Rethinking Belief and Tradition: How Young People Construct Individual Meaning in the Internet Era

During China’s social transformation, the spiritual life of young people exhibits a dual tendency toward secularisation and consumerization. While traditional institutional religion continues to wane, a consumption-based religiosity has surfaced, marking a shift from collective, class-based subcultural expressions to post-subcultural practices centred on individual affect, meaning bricolage, and fluid identities. Through a comparative analysis of historical Real Person Fiction and Yonghe Temple bracelets, this study reveals how contemporary youth transform historical memory and religious symbols into flexible cultural resources. Crucially, this transformation is not a wholesale rupture with tradition but rather a selective appropriation and recontextualization of religious concepts inherited through family upbringing and folk customs. Their practices thus embody a dialectic of discontinuity and continuity: what is discontinued is institutional allegiance to prescribed rituals; what continues is the deep-seated impulse to seek meaning through symbolic practices. The research finds that young people construct temporary scene-based tribes through emotional identification and symbolic consumption, using fluidity and multiplicity to counter anxieties in daily life. Compared to traditional communities, such tribes offer individuals meanings that are more personalised and immediate, reflecting the lifestyles individuals wish to cultivate. Within a context of high uncertainty, they convey fragmented responses to the predicaments of modernity through the reinterpretation and re-narration of historical and sacred symbols.