重新思考公民与公共生活：基于儒家立场和中国历史经验

本文基于中国的历史经验和儒家理念，重新思考公共生活与公民概念。在西方，无论在历史中还是在理论中，公共生活的基本载体都是城邦，这是一个点状的政治共同体。不过，至少从尧舜开始，自觉的中国就呈现为超大规模的文明与政治共同体，由此也决定了中国的公共生活形态和公民身份与西方不同：中国存在着多中心、多层级的公共生活单元；所有人在不同层级上参与公共生活，多少都具有公民性；作为积极公民的古典君子或者儒家士君子的公民身份是多层次和可扩展的，是真正的国家公民。这一中国经验提醒我们，应该超越基于西方经验形成的关于公共生活和公民的地方性概念和理论，发展更为普遍的共同体、公共生活和公民理论。

Citizenship and Public Life Revisited: Based on the Confucian Views and Chinese Historical Experience

Based on Chinese historic experience and Confucian ideas，this paper reflects upon the concepts of public life and citizen, which originate from Western experience. In both Western histories and theories, the basic carrier of public life was polis, or city, a small scale political unit. China, however, has been a super scale civilization and political body since Emperor Yao and Emperor Shun, about B.C. 2000. This has made the patterns of public life and citizenship in China different from its western counterparts. During Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties, three characteristics featured public life and citizenship: multi centric units of public life; every person having varying degrees of publicity; and Junzi, as the most active citizen, owning multi layered identities and acting throughout hierarchical political systems. In the post classical period, Confucian adherents were devoted to cultivate a non hierarchical Shi Junzi (scholar Junzi) as the promoter, organizer and leader of public life, and build a series of effective institutions supporting public life. As a result, we can observe a picture of multi layered and multi centric public life and citizenship: Every people lived in more than one public communities, and had more than one citizenship identity generally, participating in public life on different levels; In every community, Shi Junzi or gentlemen worked as active citizens, differentiated themselves from Xiaoren, the inactive mass; Shi Junzi was the only group connected with all communities. This paper concludes that the conceptualization of public life and citizenship was situated in a Western context, and calls for the development of a universal concept of the terms which can accommodate both the case of China and the West.