Controversy On Morality: The Display And Criticism Of Private Experience By Chinese Newspapers In The 1920s

In the 1920 s,Chinese newspapers often published articles on the topic of love and marriage,and there were occasional more time-sensitive discussions triggered by private emotional events.Journalists,editors,and readers participated in these discussions.However,because the society had not formed clearer family and community rules at the time,and lacked clear and precise relevant laws and regulations,the exposure of these private emotional events in public newspapers and periodicals often caused continuous discourse controversy.The media’s extensive coverage of these private emotional issues,although involving many sensational parts,has also attracted people of different identities and factions to participate in these public discussions,responding to these discussions with their own experience or professional knowledge.It also often involved more in-depth and essential moral issues.Therefore,this study selects two specific private emotional events published in the newspapers in 1923 as research cases to explore how the public has continued to argue about these two events.One is that Chen Shujun,a student of Peking University,canceled the engagement with her fiancé Shen Houpei and married her newly-widowed brother-in-law,Tan Xihong,a professor of biology at Peking University.Based on this incident,Zhang Jingsheng published a series of remarks about the "rules of love" and thus triggered continuous public discussion about the event and the "rules of love".Another is that Zheng Zhenxun,a professor at Southeast University,has published his personal marriage history to Women ’s Magazine,seeking public sympathy for his “escape marriage” behavior.Based on the theoretical framework of the literary public sphere and sentimental moral discourse,we explore how the individual experience narratives that originated in the private sphere in the 1920 s entered the public sphere through the media and triggered discussions about moral concepts in society.This study found that Chinese newspapers and magazines in the 1920 s displayed many narratives about private experience and triggered ongoing discussions about love,marriage,and morality.Readers,editors,authors,and many intellectuals participate in these discussions.Although they are attracted by trivial personal emotional experiences,their discussions often reveal the changing values and new moral concepts in society.The participants in these discussions form a public sphere of literature with newspapers and periodicals.At the same time,this is a complex discourse space,and people of different factions have launched a discourse competition for morality.Liberals and conservatives stand in their own positions and express different moral statements about love and marriage.When narrating virtue,it is also narrating moral groups.Therefore,individuals in this public sphere have completed the exchange of private emotional experiences through newspapers and periodicals,resulting in a common agreement on more consistent moral rules of emotion,and finally completed mutual confirmation of self-moral subjectivity.