Abstract：Defined by classical Western philosophers such as Aristotle and Cicero, the term “civil society” initially meant “citizen society”， but the concept acquired other meanings after the European Middle Ages. Both Hegel and Marx emphasize the dichotomy between civil society and the state, the latter particularly criticizing it for seeing others as instruments and reducing itself to an instrument. The Western Marxist Gramsci finds intellectual and cultural relations in civil society, which Habermas sees as a sociocultural system and a space woven by interactive discourses. The cultural attributes of modern civil society and its opposition to the state dictate that it will “revise” the writing of official history. In the present studies of modern Chinese history, the image of Qiu Jin, the heroine of the 1911 Revolution, is suffering from such “revision”. In 2013, based on her obsessive notion that marriage is a contract， Duanmu Cixiang published an article, “Qiu Jin’s poor little husband: he is frightened to death”, which reconstructs the marital relationship between Qiu Jin and her husband Wang Tingjun. Drawing on the seriously flawed memoir of Hattori Shigeko, wife of the Japanese sinologist and militarist Hattori Unokichi, Duanmu describes Wang as a “warm man”. Rife with slut-shaming, her discourse depicts Qiu Jin as a marriage-breaching gold-digger.The appearance of Duanmu Cixiang’s article, which reflects the intervention of the ethics of the emerging Chinese civil society over historiography, is not an isolated phenomenon. Public-sphere discourse in Chinese civil society is still at a fledgling stage. Promoting principles of contractual seizure—protecting personal safety, property security, family stability, and other interests, and fighting against accidental events—is the theme it is most eager to express. In the marriage market, widely circulated are tags of physical attributes: money, physical appearance, sex, and age. Deeming “contractual exchange” the golden rule, any activity that violates the rule, even noble causes such as sacrifice for one’s country, is met with disgust by proponents of the ethics of a civil society.This paper makes a critical refutation in response to Duanmu Cixiang’s deliberate slandering of Qiu Jin and Hattori Shigeko’s memoir which is full of prejudices and errors. The author argues that the revisionism represented by Duanmu Cixiang is parochial and irrational. Adopting newly discovered historical materials, it attacks established history writings by mobilizing Internet buzzwords. It seeks not only to revise the characterization of specific historical figures and events but also to rewrite the paradigms and values of historiography. It is so committed to promoting the parochial ethics of “contractual exchange” that it will eagerly seek to blacken images of heroic figures simply because it cannot tolerate their altruism, which is the opposite of “contractual exchange”.The discovery of historical facts, the renewal of research methods, and the evolution of human ethics can all bring about the necessary revision of historical writings. Nevertheless, a historical researcher must be cautioned against parochial revisionist discourses, for advocates of civil society ethics are trying very hard to wedge it into the present-day historiography.
刘晓艺. 市民社会伦理已渗入历史书写[J]. 浙江大学学报(人文社会科学版), 2023, 53(1): 144-159.
Liu Xiaoyi. Penetration of Chinese Civil Society Ethics into the Contemporary Historiography: A Tendency of Historical Revisionism in the Recent Qiu Jin Studies. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 2023, 53(1): 144-159.
2023, Vol. 53 
