The phenomenon of confucian ethics in the culture of everyday life of a contemporary chinese city (late XX – early XXI centuries)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17721/1728-2640.2026.162.12

Abstract

B a c k g r o u n d . On the threshold of the XX – XXI centuries, the East Asian region became an arena of unprecedented and intensive modernization transformations. Rapid industrialization, massive urbanization, and the transition to digital capitalism radically changed the traditional socio-cultural morphology of society, reshaping the everyday life of millions. In Western humanities, linear modernization narratives long dominated, claiming that technological breakthroughs and global market integration would inevitably lead to the total Westernization and atomization of non-Western cultural landscapes. However, the socio-cultural dynamics of contemporary China demonstrate a unique civilizational paradox: instead of the destruction of local identity, a powerful regeneration of traditional mental structures is observed. The ancient core of Confucian ethics has shown remarkable resilience and plasticity. Canonical moral-philosophical categories have undergone profound secularization and semiotic recoding, moving directly from canonical texts into the daily routines of the urban population. The study of these latent mechanisms of cultural adaptation in a post-industrial city is crucial for dismantling Eurocentric modernization theories and constructing a new, glocalized paradigm for analyzing non-Western cultures under the pressure of global challenges of the XXI century.

M e t h o d s . The methodological framework of this study is based on a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach at the intersection of historical culturology, social anthropology, semiotics, and the micro-sociology of everyday life. The leading tool is the historical-culturological approach, used to analyze the transformation of traditional Confucian values at a specific historical turning point. To decrypt the symbolic saturation of the cityscape, a systemic-semiotic approach is applied, treating material, architectural, and communicative urban environments as a continuous socio-cultural text. This toolkit is combined with the methods of structural anthropology and the concept of glocalization to interpret collective bodily practices and non-formal networks as social stabilizers against urban anomie.

R e s u l t s . The study proves that modernization did not lead to the destruction of the ethno–cultural core, but caused a profound semiotic recoding of the Confucian categories of ren, li, and xiao. It explicates the transformation of the classical concept of junzi into a meritocratic imperative of educational centrism within the academically centered space of the megacity. The space of urban leisure, physical activities, and street board games is semiotized through the prism of the archetypal ideal of universal harmony (he), functioning as a socio-cultural stabilizer of public morality. The dynamics of gender dispositions reveal a complex hybrid model that integrates women's professional emancipation into the plane of the traditional Confucian category of reciprocity (shu).

C o n c l u s i o n s . The research demonstrates the high adaptive plasticity of the East Asian civilizational matrix, where instead of linear Westernization, a process of glocalization unfolds, successfully integrating canonical textual heritage into the challenges of digital capitalism. The culture of everyday life in the contemporary Chinese city is defined as the core space for the transmission, reenactment, and preservation of ethno-cultural identity, which protects the individual from post-industrial isolation.