Source: Wikipedia — "Face (sociological concept)"
- Title: Face (sociological concept)
- Publication: Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
- URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)
- Type: tertiary (crowd-sourced encyclopedia); stance neutral, well-cited
- Accessed: 2026-09-03
Extract
- Lu Xun's 1934 essay "On Face" (論面子/论面子), published in the magazine Manhua Shenghuo ("Caricature of Life"), is reported as a canonical Chinese-language primary text specifically about mianzi — not a Western commentary on the concept but a Chinese writer's own satirical examination of it, including an anecdote from the late Qing dynasty in which Western officials demanding concessions from China's Grand Council were shown out through a side door rather than the main gate, a symbolic move to deny them face while China gained it. The article quotes an English translation attributed to Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, from Selected Works of Lu Hsun, Foreign Languages Press, 1959: "The term 'face' keeps cropping up in our conversation... grasping it will be like grabbing a queue twenty-four years ago – everything else will follow." This is this project's translator-practice data point for this word (see word page) — a professional, published, named-translator rendering of the concept, keeping it as English "face" rather than transliterating "mianzi."
- Lu Xun's essay itself refers to Arthur Henderson Smith, an American missionary whose 1894 book Chinese Characteristics included an influential early Western chapter on "face" — reported as one of the earliest substantial Western treatments of the concept, predating Hu's 1944 academic paper by half a century. This project has not read Smith's book directly this session (an open gap).
- A dating claim earlier than any other source found this session: American newspapers are reported to have listed the concept in "Chinese Proverbs" columns as early as 1874. A citation of "lose face" in The Times is also reported, dated 3 August 1929.
- Reports the OED's own characterization that the phrase originated among "the English community in China" — consistent with, but not identical in wording to, the pidgin-English framing in asianreviewofbooks-keevak-2022-on-saving-face.md.
- Confirms Hu Hsien-Chin (1944) as the pioneering academic source for the mianzi/lian distinction, quoting Hu's characterization of mianzi as something that "can be borrowed, struggled for, added to, padded... built up through initial high position, wealth, power, ability," and contrasting the severity of méiyǒu liǎn ("without face," "the most severe condemnation") against bùyào liǎn ("don't want face," expressing shamelessness) — an additional lian-side data point alongside the fuller quotations in journalofsociology-qi-2011-face-chinese-concept-global-sociology.md.
- States that Goffman "introduced the concept of 'face' into social theory" via his 1955 article and 1967 book, but — in the specific passage reached by this project's fetch — does not itself discuss Goffman's footnote acknowledgment of Chinese sources (that connection is independently confirmed instead by the directly-read Qi 2011 PDF — see journalofsociology-qi-2011-face-chinese-concept-global-sociology.md).
Gaps
- Accessed via a WebFetch prompt-summarization pass rather than a full raw-text read of the article; per this project's standing fence on WebFetch/WebSearch synthesis reliability, the Lu Xun translation quotation and the 1874/1929 dates should ideally be cross-checked against the Wikipedia article's own cited sources directly in a future session — not yet done.
- Smith's 1894 Chinese Characteristics itself, and the original Selected Works of Lu Hsun (1959) volume containing the "On Face" translation, have not been read directly by this project.