중국의 가부장제와 공·사 영역에 관한 고찰

The Issues of the Public-Private Division in the Chinese Patriarchal System

The division of the public and private spheres has been a major focus for feminist debates in explaining women's exploitation. According to many Western feminists, it is this division, fully established in the Nineteenth Century in Western society, that justifies the norms of gender hierarchy. The question posed is whether the conceptual division of the public and private is applicable to other Asian societies, which have long cherished patriarchal traditions. By taking Chinese society as an example, this paper aims at analyzing how the pubic/private dichotomy is interpreted in traditional Confucian Chinese society. It also seeks to examine the attempts made at promoting women's participation in the public sphere in modern China. The concepts of the private and public in Confucian traditions have, more likely, intertwined compared to the Ancient Greek and modern Western societies that been developed very discrete ideas of the private as opposed to the public. This is well demonstrated in the Chinese political system, which has been based on the ideal of "kaguktonggu(家國同構)", which literally means that the family and the state have the same structure. According to this definition, there was a clear division between the public and the private, but the rules governing the two spheres were identical. It is here that we should add another theoretical framework, in order to fully understand the ways in which Chinese patriarchy operated. The principle of "Nae(內)-Oe(外) [inside/outside]," which rigorously classifies activities, roles and living space according to sex, governed everyday lives in Chinese society. This "inside-outside" dichotomy appears to be analogous to the pubic-private opposition in western feminist thought. In fact, the marriage system and the rules of inheritance, which are some of the central traits of the patriarchal system, have been based on the `inside-outside' dichotomy and have undergone little change for two thousand years since these were established during the Chu Dynasty. The exclusion of women from the public sphere in China was as consistently maintained as it was for women in Western societies. After the communist revolution, however, the Chinese state has made remarkable breakthroughs, owing to its modernizing project with respect to women's lives, and by eliminating barriers that hinder women's participation in the public sphere. This revolutionary shift, however, had its own limitations insofar as the new democratic patriarchal system that emerged was a mixture of socialist ideas and the traditional patriarchal system. In other words, the revolutionary reforms for gender equity, which aimed to eliminate the `inside-outside' sexual opposition, were not able to get rid of deep-rooted patriarchal traditions. However, it is also true that this was the first time in Chinese history that women became active participants in the public and political arenas, since the Cultural Revolution, and should be evaluated as a big step forward for the Chinese women's movement. From a feminist perspective, any consideration of the question of Chinese women's liberation must also recognize that it was the political interests of the Chinese state, not merely the women's movement, that led to women's political participation on a mass scale. As repeatedly shown in the case of China, the state-led women's movement has a weak foundation. There is evidence that in the recent social discourse of "Punyohoega(婦女回家) [women must go back home]", emerging after the reform eras of the 1980s, the state has sought to bring women back into the domestic sphere, so as to adjust its restructuring of Chinese society according to the principles of a socialist market economy.