On 9 September 1976, Mao passed away, marking the end of the radical socialist experiment and the beginning of marketized reforms. In the face of growing social grievances sparked by marketized reforms, in the early 2000s the Hu Jintao administration (2002–2012) changed gear toward social protection. This chapter outlines the regime of general labour precarity in the post-Mao era: socialist surplus appropriation has been overhauled and given way to exploitation; the social exclusion system has been softened and recalibrated; despite efforts of decommodification, the recommodification of healthcare, education, and housing has created the ‘three new great mountains’ over Chinese people.

The rapid development of data analytics, computational power, and machine/deep learning algorithms has driven artificial intelligence (AI) applications to every sphere of society, with significant economic, legal, ethical, and political ramifications. A growing body of literature has explored critical dimensions of AI governance, yet few touch upon issue areas that directly resonate with the diverse context and dynamics of the non-Western world, particularly Asia. This chapter therefore aims to fill the gap by offering a contextual discussion of how Asian jurisdictions perceive and respond to the challenges posed by AI, as well as how they interact with each other through regulatory cross-referencing, learning, and competition. Premised upon an analysis of the diverse regulatory approaches shaped by respective political, legal, and socioeconomic contexts in such jurisdictions, this chapter identifies how Inter-Asian Law has emerged in AI governance in the forms of regulatory cross-referencing, joint efforts, and cooperation through regional forums and points to potential venues for normative interactions, dialogue, best practices exchanges, and the co-development of AI governance.

This chapter outlines a comprehensive multimethod approach that integrates ethnography and quantitative data analysis to explore the concept of exit. Building on Hirschman’s exit–voice–loyalty theory, the chapter delineates two distinct forms of exit: permanent exit, characterized by the death of voters, and partial exit, which can be either forced or voluntary and does not always involve physical migration. The latter includes phenomena such as migration-related remittances, which symbolize loyalty from emigrants to those who remain. The chapter highlights how partial exit can manifest through voter attrition, often attributed to pandemic fatigue. The narrative indicates that the government did not instigate this exit, but it later discovered covert methods to leverage it for political gain. The chapter introduces the reader to the voter exit premium, the additional votes bolstering ZANU PF due to voter exit. Exit premium is calculated in Chapters 3 and 4.

The influence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the law and legal order of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region might seem not to be a case of inter-Asian law because it occurs within a single jurisdiction. Yet, Beijing has employed a wide range of means to shape Hong Kong’s legal order, ranging from making or interpreting PRC law for Hong Kong, to mandating or pressing for local lawmaking in Hong Kong, to more diffuse influences on Hong Kong’s legal order and its context. Chinese influence has made Hong Kong law less liberal and democratic and more like the PRC’s. The China–Hong Kong case shows the spectrum of modes of inter-Asian legal influence, the complexity of the relationship between transplants or exports of legal models and legal influence, and the issues that lie ahead in an era of possible competition between China and the United States/the West for legal influence.

This chapter explains how the CPC has from the beginning used its official language to stabilize its rule. During the Mao era people had to integrate this language into their everyday speech by repeatedly using “correct” words and linguistic formulae to say “correct” things. Compulsory use of the language forced everyone to propagate revolutionary values, and even when it failed to produce any matching revolutionary consciousness it completely silenced dissent. Official formulations had a powerful coercive function that stabilized party rule even when its policies were deeply unpopular. The party still uses official language to structure official discourses that outline the party’s vision, promote its policies, praise its leadership, claim the credit for China’s rise, and assert that it alone can guarantee the country’s future success. These discourses are pervasive, and they provide an overarching ideological framework that unofficial discourses are not permitted to contest. China may no longer be totalitarian, but the party’s strategic deployment of its official language is central to its success in creating a hegemonic political culture.

That the Declaration of Independence could be considered from the perspective of rhetoric might seem rather obvious, if not downright self-evident. Even so, appreciating how Jefferson thought about language not as an abstract concept but as a lived and material practice can help us appreciate the text of the Declaration from different perspectives. The text is shot through with the histories of race, nation, empire, and belonging that characterized the ideology of American revolutionary republicanism, and with Jefferson’s thinking about these forces and his own anxious place in them. In fact, despite and perhaps even in part because of his own difficulties with public speaking, Jefferson thought about the ability to access and marshal rhetorical exemplars and put them to use in legal and political argument as an elemental part of what it meant to be an effective citizen. His thinking about material rhetoric, about the absorption of what one read through notes, commentary, and commonplace books, turns out to be a critical component of how he thought about the legitimacy of the American project and of how he framed that project in successive drafts of the Declaration itself.

Given the CCP’s tight control over labour resistance, in everyday life workers in the post-Mao era rely mainly on pro-labour laws to protect their rights. This chapter focuses on under-studied agency workers, the dominant form of precarious labour in urban enterprises since the 2010s, and the regulations against the abuse of agency workers. It explains how the dualism between formal contract workers and agency workers took shape by examining the origins and expansion of agency workers. Moreover, it demonstrates why legal counter-movements in the post-Mao era are incomplete from a Polanyian perspective by examining the effects of the Labour Contract Law and the Interim Provisions on Labour Dispatch, two pro-labour regulations with a focus on agency workers.

This chapter examines the impacts of cumulative changes since 1949 on workers. As state-owned enterprises and export-oriented factories are large users of agency workers, this chapter presents a case study of both formal and agency workers in a large state-owned enterprise with relatively stable orders, and accounts of agency workers in export-oriented factories, with relatively fluctuating orders. It thus covers the two major types of agency workers in China in the 2010s: one with job tenure of years and managed solely by user enterprises, and another one with job tenure of six months or less and managed by both user enterprises and labour dispatch agencies.

This chapter asks whether there is anything we might productively characterize as an Inter-Asian approach to religion–state relations. I use the example of the Essential Religious Practices (ERP) Doctrine as a window into this analysis. The ERP Doctrine offers the best-case argument for the existence of an Inter-Asian approach to religion–state relations because, after its initial articulation by the Indian Supreme Court, it has been widely influential within South and Southeast Asia. I use two of the contexts where ERP analysis has been influential – Malaysia and Sri Lanka – to show how there has indeed been significant conceptual migration within Asia with regard to religious freedom jurisprudence. The ERP Doctrine’s travels are clearly reflected in the flow of jurisprudential ideas and via robust campus-court exchanges. At the same time, differences in the theoretical networks and sociopolitical contexts within which the ERP Doctrine has traveled prevent it from constituting a homogenous and hermetically sealed Inter-Asian approach.

In the West, liberty and equality emerged as individual rights from theological speculations about the nature of God and human beings, and the relationship of human beings to each other and to God. It was a natural theology in which God is beneficent and glorifies in what God has created, having made a world in which it is possible for human beings to pursue happiness. Derived primarily from the writings of John Locke, that natural theology was embraced and expanded upon by Thomas Jefferson and articulated in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration’s natural theology foundation holds that liberty serves God’s purpose: preservation of creation and flourishing in the pursuit of happiness. And liberty is equal liberty because, as Locke’s philosophy and Jefferson’s Declaration proclaim, human beings’ equality is more than a right; it is a fact of creation. For Locke and Jefferson, and for the “American mind” of the founding era, the theology underlying the Declaration implies duties to one another. Without such obligations beyond the self, egoism would lead to confusion as everyone would assert their own interests, and God’s purpose would not be realized.