Britain was largely successful during the 1920s in escaping criticism that it lacked legal status. Other states focused on their own interests in Palestine. That passivity let Britain operate as if it were in Palestine legitimately. If Britain were merely a belligerent occupant, the infusion of immigrants from Europe and the role the Zionist Organization played in governance were unlawful.

In 1932, however, a situation developed in which Britain could not avoid the issue of its status in Palestine. The British Government found itself in a dilemma from which it could extricate itself only by asking other major powers what they thought Britain's status in Palestine to be. In that year, Britain enacted tariffs for goods entering Britain from foreign countries, imposing, in general, a duty amounting to 10 percent of their value. The dilemma was that the British Government did not want to charge this duty on goods entering Britain from its various possessions around the world. Parliament had provided an exception for this situation in the 1932 legislation, which was called the Import Duties Act., The exception was that the Government was given the option to grant what was called a “colonial preference” to goods entering Britain “from any part of the British Empire.” Mandate territories were mentioned specifically in the Act, as Parliament knew they would present a problem. The Import Duties Act authorized the Government to accord a “colonial preference” to “any territory in respect of which a mandate of the League of Nations is being exercised by the Government of the United Kingdom.”

The Government issued an order granting a preference to three territories Britain held under mandate in Africa: Tanganyika, Cameroons, and Togoland. These territories fell under Covenant Article 22, paragraph 5. Their status was lower than that of Turkey's Arab territories, which fell under Article 22, paragraph 4, as having attained “a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized.”

The Government delayed, however, in issuing a comparable order that would have applied to Palestine. The reason for the Government's hesitancy was that if it accorded Palestine a preference, states with which Britain had a bilateral most favored nation treaty might claim that goods entering from their own territories were entitled to the same preference.

Recorded 17 May 2010

Translated and annotated by Kim Hunter Gordon

Lecturer

Fan Jixin 范繼信 (1939–2016), like Zhang Jiqing 張繼青 [Appendix H], was a member of the “ji” generation ( ji zi bei 继字辈) [both Appendix H] of the Jiangsu Company, specializing in both fu 付 or 副 and chou 丑. As with most chou scenes, he performs this scene in the Suzhou dialect. In later years he also became known as a prize-winning director for large productions in various xiqu genres.

Synopsis

Tale of the Mermaid Silk Handkerchief (Jiaoxiao ji 鮫綃記) is a Ming dynasty chuanqi 傳奇 play, probably by the sixteenth-century author Shen Jing (II) 沈鯨 [Appendix G] and set in the Southern Song dynasty. The plot has origins in Song historical texts in Ming fiction. The “mermaid silk” of the title is a light but dense material.

Wei Congdao 魏從道 and Shen Bigui 沈必貴 both pass the highest level of the imperial examinations. Having formed a deep friendship, they promise their infant children in marriage to one another. Wei becomes prefect of Lin’an (present-day Hangzhou) but is removed from his post through the machinations of the villainous Qin Hui 秦檜 (a historical figure, a Southern Song minister said to have been a spy for the Jurchen Jin). Shen leaves officialdom and returns to his ancestral home. Ten years later, their children, Wei Bijian 魏必簡 and Shen Qiongying 沈瓊英, have grown up but the families are separated. Wei Congdao sends his son Bijian to Lin’an with a betrothal gift of a handkerchief made of mermaid silk.

Meanwhile, a nouveau riche neighbor, Liu Junyu 劉君玉, proposes a marriage between his son and Shen Qiongying, and is flatly rejected. Humiliated, Liu seeks the services of an unscrupulous lawyer, Jia Zhuwen 賈主文, to exact revenge. In “Writing the Accusation” (“Xie zhuang” 寫狀) Jia persuades Liu that the most effective measure would be to trump up conspiracy charges accusing Wei Congdao of plotting to murder Qin Hui as a retribution for his lost position.

