Between Tradition and Modernity: Emotional Changes and Expressions of Chinese Society

This presentation attempts to use emotion as the core concept to explore the historical pedigree of

China. Chinese culture has always attached great importance to emotion. Traditional Chinese

rule was highly dependent on notions of human kindness and compassion. Since the encounter

with the Western world, the Chinese revolution gave birth to a unique emotional mode, and this

had a great impact on the Chinese society. Contemporary China bid farewell to the revolution

and started its market-oriented reforms. An emotional mode of consumerism has become the

dominant one. Based on Raymond Williams’s theory of structure of feeling, this article divides the

emotional patterns in Chinese history into the traditional structure of feeling, the revolutionary

structure of feeling and the consumerist structure of feeling. This does not mean a simplified

analysis of history and its complex emotional patterns, but an attempt to explore the complex

interaction and social consequences of these models.