in entities directly subordinate to the [Inner Mongolia] regional government’s Department of Finance and Trade and Department of Communications. Below, for reference, we share some of our findings.