In documentation it presented to the League of Nations, as we will see in more detail shortly, the British Government highlighted its 1917 statement, the Balfour Declaration. The Balfour Declaration plays a central role in the Narrative. It was highlighted as well in 1948, in a statement issued in Tel Aviv to proclaim a Jewish state in Palestine. That statement recited that in 1897, “the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country.” The statement then continued, “This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of the 2nd November, 1917.”

A prominent Israeli jurist described the Balfour Declaration as the starting point for analysis of legal rights in Palestine. “From an international legal perspective,” wrote Yoram Dinstein, “the first step for any meaningful discussion of the Palestine Question is the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917.” The “Palestine Question” was the title of the agenda item for Palestine in documents of the United Nations, when it began dealing with the situation in 1947. Dinstein, long-time professor of international law at Tel Aviv University, was familiar with the work of the United Nations on Palestine, having served there in Israel's delegation.

The Balfour Declaration occupies a central place in the Narrative, as a font of Jewish entitlement claims in Palestine. It would, to be sure, be important in the subsequent history of Palestine. Only one sentence in length, it reads:

This statement was made by Britain's War Cabinet, a small coterie of top officials that managed the conduct of the war against Germany and its ally Turkey. The statement came to be known by the name of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, A. J. Balfour. Whether it should be the focal point for Palestine's status, analyzing from an international legal perspective, is not obvious.

Our data on the local population between Wu Xing's project and the later tenth century are spotty. Soon after the mid-eighth century census that is referenced in Chapter 4 provided the first somewhat credible count of registered households in greater Quanzhou, however, the northern core of the empire was wracked by the rebellion associated with An Lushan. This prompted a major wave of migration toward the comparative safety of the South, which remained largely unaffected and relatively stable. It is reasonable, therefore, to assume that Wu Xing was prompted to undertake construction of the Distributed Blessings Retention Dam and drainage of the coastal salt marsh partially if not primarily in response to pressure for land that was a result of a growing presence of the agriculturally oriented Sinitic immigrants.

That presence is attested by the next trove of census data compiled in the latter half of the tenth century. By the turn of the tenth century, faced with a growing pattern of rebellion that culminated with an uprising in the 870s and 880s from which the dynasty was unable to recover, the Tang court had unraveled. In the power vacuum that followed a congeries of autonomous and mutually hostile regional warlords competed for power. When all had shaken out and the Tang court had been formally deposed early in the tenth century, the Tang realm was a divided world. From a base on the Central Plain, the old heartland of Sinitic power and cultural authority, one leader claimed to have inherited the mantle of the Tang mandate and proclaimed a new dynasty called Liang. Along the length of the Yangtze River basin and across the deeper South, however, the struggle to fill the vacuum led to seven autonomous courts, each claiming their own share of the imperial mandate. The narrative of the interregnum decades that followed is complex and largely not relevant to our discussion. After several decades of division, however, a new order began to emerge from the Central Plain. This was the Song dynasty.

The Song court, which claimed the imperial mandate in 960, inherited from the Latter Zhou, the last of the interregnum northern dynasties, a policy of imperial reintegration.

Rapid urbanization is a daunting challenge for many governments in developing countries in Asia striving to provide basic needs such as safe drinking water and sanitation. As the provision of drinking water in the face of urban expansion has become a major planning and policy challenge in Cambodia, the country has had to rebuild effective local institutions after years of war. Unlike the other cases, Cambodian urbanization is not simply the growth of new secondary or primary cities and peri-urban expansion of functioning large cities. Rather, it is these processes combined with a complete reconstruction of formerly functioning institutions that were almost completely destroyed during a period in which a revolutionary government entirely emptied the country's cities in the name of building an agrarian utopia.

