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.

Chapter 5 is focused on the impact of national security review for cross-border listings of Chinese companies within the broader context of foreign investment regulation in China. By analyzing the law and practices of China and the United States, this chapter finds that the national security review regimes of the two jurisdictions have functional convergences despite some formal divergences caused by diverse political-economy landscapes. Their functional convergences are highlighted by China’s local practices, such as the de facto national security screening in the name of anti-monopoly review. There are many factors affecting China’s national security review regime for foreign investment, including the ongoing (and escalating) US–China competition (or conflict) at the international level and the evolution of state or party capitalism at the domestic level.

I have in the past served the enemy and his illegitimate regime, and I have been a member of a total of thirteen different bandit and reactionary tewu organisations, including the Military Affairs Commission War Cadre Training Corps, Sanminzhuyi Youth Corps, and Guomindang. In those organisations I held positions of responsibility, including as secretariat director, instructor, head of the education administration, editorial bureau chief, and dean of students. I consistently carried out counter-revolutionary activities opposing the People, regarded the enemy as my kith and kin, betrayed my motherland, and loyally served the enemy and his illegitimate regime as a cultural collaborator, while sexually violating women and cruelly harming the young by propagating opinions and words opposed to the People.

Translated below are two agent validation reports on Yang. The template for reports like these resembled be the KGB‘s karakteristika agenta, which was meant to describe, among other things, a person’s ‘strong points and shortcomings … which have come to light while he was used for agent work, prospects for making further use of him, and an evaluation of his work over a particular period’. The first validation report (from 1953) assesses in depth Yang’s overall performance and potential as an operative, while the second report (from 1957) mainly highlights his performance during the Communist Party’s Hundred Flowers Campaign.

Records of the kind translated in Part III above do not emanate immediately from the running of sources/agents/informers, but on their own they nonetheless successfully illuminate crucial aspects of the ‘machinery’ of HUMINT. A history foregrounding such records can convey the broad picture, including of policy changes and the evolution of security agencies as organisations. What has to be kept in mind, however, is that formal doctrine, rules and regulations, and experience written up expressly to document Cold War stakeholders’ views of how HUMINT should be (or, which in this case is no different, should not be) conducted, are not evidence of how it was. Historians eager to get closer to the agent running praxis itself therefore must also interrogate sources of a very different kind, starting with the unevaluated and uninterpreted information produced by the agents and their handlers on the ground. If our interest is in the Cold War FBI, we will find it deposited in bureau files and institutional subfiles on assets as ‘information furnished by the informant’.

The early Cold War period witnessed an expansion of security agency mandates and resources as national governments declared threat levels elevated and public opinion in turn demanded forceful responses. To counter, contain, and disrupt activities that bore the suspicious hallmarks of subversion – ‘political-ideological diversion’ in East Berlin, ‘disruption of the constitutional order’ in Bonn – or foreign espionage, HUMINT capacity building called for little in terms of investment in expensive infrastructure. The optimum towards which governments quietly strove by way of appeals to a higher loyalty (J. Edgar Hoover spoke of ‘an obligation of citizenship’) was a vigilant citizenry, its members mobilised to serve as the eyes and ears of the state. In Europe, one retired security agency chief boasted when the Cold War was over about the nationwide web of agents that his men and women had been able to call on when a job demanded it. A medley of contemporaneous and reminiscent matter, his memoirs describe how they approached ‘people who are able to serve as sources. Each section of the Security Police actively maintains its own web made up of altogether thousands of local politicians, union officials, business leaders, regional government civil servants, and residents close to military installations.

This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive and critical examination of how Mainland China and Hong Kong cooperate to regulate cross-border securities market misconduct, and based on the examination, make suggestions for improvement. While the Mainland–Hong Kong cooperation has produced good achievements, there remain many important issues which can be broadly divided into two categories: substantive rules on the definitions of market misconduct and penalties for such misconduct; enforcement mechanisms in relation to information exchange, regulatory architecture and extradition arrangement. This chapter suggests that the substantive rules be harmonized to the extent possible and the enforcement mechanisms be unified as a long-term goal. Despite its peculiarities, the Mainland–Hong Kong case can contribute to the international discourse on the regulation of cross-border securities misconduct.