Discourse on Privacy by Women Writers in Late Twentieth-Century China

Abstract

There is a common belief in China and the West that “the Chinese” have no concept of privacy, although there is a well-established tradition of private property and privacy values in China. In the twentieth century, especially in the PRC, rhetoric on the public good prevailed over individualism and subjectivity, but both privacy and private property have been reevaluated in the post-Mao era. In the 1990s, writing about private life became associated with fiction and journalism by women, and privacy became publishers’ shorthand for sexual revelations. By the end of the century, interest in the public at large showed a wider appreciation of the values and functions of privacy. At the same time, the status of private property in the constitution and in law was restored to precommunist respectability. This article analyzes the meanings and function of privacy in writing by women in the 1990s and comments on gender aspects of privacy as well as the relationships between authors, publishers, and readers in the late twentieth century.