2. Literature Review

Privacy, in Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary, means “the state of being alone and not watched or disturbed by other people; the state of being free from the attention of the public.”

Privacy issue is inevitable in international communication. Many articles at home and abroad talk about the conflicts of privacy between China and the West. There are two main trends in recent researches. One is that English-speaking people’s privacy is regarded as the only standard of value judgment. What’ more, it thinks that Chinese people pay little attention to privacy. While the other maintains the Western people focus on privacy too much (Cheng Hongbo, 2008: 237). There were also many scholars studying the privacy concepts. Hall (1969) classifies distance into fixed-feature space, semi-feature space and informal space, which were marked particularly by shifts in vocal volume that Americans (middle class adults, mainly natives of the northern seaboard) use in the structuring of informal space. I.Altman also thought that there was more than one kind of privacy. He regarded privacy as selective control used by inpiduals or groups when they came across others. In other words, privacy was a kind of protection idea and mechanism to avoid contact and disturbance. He also classified the privacy into inpidual privacy and collective privacy. Inpidual privacy was a kind of personal privacy, while collective privacy was a kind of group privacy (Quoted in He Daokuan, 1996:82).