This chapter recounts the story of how one arm of government creatively responded to this huge challenge of urbanization during reconstruction. Beyond being an illustration of successful post-conflict reconstruction, the chapter emphasizes the need of formal institutions for informal and ad-hoc contributions; it describes the relationship between a municipal agency supplying water and urban poor communities in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. In doing so, it shows how good governance of infrastructure development and management can result from decision-making rooted in informal communities and processes, even under the most challenging of circumstances. Moreover, these strong ties to informal relationships may be precisely the reason why the system was so successful. Importantly, this story also bolsters the view that participatory infrastructure development recognizes a wide range of useful planners and regulators, including those from poor communities, who should not be considered merely passive recipients of development assistance. This latter point is an essential aspect of successful and democratic urbanization.

After years of civil war in the early 1990s, Cambodia began to focus on reconstruction and the development of its much-needed infrastructure across the country. While most government institutions at the capital/provincial levels were dysfunctional, the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority (PPWSA) was able to provide excellent water service to most of the capital's residents, even to the extremely poor. This case represents a traditional utility that was able to creatively experiment with new management practices and to solicit community involvement in the administration of its work.

The First Amendment to the Constitution confirms the close connection between political freedom and tolerance in general (discussed in the preceding chapter) with the freedom of speech:

The chapter on “Academic Freedom” also relates directly to our analysis of free speech, as evident in the “Free Speech Movement” that began on the University of California Berkeley campus during the Fall semester of 1964. It is certainly no coincidence that the question of free speech should arise in these two “zones” of positive freedom (religion and academia), as well as in the more obvious contexts of government, whose deliberative bodies must allow for free and open debate to function properly, or even in art (the subject of the following chapter). In order to make this broad topic more manageable we will examine “free speech” first in the context of the “Free Speech Movement”; second, free speech in its governmental context (including freedom of the press) and, finally, we will examine the phenomenon of “small talk” in Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener and Dostoyevski's Notes from Underground […] in order to determine whether it is possible, in our daily lives, to turn the adjective into a verb and to “free speech.”

The Free Speech Movement Set into the ground outside Sproul Hall, the building occupied by protestors during the height of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, there is a monument created in 1991 by the artist Mark Brest van Kempen to commemorate the events that took place there a quarter of a century earlier. The monument, or rather the disk,

The monument does not refer directly to the events of ‘64-’65 but, rather, to the soil and to the air above it which belong to no one, not even to the University, the nation, or any institution or “entity.”

While the cliché of “academic freedom” has unfortunately led to a freedom that is often merely “academic,” I would argue that institutions of higher learning are greater expressions of our freedom than any other institution, including that of the government itself. What does “academic freedom” tell us about freedom in general, and what does freedom, in general, tell us about academic freedom in particular? Having distinguished the common, “negative” notion of freedom identified with individualism or, as it is more commonly understood, doing what one wants without outside constraint, from the more positive view of freedom discussed in the first part of this book that identifies the notion with our creativity and potential originality in acting in accord with our highest—divine or absolute—aspirations, we are now in a better position to apply this positive notion to other institutions and “zones,” beginning with academia and then proceeding to politics, free speech, artistic freedom (the music of Beethoven) and, finally, friendship.

As we learned in the previous chapters, positive freedom requires work. We have seen this in the case of Sisyphus, whom Camus declared happy not despite the fact of his incessant, “proletariat” toil but because he knew it was the “price to be paid” for challenging the absolute authority of the gods. We have also seen this in the case of Nietzsche, for whom artistic freedom is not achieved by simply ignoring the “tyranny of arbitrary laws” and traditions but by working with and struggling against them. And, finally, we have seen this in the case of Kant, for whom moral goodness is only achieved by ignoring precisely those contingent forms of self-interest that define our so-called personal, individual freedom. As noted in the Introduction to this work, positive freedom has nothing to do with the freedom of the individual with which it is often confused, as in Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom.

One thing that is clear in approaching the question of academic freedom is that it, too, is largely defined in opposition to personal, individual freedom and in accord with the work that is necessary to make such freedom possible.

