Relational Well-Being in Non-WEIRD Societies: A Reformulation of Happiness From a Chinese Cultural Perspective

Positive psychology has made substantial contributions to the scientific understanding of human flourishing, yet its conceptual architecture remains disproportionately grounded in WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) populations. Prevailing models privilege intrapersonal processes-autonomy, self-efficacy, and personal achievement-while systematically under-theorizing the relational and moral dimensions through which happiness is experienced and evaluated in non-WEIRD societies. This article proposes a reformulation of happiness through the construct of relational well-being: a multi-level framework that reconceptualizes flourishing as emerging from the dynamic interplay between individuals and their embeddedness in social, relational, and moral worlds. Specifically, we define relational well-being as a pattern of flourishing constituted by four interdependent dimensions: (a) relational connectedness and belonging, (b) role fulfillment and reciprocal obligation, (c) interpersonal harmony and conflict regulation, and (d) moral embeddedness within social and cultural systems. Although these dimensions are not culturally exclusive, we argue that they are normatively foregrounded, elaboratively articulated, and more systematically organized in Chinese cultural contexts-making Chinese society a theoretically generative case for advancing a non-WEIRD account of well-being. Drawing primarily on traditional Chinese philosophical traditions-including Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist perspectives-while acknowledging the dynamic transformation of contemporary Chinese culture, we develop a culturally grounded account of how relational processes constitute-rather than merely contextualize-the experience of happiness. Moving beyond a binary opposition between Chinese and Western models, we adopt a relative emphasis perspective that acknowledges cross-cultural overlap while mapping systematic divergences in the normative organization of well-being. We further address key methodological challenges in studying relational well-being, including construct validity, measurement equivalence, and the risk of conceptual ethnocentrism, and we outline a research agenda for developing culturally sensitive, multi-level assessment strategies. This article contributes to the ongoing project of building a genuinely inclusive positive psychology-one that integrates individual, relational, and collective dimensions of human flourishing and holds empirical validity beyond the WEIRD populations.