The article is dedicated to understanding the regional specificity of contemporary Chinese design. Although regional Chinese design is still taking shape, interest in it in our country is growing due to the strengthening economic ties between Russia and China. Due to the "Chinese economic miracle" from 1978 to 2019, interest in "Chinese design" is also observed in foreign countries, which has led to an increasing number of international publications in English each year that focus on defining the specifics of Chinese design. The works of Chinese theorists and practitioners of design, who question what it means to design "in a Chinese manner" and how to adequately represent China on the international stage, are being translated into English. The aim of the research is to determine the emerging semantic core of contemporary Chinese design that determines its regional identity. Since the authors consider regional identity in the context of forming the international image of the state, they rely on a research method initially used in territorial branding—the method of defining a "cloud" of "key words" that reflect the specifics of the design thinking of Chinese designers and characterize the "overall feeling" of "Chinese design". During the research, the authors identify the following "key words" that characterize contemporary Chinese design: adaptability and diversity, naturalness, connection to tradition. The adaptability of Chinese design, according to the authors, implies the contextuality of the design goal and corresponds more to intuitive than rational searches for fundamentally diverse design solutions. Since naturalness is traditionally understood by the Chinese through the "metamorphoses of things", their transition into their own opposites, contemporary Chinese design is characterized by the logic of "transformation" and the vision of "one within another", as well as a desire to create a "living form", or "silo-form", characterized by curvature and internal dynamics. As for the connection to tradition, in China today, it is realized either through the elegant "new Chinese style" (xin zhongshi) or through mass culture with its kitsch and pursuit of "luxury", through the so-called "national wave" (guo chao).
Tretyakova et al. (Sun,) studied this question.