Singing

Kunqu singing, often called water-milled singing (shuimo qiang 水磨腔), is characterized by slow tempi, sustained pitches, and melisma, in which syllables are sung over several notes (Marjory Liu 1974, 65). Voice is usually accompanied by the flute which is the most important instrument in the orchestra. Most scenes have a principal aria (zhuqu 主曲), considered central to the scene's performance. In kunqu the melody is always carried by the singer and the orchestra together, and unlike in many other xiqu genres arias feature no orchestral bridges (guomen 過門). Given that there are “no instrumental interludes where the voice can rest” (Strassberg 1976, 52), where and how to breathe becomes an important consideration, and is often marked on scores.

Arias are divided into two melodic modes, the northern-style melodies (beiqu 北曲), with their seven-note diatonic scale, and southern-style melodies (nanqu 南曲), which are fundamentally pentatonic, using the other two notes only for ornamentation (Mark 2013, 21). Kunqu circles generally consider the former to represent the “spirit of the north” as it is more “male, exalted, lively, and rapid,” while the latter is considered to represent the “spirit of the south” as it is “soft, fluid, and melodious” (Tsiang Un-kai 1932, 14), using slower tempi, more melisma, and “expansive rhythmic structures” (Nine Modes Manual Online 2022). Broadly speaking, northern-style arias may be more martial and strident, and southern-styles more romantic and mellifluous in character.

Since Chinese is a modal language, the melody is deeply structured by the tones associated with each character (Marjory Liu 1974). The pronunciation of certain characters also depends on whether the aria is in the northern or the southern style. One of the most important phonetic distinctions between singing northern- and southern-style arias involves the entering tone (rusheng 入聲) characters. In southern-style arias, entering tones are usually sung with a glottal stop, ref lecting pronunciations in Wu dialects (and other forms of southern Chinese) and furnishing a “tremendously dynamic effect … which brings out every detail of the melismatic patterns and yet does not destroy the overall coherence” (ibid., 84).

The Paris Peace Conference afforded an opportunity for the Zionist Organization to explain its reasons for a Jewish national home. Israeli historian Tom Segev called the peace conference “the pinnacle of Weizmann's diplomatic achievements.” Segev wrote that Weizmann “managed to ensure that the British would remain in Palestine.” Segev explained Weizmann's success: “Weizmann, at the head of the Zionist delegation, pleaded for the international ratification of the Balfour Declaration. As a result, the League of Nations agreed to grant a mandate to the British, empowering them to govern Palestine, that included an explicit responsibility to help the Jews establish a national home in the country. The mandate was Weizmann's own personal achievement.”

Segev's assessment reflects what the Narrative came to reflect, that the Zionist Organization succeeded at the Paris Peace Conference in convincing the world to promote its objectives. The reality was far different. In Paris, the Zionist Organization did not move the international dial on the topic of Zionism. Nor did it ensure that Britain would remain in Palestine. Britain had its own reasons for doing so. Neither did it gain agreement from the League of Nations, which was not yet in existence. And when the League did address Palestine, as we shall see, it did not empower Britain to govern there or to promote a Jewish national home.

Weizmann gave himself less credit than did Segev for his performance in Paris. In his memoir, Weizmann, who was not known for understating his own successes, could find nothing more positive to say about his achievements in Paris than that the Zionist participation resulted in some “good press in France.”

The invitation issued to the Zionist Organization to make a statement at the Paris Peace Conference did afford it a chance to state its case in a forum that could shape events. The major powers were gathered to arrange peace with Germany and Turkey and to make decisions about territory being taken from them. The Zionist Organization made both a written and an oral presentation.

In its written plea, the Zionist Organization laid out a plan for Britain to control Palestine, quite a bold move for a non-governmental organization.

A Missing Legacy?

