Local residents doing morning exercises in Beihai Park, Beijing Photo: TUCHONG

As a fundamental mode of human social operation, everyday life constitutes the basis upon which all other social activities unfold. It is characterized by historicity, repetitiveness, practicality, tediousness, materiality, and diversity. Since its emergence as a research paradigm, everyday-life studies has gradually extended from philosophy to other disciplinary domains. In scholars’ writings, everyday-life practices are imbued with texture and meaning, embedded with multidimensional interactive relationships and structuring mechanisms, and reflect specific socio-cultural connotations as well as the tensions between individuals and culture, state and society, and the past and the present.

Everyday life as research perspective, method

In the 1940s, the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre shifted the traditional Marxist critique of the capitalist political–economic system toward a critique of everyday life. He incisively revealed the inner essence of the modern capitalist lifestyle constructed by technological rationality and consumer society, offering a critical analysis of the decline of everyday life itself. Around the same time, a number of prominent thinkers—including Jürgen Habermas—likewise undertook profound critiques of the comprehensive alienation spreading in the realms of production, consumption, and spiritual life within the everyday lifeworld of capitalist society.

In contrast to the critical orientation of everyday-life critique theory, theories of everyday-life practice emphasize everyday life as a field of practice. While providing rational analyses of production and consumption as domains dominated by social elites, they highlight the creativity of the masses as tacticians and practitioners of everyday life. Focusing on the subtle aspects of ordinary people’s daily experiences, this line of inquiry turns its gaze toward the grassroots and the marginalized, documenting the strategies of daily action and the aesthetics of everyday life.

Grounded in existentialism, humanism, and a concern for human life conditions, scholars have sought to find within the lifeworld a vivid path for understanding human social life, aiming to establish a research paradigm with a rigorous intellectual structure that can be distinguished from concrete daily activities. In their view, everyday life is pre-existent and structured—a domain that independently provides the fundamental elements for human existence and value-creation—yet it is also dynamic and plural, with new meanings continually generated and constructed through daily practices. In sum, everyday-life research offers multiple analytical frameworks for understanding individual experience, interpersonal interaction, cultural practice, and social structure.

Practice of everyday-life research in Chinese scholarship

From antiquity to the present, the practice and experience of everyday life have been central to how the Chinese people perceive and understand social life and the meaning of existence. With increasingly frequent global cultural exchange and China’s own profound social transformation—manifested prominently in everyday life—research on everyday life has gradually attracted scholarly attention in China, particularly in the following areas.

First, scholars have interpreted, applied, or borrowed concepts and theories of everyday life from abroad, including analyses related to everyday-life critique theory, everyday-life practice theory, and micro-sociological explanatory frameworks. In terms of theoretical application, many studies adopt Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life as an entry point to examine spatial governance in urban renewal, neighborhood politics, and “ethics of everyday life” amid urbanization. As research has expanded, some studies have detached the concept of everyday life from its phenomenological or sociological definitions, using it instead simply to denote the cultural space of ordinary people’s lives or the sum of various practices.

Second, based on critical reflection on international theories of everyday life, scholars have sought to redefine a concept of everyday life suited to the Chinese context or to promote theoretical innovation. Some researchers, recognizing that established concepts in folklore studies fail to capture folklore’s penetration into modern everyday life, have proposed a “turn to everyday life” in folklore studies—shifting from the study of specific folkloric phenomena to holistic research on people’s daily living, understanding fluid folklore and intentionally constructed sociocultural facts, focusing on ordinary people’s everyday practices, interrogating the “taken-for-granted,” and revealing the practical and real-world essence of everyday life. Scholarly interest is increasingly directed toward understanding the distinctiveness of traditional Chinese everyday life, constructing indigenous scholarly concepts from the vantage point of everyday life, and explaining concrete issues in Chinese social life.

Third, research on the local history of China’s everyday life has expanded along two main lines. One approach seeks to interpret classical texts to elucidate the essence and rich connotations of everyday life. Another entails historians’ use of archival materials to reconstruct the history of daily life. The history of everyday life positions the people as the principal agents of China’s social and historical activities, emphasizes micro-narratives and the daily activities of the populace, and thereby reinforces the foundation of sociocultural history and historical anthropology.

Fourth, everyday-life research has incorporated the study of commonplace “things,” linking them with people’s lifestyles, productive activities, and value order. Material objects embody and metaphorically express particular ways of life. They also carry deep historical and sociocultural significance while bearing witness to social change.

Fifth, scholars are analyzing how individuals respond to transformations in the domain of everyday life. In China’s modernization process, fundamental and profound changes have continuously—whether explicitly or implicitly—reshaped everyday life. Against this backdrop, the living conditions and subjectivity of individuals or groups of different ages, genders, and social strata have become focal points of scholarly inquiry.

Developling everyday-life research approaches with Chinese characteristics

To capture the features of everyday life and the ethics of daily living among the Chinese people in the context of rapid social change and interconnectedness, it is necessary to develop research approaches and paradigms of everyday life with Chinese characteristics, which can be explored through five dimensions.

First, in the dimension of time and space, we can investigate concrete practices of everyday life along both vertical and horizontal axes, analyzing—through comparison—daily behaviors across different regions and historical periods, revealing the dynamism of everyday life and the factors and internal structures driving its transformation. Sifting through fragmented historical materials to reconstruct the everyday practices of ordinary people across different times and spaces, thereby presenting the trajectories of historical development and social structures, therefore constitutes an important task in Chinese everyday-life research.

Notions of time and space in traditional Chinese philosophy, which have profoundly influenced people’s everyday lives, can be integrated into the time–space lens. Such notions emphasize holistic attention to the relationships among humans, nature, and society while highlighting the temporal–spatial dimensions of ethical cultivation. With the rise of the internet and artificial intelligence, the subjects, spaces, and ethical structures of everyday life are taking on new features. Examining everyday life at the intersection of traditional and modern spatiotemporal orders thus provides an important theoretical tool for exploring new models of social development and achieving a good digital life.

Second, in the dimension of life and institution, everyday-life practice entails a degree of subjectivity and agency. Each individual or group inevitably lives within a particular historical era and political system, and everyday life offers a productive vantage point for linking the state and individuals or groups through institutional structures. State policies and institutions subtly shape fundamental cognitive orientations in daily life and can rapidly influence and permeate concrete daily practices. Conversely, the daily practices of the populace interact with and respond to state institutions.

Third, viewing cities and villages through the lens of everyday life and analyzing the connections or interactions between them not only enables insight into the impact of modernization and industrialization on human social life and environmental change, but also encourages deeper reflection on urban–rural relations and supports the pursuit of integrated urban–rural development.

Fourth, in the production and consumption dimension, with the development of the digital economy and the widespread adoption of digital technologies, new production and consumption ethics are increasingly permeating everyday life. The impact of technology and capital on production and consumption, their mutual construction with the values and meanings of individual life, and the resulting configurations of everyday life constitute major topics in the study of contemporary Chinese society.

Fifth, in the material and socio-cultural dimension, “things” are at once media, modalities, or means of everyday-life practice and its products. Examining commonplace objects can reveal the essence and meaning of human life or broader sociocultural implications, offering unique insights into the reality and dynamism of everyday life and contributing to our understanding of ourselves. In today’s mobile-internet society, modern technological objects or digital objects have increasingly impacted—and even “colonized”—the everyday lifeworld; the ethical issues raised by intelligent robots, in particular, have become crucial research topics.

Yang Zhuhui (professor) and Bao Lili are from the School of Ethnology and Sociology at Minzu University of China. This article has been edited and excerpted from Academic Journal of Zhongzhou, Issue 2, 2025.