Social transformation: The value of traditional leisure culture of china revisited

In the 5000-year-long history of China, leisure has played an important role in passing on Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist culture. However, for more than a century now, with Chinese society undergoing several great social transformations, China's tradition of leisure culture has been mutilated more and more and has fallen into disorder. Since the 1980s, especially, Chinese society has entered a new stage of transformation—that of modernization. The economy has been growing rapidly, the industrial structure has seen major reformations, and the culture has become diversified, multi-faceted, and multi-layered. With the infiltration by elements of modernization, vogues, and Westernization, the essence of leisure values has been much tainted by materialism, which has accelerated the deconstruction and reconstruction of traditional leisure values. It is against such a background that we call on people to look back to the value of traditional leisure culture, in the hope that we will thus be able to find a new approach for the different expectations people have for sustainable development and a harmonious society.