Chapter 12 investigates Yukikaze’s activities after the sinking of Yamato and during Japan’s surrender to the Allies. Yukikaze was transferred to the Republic of China in 1947, where she defended Taiwan during the crises in the Taiwan Strait. The chapter concludes with Yukikaze’s enduring legacy in Japanese culture.

Economic nationalism became a dominant, and often destructive, discourse in the interwar period. This manifested itself in the rise of economic antisemitism in Nazi Germany, as well as in the corporatist dictatorships ruling Italy, Romania and Brazil. These autocracies were promoted in the writings of Mihail Manoilescu, who believed that dictatorship could spur growth even in autarky. In other ways, however, the interwar period saw a sharpening of existing nineteenth-century trends. Anti-imperialist movements remained powerful, especially in China, where Sun Yat-sen conceived of a powerful protector state that would manage foreign investment. Multi-ethnic contexts, as in Mandatory Palestine, encouraged isolationist approaches, this time from Zionist nation-builders. These efforts at nation-building encouraged economic segregation and ultimately inter-communal conflict. Even Britain, the erstwhile beacon of free trade, attempted to transform its Empire into a self-sufficient trading block during the Great Depression.

This chapter demonstrates the interplay between domestic and international ideas about birth control and abortion in Republican China (1912–1949). Eugenic discourses linking individual health to national strength and modernity gained currency in the early 1920s. Margaret Sanger’s visit to China in 1922 further fueled elite preoccupation with using contraception to improve the “quality” of the population, while reformers called for an end to social ills, such as abortion, child abandonment, and infanticide. Mirroring the blending of Chinese and foreign eugenic thought, the medical language used to describe birth control merged a primarily traditional Chinese medical discourse with Western and Japanese scientific terminology. Despite their prominence in intellectual circles, many of the high-level arguments for and against birth control had little direct impact on everyday reproductive practices.

Chapter 2 focuses on the praxis of birth control and abortion during the Republican era. Although sterilization and abortion were criminalized, contraception was neither explicitly endorsed nor banned. Yet, at times, local police cracked down on those who sold or consumed these products. In spite of the law, a wide range of contraceptive and abortive techniques were available to women in urban China. Grounded in folk practices, traditional Chinese healing, and Western medicine, abortion was the most prevalent form of fertility regulation that appeared in the historical record. Tiaojingyao – patent drugs and homemade herbal decoctions that blurred the line between abortifacients and emmenagogues designed to induce regular menses – were also particularly common, and by their nature, difficult to police.

Chapter 2 uncovers how the political censorship regime in Hong Kong evolved from punitive censorship to what I call ‘pre-emptive censorship’, a measure that imposed the mandatory daily vetting of newspaper proofs by government censors. During the China-backed large-scale strikes that occurred in 1922–1926, the colonial government faced the most serious challenge to its legitimacy to date. In response to the resulting anxiety over its continued rule in Hong Kong, the colonial government further stretched its control of the press by enacting newspaper regulations. Press control was expanded from punishing editors for what they had already published to day-to-day political vetting of the content of Chinese newspaper proofs before they were printed for sale to the public. The operations of the censors’ office produced newspapers with weird dots and crosses concealing censored material. News manuscripts banned from publication featured a big chop from the government’s Press Censorship Office, as shown on the cover of this book. The daily operation of this mysterious office, hitherto unknown to scholarship, will be described in detail in this chapter.

From the 1950s to at least the 1970s, China established and operated a variety of intelligence networks from Switzerland. The chapter relies on thousands of files by the Federal Police as well as Chinese memoirs, biographies, commemorative volumes of former agents, and publications on the history of Chinese intelligence to discuss different forms of intelligence activities carried out by Chinese diplomats in Switzerland. Showing just how intertwined Chinese foreign policy and intelligence were, the chapter argues that diplomatic staff were so often also active as intelligence agents that it could be argued that the Chinese used a hybrid form of diplomat–agent in Switzerland. Some of the national, international, and transnational intelligence networks that the Chinese operated from Switzerland show that Switzerland functioned as a Chinese intelligence hub in Cold War Europe. These include a network of UN officials, ethnic Chinese students and scientists, Chinese restaurants, and Chinese Indonesians. The chapter also describes the Swiss Federal Police’s counterintelligence measures as a reaction to the Chinese intelligence activities. The chapter begins with a discussion of the development of Communist Chinese intelligence in the 1930s and 1940s in order to show how this contributed to Chinese intelligence activities in Europe.

The ideas and practices of constitutions and constitutionalism were first imported into China in the late 19th century. There were three eras of constitution-making in modern Chinese history: the last decade of Qing imperial rule, the republican era, and the communist era. Dr Sun Yat-sen, founding father of the Republic of China (RoC), developed a three-stage theory of China’s political development in which the last stage was to be constitutionalism (xianzheng). Although this was realized in theory when the RoC Constitution of 1946 was enacted, the Constitution became largely suspended as the RoC regime moved to Taiwan and introduced martial law after its defeat by the Communists in the Chinese Civil War. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established in the Mainland, which witnessed a new era of constitution-making under the Soviet Union’s influence. However, even today, the discussion of “constitutionalism” (xianzheng) is still discouraged by the PRC regime, although the concepts of the (socialist) Rule of Law and human rights have been affirmed by constitutional amendments. This chapter will review and assess the history of constitution-making in modern China and the discourse of constitutional law scholarship in contemporary China, and it will explore how the case of China both illuminates and challenges conventional understandings of the meaning and significance of constitutions and constitutionalism in the contemporary world.

The fall of the Qing dynasty was followed by the successive creation of two republics: the Republic of China (‘ROC’), established in 1912 and ultimately dominated by the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek, and the People’s Republic of China (‘PRC’), established in 1949 by the Chinese Communist Party (‘CCP’) headed by Mao Zedong. Treatment of the two Chinas in the international arena could hardly have been more different. Never exercising more than nominal control over the entirety of the territory it claimed, the ROC was riven by an endless succession of warlords, an even greater number of Westerners holding onto semi-colonial privileges they claimed to have inherited from the Qing, a civil war between Nationalists and Communists, and a brutal occupation by Japan. Nevertheless, while there was no shortage of people in China rejecting the claims of the Nationalist Government, internationally no one doubted its legal existence, even when contradicted by facts.