From the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, Japan purposely eschewed concluding diplomatic relations with the countries on its periphery. The international environment that made this fundamental policy possible first formed in the ninth century in the East China Sea with the appearance of maritime merchants. Japan was able to obtain foreign goods through trade ships without having to follow troublesome diplomatic procedures. In addition, no strong hegemonic power could threaten Japan militarily after the ninth century. Assuming this environment, Japan did not engage with any other country beyond temporary communications. Japan’s environment changed with the appearance of the Mongols as a hegemonic nation in thirteenth century. But even under military pressure, Japan refused to conclude diplomatic relations with the Mongols. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Mongols approved trade with Japan without the conclusion of formal diplomatic relations. In the latter half of the fourteenth century, the Ming’s making trade inseparable from the paying of tribute forced Japan to honour the Ming demand. This caused a radical change to Japan’s foreign diplomatic relations.

Allen Ginsberg visited China in 1984, first as part of an American delegation of writers and then as a private traveler. He visited many cities over a period of several months and spent time lecturing on American poetry. He found China oppressive and, in many ways, disappointing, and also he suffered many health problems owing to the pollution there; but nonetheless his time in China was a creatively fertile period for him, resulting in a number of important poems. This chapter details his travels around China, focusing on a sense of paranoia that plagued him because he was in a totalitarian state where he was constantly observed. It also looks at the poems that emerged from his trip, examining the various influences his inquiries into Chinese poetry had on his own work.

I examine the complexities of maritime connections between China and South Asia created by the entry of multiple states and non-state actors in the Indian Ocean between the thirteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Divided into three chronological sections, the chapter first focuses on private traders, shippers, coastal polities, and European colonial enterprises in shaping and regulating commercial activity, diplomatic encounters, and their involvement in cross-regional interaction, exchange and conflict. The networks of traders that criss-crossed the ocean is highlighted. The next section analyses the impact of the seven voyages of Zheng He in the early fifteenth century on restructuring maritime interactions between China and South Asia. The final section centres on two entrepreneurs, one Chinese and one Indian, who utilised British colonial networks to advance their ventures and contributed to the expansion of maritime exchange. The chapter provides new insights into the nature of interactions between China and South Asia when there were no norms or regulations beyond specific coastal polities and regions.

‘Pan-Asianism’ came to prominence after the Second World War. Beyond the conventional understanding of the link between pan-Asianism and Japanese imperialism since then, this chapter explains the role of pan-Asianism as an anti-imperial ideology and strategy in the early twentieth century. As an anti-imperial ideology, pan-Asianism advanced a normative argument for the emancipation of Asia from Western imperialism and provided an alternative to Eurocentric discourse on civilisation, a vision premised upon a shared Asian spirituality, heritage, culture and glorious past. As an anti-imperial strategy, pan-Asianism offered Indian nationalist leaders in exile a language to gain support of the Japanese and the Chinese for their nationalist movement against British rule. Although pan-Asianism later came to be used as a justification in Japanese imperialism, it is important to highlight the anti-imperial role that pan-Asianism played in the early twentieth century. This chapter does so by analysing the works of leading Pan-Asianist ideologues and activists of the period and by highlighting the ideological and strategic aspects of their conception of pan-Asianism as anti-imperialism.

This chapter explores how considerations of private international law affected marriage and gender relations during the Mongol occupation of China, in the Yuan dynasty (1260–1368). I first address matters of jurisdiction and choice of law that arose in Yuan China and border areas when lawsuits involved non-Chinese. It demonstrates the willingness of Mongol Yuan officials to consider non-Chinese law in adjudication and how this process could be complicated by facts on the ground. The section reveals under Mongol rule a form of ‘transnational everyday life’, as other scholars have termed it, and the disadvantages that often accrued to women in these circumstances. Then I demonstrate how the Chinese encounter with Mongol rule and the resulting ‘foreign’ elements introduced into legal practice brought about changes in traditional, codified, Chinese marriage law. Finally, I address the Mongol use of strategic marriages in their interpolity relations both during the united world empire and in the Yuan dynasty. These interpolity marriage relations were crucial to Mongol successes during their conquests and in their efforts to maintain sovereignty over conquered peoples.