Robert K. Merton did not identify as a sociologist of culture and would have rejected this label as an attempt to pigeonhole his sociological style. When forced to adopt professional titles, he used to introduce himself to nonacademic audiences simply as a sociologist or, while addressing colleagues, resorting to the denominations of those American Sociological Association (ASA) and International Sociological Association (ISA) sections he belonged to: sociological theory and sociology of science. In his New York Times obituary (it is their policy to make the eulogy conform to the deceased person's thought, so that one might even take the commendation literally as a personal statement), it is handed down to posterity that Merton coined the concept of “theories of the middle range,” which refers to “undertakings that steered clear of grand speculative and abstract doctrines while also avoiding pedantic inquiries that were unlikely to yield significant results.” His contribution to the study of science is synthesized with the same brevity with which, according to Merton, scientists should provide information about themselves and their actions: “Merton gained his pioneering reputation as a sociologist of science, exploring how scientists behave and what it is that motivates, rewards, and intimidates them.”

Although RKM (Robert K. Merton loved abbreviations, even when it came to his own name) did not make “culture” the subject of his sociological research and did not consider it as the sole guiding principle of his investigations, his work nevertheless offers several insights worthy of consideration for those who have devoted themselves, in one way or another, to the sociology of culture. If some scholars in this subfield wanted to make RKM a “reference individual” (Merton 1968b, 357–359), they would easily turn to his publications that examine cultural productions empirically, but there are also other writings in which cultural characteristics are given an important place in the design of sociological research. Monographs that belong to the former category include Science, Technolog y and Society in Seventeenth Century England (Merton 1938a [1970)], Mass Persuasion (Merton 1946 [2004]), On the Shoulders of Giants (Merton 1965 [1985]), and The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (Merton and Barber 2004), as well as countless of his essays (almost all his contributions on the different aspects of scientists’ activities, however, are collected in one volume: Merton 1979).

Sometimes need is—indeed—the mother of invention; sometimes, remarkable individuals and institutions can creatively solve community-level problems in the face of extreme political and financial constraints. This book is about such experiments in local governance resulting from the growing demands created by rapid urbanization. In writing about them in comparative context, I aim to shed light on some of the inner workings of local leadership in public and community sectors in ways that improve our understanding of how the practice of development is unfolding across a wide range of countries, predominantly in the Global South.

By now, it is common parlance to think of the development states of Asia and elsewhere as national behemoths implementing various versions of Modernist projects such as those detailed by Jim Scott (1998), whose version posits an ever-increasing exercise of state authority over the daily lives of citizens. Counterposed to such descriptions of strong development states are extensive descriptions of elaborate networks of informal and non-state-sanctioned community groups seeking grassroots decision-making authority. Concurrent with these two streams of thinking, involving state and non-state political actors, are the more formulaic development economics approaches whereby investments in capital result in the rewards of economic development, as has long been articulated by practitioners of development wishing to downplay the political aspects of their work.

Without undervaluing these precedents, this book navigates waters in which local governing bodies mitigate powerful nation-states—waters in which community activists channel their organizing capacities into urban infrastructure projects and in which community organizations model non-traditional development finance mechanisms. In charting this route, the book borrows perspectives and methods from each vantage point as a way to show how local government actors are not only providing a range of development alternatives but also managing new forms of public participation amidst rapidly changing local societies and politics.

Where these local arrangements come into play before a national development state creates large infrastructure systems to respond to urbanization needs, sociopolitical structures become embedded within daily practice and sometimes form the basis for a participatory version of self-governance. It is my argument that these kinds of arrangements should be seen as the seeds of a resilient form of governance in a rapidly urbanizing and developing global context.

About Masters’ Lectures

The purpose of this book is to help researchers, students, and theatregoers get a sense of how actor knowledge is structured and expressed in Chinese traditional theatre (xiqu 戲曲), specifically in the form of kunqu 崑曲. To this end, it offers some of the necessary tools to interpret what goes on when actors are onstage, placing performance practice within its network of transmission, vocabulary of technique, repertoire structure, and institutional context. Outside of China and Chinese theatre studies, few theatre practitioners have a clear sense of how actor training or repertoire transmission in China actually function, or their terms of reference. Yet theatre accounts such as these are important not only to help enthusiasts and researchers come to grips with xiqu on its own terms but also to assist those who would like to work respectfully on intercultural projects involving xiqu. This introduction can only briskly sketch some information about kunqu that should make the lectures more intelligible to the reader newly coming to Chinese theatre. If we succeed in our aims, the book itself may serve as the introduction to kunqu.

