i read this blog about ming dynasty weapons which begged this question as agricultural flails were used all throughout Eurasia (in africa, i do not know). baed on my knowledge of weaponry, ball and chain flails from asia only existed in india via the kabasteen and binnol
the blog http://greatmingmilitary.blogspot.com/2016/04/flails-of-ming-dynasty.html
It's worth first considering the question of whether European ball-and-chain flails actually existed in Europe. This has been asked before, and my answer is in
The short version is that they existed, and they appear to have been more common in Asia.
The usual East Asian flail as used on the battlefield was similar to the usual European battlefield flail - similar in appearance to the agricultural flail. Ball-and-chain flails were used, but don't appear to have been battlefield weapons on any significance. Instead, they appear as police weapons, and civilian and martial arts weapons. Probably the most famous Chinese flail weapon, due to its use as a martial arts weapon into recent times, is the meteor hammer: one or two balls on a rope or chain:
The Japanese equivalent is the marikigusari ("ten thousand powerful chain") or kusarifundo ("chain and weight"), with two weights connected by a chain. It was used as a less-than-lethal police weapon and as a concealable martial arts weapon, suggesting that the Chinese meteor hammer would have been used for similar purposes.
Apart from the versions without handles (and usually with a weight on each end), there were also flail weapons with handles, such as these Chinese examples:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/bc/30/a4/bc30a4ba9c35af4f934229127a671e68.jpg
https://collections.royalarmouries.org/object/rac-object-1880.html
The Japanese ball-chain-sickle, the kusarigama, could also be considered a flail with a handle (and with a blade on the handle).
There were East Asian ball-and-chain flails with long two-handed handles, as this Japanese example shows:
Typically, the weights were fairly light, and the chains/ropes were often long, sometimes very long. This provided the weapons with reach, and the chains/ropes were long enough for entangling and opponent or their weapons. I don't know of any East Asian real-life examples of spiked balls on chains - these wouldn't have been useful as less-than-lethal police weapons, and were also less convenient to carry concealed, so would have been rare compared to non-spiked versions for this reason, if they existed. East Asian agricultural-style flails were sometimes spiked or studded.
