For scholars of crime, law and social change, one of the more interesting aspects of globalization is the way it produces new regulatory regimes. Markets, it seems, are not natural forces; they must be created. And the creation of a new market depends, in no small part, on the formation of a governing system capable of securing its new forms of property, rationalizing its new relations of domination, and organizing its new system of exchange. The emergence of a new regulatory regime is fascinating to watch anywhere, but perhaps the most intriguing place in which to explore the process is one of the sort that Mary Louise Pratt called “contact zones” [1], i.e. sites in which radically different economies of meaning encounter one another, find a footing for engagement across their differences, and set about exploiting the new possibilities afforded by combination and hybridity.

The Southern Chinese Seaboard is such a contact zone. It has been for a very long time and, as such, holds a posi