中欧社会论坛 - China Europa ForumThe Origins of Modern Chinese Concepts of Privacy: Notes on Social Structure and Moral Discourse
in Chinese concepts of privacy
Peter Zarrow
2002
edited by B. S. McDougall and A. Hansson, Leiden: E.J. Brill, pp.121-146.
In this article, the author examines the shaping of the notion of privacy in the late Qing empire. He claims that in the traditional Chinese society, the private realm (si) was highly regarded as a residual category, left over after the public sphere (gong) was defined. In this, the traditional Chinese society resembles ancient Greek or Roman society. After the Taiping Rebellion, and especially in the 1890s, the traditional Chinese context changes dramatically: the traditional dynastic system starts to collapse, there is the influence of Western political ideas and ideas of privacy, and a rising number of gentry find no official positions. In the post-Taiping era in which the state’s share of public activities was decreasing, a gentry-merchant public sphere – i.e., a realm of rational, critical discussion of public issues, open, at least in theory, to all educated and rational voices, regardless of official status, wealth or class position. It is a sphere of public activity independent, to a large degree, of the state. In the context of the late Qing, however, a state would have seemed more necessary than ever, and the educational and the examination systems continued to link state and society closely. In this context, those gentry who had no hopes of official employment would be separating family from state in order to give ultimate devotion to family (and perhaps more attention to local communities), while those who did become officials would be pursuing their ambitions by displaying their ultimate loyalty to the state, and thus separating family from state as well. In this context, the notions of si and gong attained independent meanings. The fact that the rhetoric of family and state seems to have been little altered, however, suggests that the emergence of a publicly-acknowledged private realm remained latent. Liang Qichao was among the first to make the contrast between gong and si explicit. For Liang Qichao, personal virtue was not merely the foundation of public virtue, but personal virtues, collecitvely speaking, were civic virtue. Civic virtue was seen as the extension of private morality. In a larger sense, the state- and nation-building projects inevitably required a rethinking of si. The private realm was thus no longer a residual category, left over after the public sphere was defined, but an essential part of the late Qing reconceptualisation of the political.