This chapter begins by describing the pre-history of southern China and the origins of colonial Hong Kong. It then proceeds to a discussion of English in the late nineteenth century and the formation of an English-speaking Chinese elite in colonial Hong Kong. Since the resumption of Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the government has promoted a policy of “trilingualism” (Cantonese, English, and Putonghua) and “biliteracy” (written Chinese and English). Recently, the national government has moved to assert tighter control over the territory, and there has been increasing importance placed on the learning and use of the national language, Putonghua. At present, English continues to be widely used in key domains of Hong Kong society, including government, law and many areas of employment. This is likely to continue in the future, despite Hong Kong’s increasing integration economically, politically, socially, and linguistically into mainland China.

Chapter 13 concludes by recapping the book’s key themes, considering potential obstacles to mandatory cooperation, and identifying other matters of international concern, such as pandemics, that are good candidates for mandatory cooperation under the equitable conception of sovereign equality.

This chapter surveys the history of China from the time of first contact with British traders in the early seventeenth century until the present. It traces the story of English through the era of pidgin English, to English language education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and recent policies in the People’s Republic of China. Since the opening of China in the late 1970s, English has been officially promoted as a key to modernisation. Today, official attitudes to the language seem to be less enthusiastic than the recent past, but, despite this, the popularity of learning English appears to be undiminished among China’s growing middle classes.

When discussing Asian religion, art, and philosophy, Emerson generally bestows praise and tends toward cosmopolitan, universalist sentiments. Old Asian ideas, especially from Persian, Indian, and Chinese traditions, reinforced his Transcendentalist sense of morality and, especially, his belief in “the infinitude of the private man.” In the contexts of geography and history, however, he gravitates toward nationalist, imperialist, and racist views. Here he betrays his vulnerability to some of the ruling ideas of geographical determinism and teleological historicism informing the ideology of manifest destiny. Yet, true to form for a writer who so famously abjured consistency, this basic distinction does not always hold. This chapter thus begins with an examination of Emerson’s discrepant Asias before analyzing how, despite this general dichotomy, he was sometimes able to subvert prevailing tendencies and introduce uncommon subtleties to his representation of Asia, its cultures, and its peoples.

Issues of race and racism have been highly controversial in contemporary China. This chapter examines the significance of various events and the polemics they provoked around the politics of race and nationalism. Indeed, the controversy has to be appreciated in light of the rise of nationalistic feelings among Chinese netizens, who have insisted that the fashion world should no longer cater to Western aesthetics and should align with the aesthetics of Chinese people.

Genocide is a contested concept with normative, legal, political, and empirical dimensions, each pulling in different directions. The chapter emphasizes that, in addition, a fundamental contradiction exists in the concept: The legal definition, anchored in an international treaty, dominates the social sciences, even though the legal definition is problematic for the specification of a particular type of violence. The concept is thus perpetually trapped between legal and empirical imperatives, rendering it unwieldy for the social science objective of isolating a particular type of phenomenon. The chapter rejects the solution of jettisoning the concept, instead proposing a set of solutions for how to retain the concept and separate it from its legal origins. The chapter concludes by arguing that such solutions are unlikely to carry the day, but that social scientists should still seek to develop a rigorous conceptualization of the term that allows for the identification of specific types of political violence. Finally, a postscript offers an interim assessment – from the perspective of this chapter – of the war in the Middle East that began on October 7, 2023.

Grounded in comparative politics, this chapter presents new theory in comparative political economy: First, it argues that, in the context of technological transition, a legal system that facilitates reassignment of property rights, making certain rights less secure, plays an important and under-theorized role in promoting economic development. It focuses on China’s technological transition from a rural, agricultural economy to an urban, industrial one to highlight the relationship between technology change, reassignment of land rights, and transformative economic growth. The chapter reinterprets England’s post–Glorious-Revolution reassignment of land rights, using enclosure, estate, turnpike, and other parliamentary acts, in light of China’s rise. It also identifies the problem of state misallocation of land resources in the Chinese case. Second, it argues that the authoritarian state also invests in the formal legal system in order to manage conflict over changes in land rights and to legitimate the state. It revisits England’s eighteenth-century use of law, including the Riot Act and Black Act, to contain protest over dispossession and compares it to China’s embrace of authoritarian legality to repress conflict. The chapter defines liberal and illiberal law in both form and content and locates the analysis in the context of the law-and-development movement.