The Concept of “Identity” in Social Philosophy: A Conceptual Analysis of Chinese Scholars’ Research

Abstract

The article is devoted to the conceptual analysis of the concept of “identity” in Chinese studies in social philos-ophy, cultural exploring, psychology, and media theory. The research problem is not an insufficient comparison of definitions and models of identity within the selected interdisciplinary corpus. The paper aims to build an integrative model of the concept of identity that clarifies the relation between social foundations, subjective ex-perience, memory, structural forms, and dynamics. The material comprises twelve Chinese publications: elev-en articles from 2020 to 2025 and one terminological article from 2004. This corpus was presented according to the topics, disciplinary range, and the presence of a definition, classification or model of identity. The con-ceptual analysis includes the identification of such units, comparison of their functions in the authors’ argu-ments, and the synthesis of the results. It was established that the study shows that the analyzed corpus inter-prets identity as a person’s socio-historically conditioned and reflexively experienced attitude to him or herself, social groups, and the cultural world. Memory ensures a temporal continuity, digital mediation changes the storage and presentation of the experience, while hybridity and shifts in scales of belonging explain the varia-bility of identity. The proposed model does not claim a universal validity, but it provides a basis for further cross-cultural comparison.