This chapter mainly discusses the process of Shanghai evacuating a large number of urban population from the city in the early days of the founding of the people’s Republic of China by sending “refugees” and “victims” home, mobilizing farmers to return home for production, and calling on urban residents to migrate and reclaim wasteland, and changing their identity into farmers through land reform, joining co-operatives or establishing collective farms.The Communist Party of China reduces the urban population and consumption through these methods, aiming to realize the strategy of industrialization as soon as possible and build a strong socialist country.

Drawing on local judicial records and on-the-ground interviews, the chapter examines two criminal cases in a Shandong village, highlighting how, in the hyper-politicized context of the Great Leap Forward, factional struggles among rural elites took on a dangerous new significance. The revival of the Socialist Education Movement saw the downfall of two leading cadres in early 1960. The local lineage made a series of incendiary allegations against them, leading to their removal from office, prosecution, and long-term imprisonment. A key learning from this case study concerns the way in which the implementation of campaigns, as well as judicial punishments, produced contingency. At the local level, campaigns were not just a path by which the state achieved or failed to achieve its own goals, but also provided a framework for individuals to exercise their own agency. Meanwhile, a decentralized judicial system with limited safeguards and poor evidence-gathering and case-making practices allowed campaign-induced conflict to spill over into criminal punishment. The convergence of campaign-style politics with politicalized legal enforcement seems inevitably to have ratcheted up the stakes to the point where only one endgame was possible: a bitter struggle followed by brutal and ultimately fatal punishments.

This chapter first explores in general the often forgotten contributions to the birth of international law study and practice in China by the Beiyang or “warlord” government, first dominated by the former Qing Viceroy Yuan Shikai. Some achievements of China’s first holders of international law degrees from elite foreign universities, which included arguments and publications that exerted an immediate and at times remarkable impact upon the international law field in the West, have been almost forgotten today.

Chapter 2 covers the years from 1740 to 1840, a period that some scholars refer to as the “Chinese century” in Southeast Asia and a period that partially overlaps with what Chinese historians call the High Qing and was known to contemporaries as the “prosperous age.” The chapter demonstrates that migration across the Qing frontiers and to destinations abroad was linked to the extraction of resources in Inner Asia and Southeast Asia for the Chinese market. This was a period in which Chinese laborers – miners and farmers – became distinct types of migrants. The chapter introduces a new diasporic trajectory, that of Hakkas to Borneo and other areas in Southeast Asia. It traces the development of such diasporic institutions as native-place associations, or huiguan, and the emergence of others, such as revenue farms, brotherhoods, and kongsi. It also further explores the issues of split families, maintained through remittances, and of unmarriageable men for whom migration became a means of ascending the marriage ladder. The chapter ends with an example of another diasporic community, the Chinese mestizos in the Philippine town of Malabon.