Abstract: 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. 

Key words: citizenship , public life ,  Confucianism, , Junzi