Upliving: Lessons from Chinese Semiotics

This article explores the conditions of meaningfulness in contemporary societies through a dialogue between Western and Chinese semiotic traditions. It starts from a paradox: although meaning saturates today’s semiotic environment, lived experience is increasingly felt as meaningless. Rather than treating this as a psychological or economic failure, the article frames it as a semiotic disconnection. Meaningfulness is defined not as purpose or teleology, but as the capacity to remain attuned to the plural, fragmentary, and unscripted signs through which life unfolds. Within this framework, the notion of upliving is introduced by analogy with upcycling: a semiotic practice that creatively recomposes inherited experiences, residual relations, and past discourses into renewed vectors of significance. Upliving is not nostalgic repetition but a modeling operation that reconfigures time, memory, and discourse into generative patterns of sense. The core of the paper develops a reciprocal reading of contemporary Chinese semiotics, drawing on the work of Hongbing Yu, Jie Zhang, Yiheng Zhao, Ersu Ding, and Mingyu Wang. It reconstructs a progressive framework organized around models, modus, modes, modality, and moderation, highlighting concepts such as fictional anti-identity modeling and culturally specific modalities like resonance (gǎnyìng). Chinese semiotics, the article argues, links signs to wisdom rather than interpretation alone, positioning moderation as a central virtue for sustaining livable meaningfulness amid acceleration and semiotic overload.