Knowledge about xiqu exists largely in an embodied form. The accessibility of artist expertise has been circumscribed by its tradition of oral transmission. Historically, hard-won knowledge of this kind has not been lightly shared; many aspects of theatre artistry have been regarded as sensitive, even proprietary. Transmission is sometimes treated as delicately as material inheritance. Fortunately for the aficionado, amateur performer, and researcher, xiqu actor accounts of their performance practice began to be published in periodicals in the Republican era (1912–1949) and in books after 1949. Audiovisual lectures were also sporadically recorded, but it is only in recent years that large-scale and more systematic projects to document xiqu theatre practice have appeared. The largest such enterprise to date for kunqu is Masters’ Lectures on One Hundred Kunqu Scenes (Kunqu baizhong, dashi shuoxi 崑曲百種, 大師說戲) (Yip Siu Hing and Masters’ Studio 2014). The present book consists of annotated translations of 12 of its lectures, not even one eighth of the original Chinese project's scope.

By referencing the Balfour Declaration in the 1948 proclamation of Jewish statehood, the founders of Israel took the Balfour Declaration to mean that Britain had promised a state. The meaning of the Balfour Declaration in that regard was a matter of debate all through the period Britain governed Palestine. The Zionist Organization aimed for statehood, and it played a role in implementing British policy in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration itself, however, avoided any definition of “national home.”

The context of the adoption and delivery of the statement provides clues. The War Cabinet, in instructing Balfour to convey its statement to the English Zionists, asked him to “take a suitable opportunity of making the following declaration of sympathy with the Zionist aspirations.” The Zionists aspired to statehood. In the communications leading up to the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, the English Zionists pressed for a statement that would strongly imply an aim of statehood. Draft language was exchanged that would have recited that the Government “accepts the principle that Palestine should be reconstituted as the National Home of the Jewish people.” The War Cabinet's rejection of such phrasing was deliberate. The Balfour Declaration did not by its terms envisage Jewish statehood in Palestine.

In the aftermath of World War I, protection of minority groups was high on the international agenda. New borders were generating new minorities. For example, a German population group who found themselves within Poland as a result of a border shift came to be protected by treaty, so that they could continue to develop in a German cultural environment. Germans inhabiting the sector of Poland in question were guaranteed a right to conduct primary schooling in the German language, in schools funded by the Polish government. In Palestine, the Jews, similarly, were expected to be a minority, hence “national home” might mean something similar. The treaty on Poland did not, to be sure, use the term “national home,” but the term served readily as shorthand for what was spelled out in that treaty.

Concern immediately arose on the Arab side in any event about what the War Cabinet had in mind. Hussein bin Ali asked the British Government to clarify.

The writers of the Passover Haggadah brought together four passages from disparate portions of the Torah to frame the allegory of the four sons:

We can appropriate this passage for another use. The story of the four sons illustrates the four tasks of Jewish Studies.

The wise son's question represents Jewish Studies scholars hashing out matters related to Jewish law, Jewish custom, Jewish history and Jewish thought among themselves. This son is wise because he is one of the learned scholars discussing Jewish matters at a high level with other learned scholars. Like any proud Jewish family, we love to put our wise children in front of company. One can find Ruth Wisse, for example, not only on the pages of prestigious academic journals, but on radio and television. Jacques Derrida made no secret of the Talmudic influence on his deconstructive methodol ogy which spread to secular philosophy, literary theory and throughout the social sciences. The wise siblings own their Jewishness and it informs their questioning.