Xamining The Chinese Concept Of Face In Light Of Identity Theories

The concept of face rooted in Chinese culture has attracted academics' interest both at home and abroad, for it plays an important role in people's daily life. Brown & Levinson's(1978,1987) theory stands out among the enormous research into the face concept and enjoys a universal fame. As defined by them, face is "the public self-image claimed from others" and consists of "positive face" and "negative face". Their "negative face" means "one's freedom of action and freedom from imposition", and it seems to neglect the influence to the concept of face imposed by the value orientation in Chinese culture, thus it fails to account for the Chinese concept of face.Spencer-Oatey(2007)'s approach of conceputalizing and analyzing the concept of face drawing from the identity theories provides great insights for us. The analysis of face should be conducted through examining what sorts of factors could be face-sensitive in a specific culture. This paper followed Spencer-Oatey's approach and designed a questionnaire based on Schwartz's(1992, 2001) 10 universal value constructs with the attempt to re-investigate the Chinese face phenomenon through looking into different face-sensitive factors for Chinese poeple, and to re-examine whether Brown & Levinson's core notion of negative face will be among these face-sensitive factors. 115 copies of questionnaire were distributed to a variety of participants including administrative officials, graduate students, teachers and workers in a manufacturing factory. Only 100 copies of the finished questionnaire were recycled and all the 100 copies are valid to use.Based on the analysis of the data collected, this study found that in Chinese culture, there are many factors which can cause people to gain Mianzi or lose Mianzi in Chinese society. Among them, three factors of a person(including Being Competent, Having a Happy Family Life and Being Positive towards Life), these three factors found in that same person's closely related family members or friends and the three factors found in that person's group where he/she enjoys a memebership all lead him/her to have strong Mianzi gain. Another three factors which will let most of the participants to enjoy Mianzi gain are Being Competent, Having a Happy Family Life and Being Independent in the above three levels, while Being Incompetent, Being Negative towards Life and Having an Unharmonious Family Life will cause people to lose Mianzi. Also interesting is the finding that 52% of the subjects think that Mianzi is the respect an individual claims from the community and the society, not one's dignity or one's public self-image claimed by Brown & Levinson.Based on the results of the data analysis, this thesis drew three conclusions: (1) There are many factors that can involve people in Mianzi matters in Chinese society; the most prominent factors are competence, attitude towards life, family life and social status. (2) Factors both at individual level, interpersonal level and group level can be identified in Chinese culture. (3) There is no clear evidence that individual freedom of action and freedom from imposition is one of the many Mianzi-sensitive factors for Chinese people; consequently, Brown & Levinson's notion of negative face can not appropriately explain Mianzi in Chinese culture.