Is there a Chinese Sense of Privacy?

With the aim to identify and analyse Chinese concepts of privacy, now and in the past, a workshop was held at Leiden University and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) from 31 May to 2 June 2001. There is a common belief that concepts of privacy are attributes of national cultures, and it has even been claimed that 'the Chinese' do not have a sense of privacy.

* By BONNIE S MCDOUGALL

Modern studies of privacy have nonetheless shown that a sense of privacy is a basic characteristic of all humankind, but its manifestations differ from place to place, over time, and according to differences in age, gender, and other circumstances. To date, systematic studies of privacy in China are few, however, and there is no general history or sociology of privacy in China.

The workshop papers investigated different ways in which Chinese people experience and conceptualize privacy. Even among people of the same age, social background, educational level, and nationality there may be a wide range of different views, so that attached to a large body of generally shared opinion, there may be a long tail of minority opinions as well as opinions which are mutually contradictory. Since isolated instances of behaviour in regard to privacy issues do not add up to concepts of privacy but need to be examined within a general framework, the workshop papers also addressed privacy mechanisms, functions, and values from different disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives, and attention was focused on methodologies which avoid the imposition of Western values.

Terminology is a crucial issue in cross-cultural comparisons of concepts of privacy, and several papers took terminology as their starting point. The words 'private' and 'privacy' in English come from the Latin privatus, meaning 'withdrawn from public life, deprived of office, peculiar to oneself', and this generally negative connotation is continued into the definitions of the English word 'private' (the first recorded appearance of which goes back to 1450). By the end of the nineteenth century, 'privacy' became related to legal and political rights, came to be associated with modernity and advanced civilization, and was attributed a moderately or even very high value. Near-synonyms for 'private' as a descriptor in English in different contexts include 'individual', 'personal', 'family', 'domestic', 'secret', 'confidential', 'secure', 'inner', 'interior', and 'intimate'. The Chinese word most commonly given as the equivalent of 'private' is si. Like 'privacy', si is commonly paired with its antonym gong (public), and commonly has a negative connotation in modern Chinese, the main associations being with selfishness and unwanted solitude rather than intimacy and desired solitude. Nevertheless, over its long history, si has had a wide range of meanings in Chinese, including combinations where si is combined with positive words like jia (home, family, domestic). Also in use to describe privacy experiences are expressions such as qin and ni, denoting intimacy, related concepts such as nei (inner, interior), you, youjing etc. (secusion), and mi (secret), and the modern coinage yinsi (privacy).

Comparisons with Dutch and other European languages also show a diversity of privacy terminology. Few English-speakers who are aware that there is no exact equivalent of the word 'privacy' in several European languages would wish to deny on linguistic grounds that concepts of privacy exist in the Netherlands, France, Italy, Sweden, or Finland. It was generally agreed that differences in denotation or connotation do not invalidate the proposition that concepts of privacy exist in equivalent ways among English-speakers and Chinese-speakers.

Workshop participants also considered at some length how to avoid imposing pre-determined definitions of privacy on the interpretation of texts (including both verbal and visual documentation). The proliferation of definitions of privacy in English and other Western languages is one obstacle; more serious is the danger of shaping our understanding of Chinese concepts of privacy by imposing Western definitions on Chinese experiences. Chinese definitions might be seen as an alternative starting point but, in the absence of systematic studies of privacy in China, this alternative is not promising. Definitions of privacy were, therefore, not an overriding objective of the workshop papers. Instead, the papers sought to clarify those areas of privacy issues and conceptualizations, which may or may not be unique to China, shared or disputed by Chinese people at different times and places, internally coherent or disparate, and valued greatly, moderately or hardly at all.

Fifteen papers were presented at the workshop by scholars from the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, Russia, the US, Australia, China, and Taiwan. (An index of the workshop's international scope was the fact that many of the participants were living or working outside their native country.)

The chief outcome of the workshop will be an edited volume of twelve papers, with an introduction in concepts of privacy with particular attention paid to methodological aspects of privacy studies, to be published early in 2002. In addition, a large-scale international conference is on comparative studies of privacy with a central focus on non-Western concepts of privacy to be held within the next three years.

The workshop was jointly organized by Bonnie S. McDougall, professor of Chinese at the University of Edinburgh and NIAS Fellow in Residence 2000/2001 and Maghiel van Crevel, professor of Chinese Language & Literature at Leiden University, with the assistance of Remy Cristini, student at the Sinological Institute at Leiden University. The academic success and smooth running of the workshop were largely due to excellent teamwork by these three. The workshop was held at Leiden University (one day) and at Wassenaar (two days). We are grateful to Leiden University and NIAS for the use of their facilities and cooperation. The workshop was sponsored by CNWS, IIAS, NWO, NIAS, LUF, and the Taipei Representative Office in the Netherlands, and we are most grateful for their assistance.

A bibliography of books in English on privacy, a briefing paper on Western concepts of privacy, the workshop abstracts and the workshop programme were provided on an pre-existing website containing other materials on privacy research, news, contacts and such like. *

Please visit this site for more information: www.arts.ed.ac.uk/asianstudies/privacyproject.