For a long time, work has been regarded as an activity for people to define themselves and be perceived and defined by others, while leisure is thought to play a subsidiary role to the economy. However, with the advent of the leisure era, leisure is no longer a privilege for the leisure class but becomes the right and daily lifestyle for common people. On the other hand, the high-speed development of globalization and urbanization makes people's life more unstable and alienated. The intrinsic values of leisure such as freedom and social connection thus provide people with an important way to deeply know themselves and their relationships with the outside world. Against the theoretical background of leisure and identity, this paper examines the role played by leisure in constructing and developing identity to provide people with a feasible scheme to achieve and lead a good life. To achieve the above goal, the paper first reviews the concepts of leisure and identity that have long been discussed in both Chinese and Western contexts, especially the three aspects of identity, namely, personal identity, social identity and cultural identity. Then, the fact that people nowadays have gradually turned their eyes from work to leisure related concepts such as self-fulfilling, happiness, life satisfaction to define themselves is pointed out. And freedom, as the most important feature of leisure enables people to freely explore and flexibly reflect on themselves in the context of leisure. On the other hand, the symbolic meanings contained in leisure activities benefit people in affirming themselves. With the enhancement of self-concept, self-esteem and the like, leisure gives central meaning to people's life, thus becoming a way of defining oneself. what’s more, leisure is also a social space in which people explore and seek interpersonal relationships and belongingness. The types of leisure activities demonstrate that leisure has an obvious nature of social connection, which helps people find social identity in a mass society. In addition, people act according to the social norms and behaviors regulations behind certain social roles to express and maintain their social identity. Leisure has also become a tool to challenge the essentialist view of social identity.  Lastly, leisure's role in shaping cultural identity since antiquity till now is referred to. The development of globalization promotes global tourism which makes leisure a tool of political consciousness package, culture dissemination and culture identity shaping. But in the violent collision of different cultures, people are also actively constructing a global cultural identity in their local ways. At the same time, in the constant immigration waves, engaging in some leisure activities enables those immigrants to reserve and diversify their cultural identity in the subsequent acculturation process. In summary, this paper makes contributions in two ways. Firstly, it builds a theoretical bridge between leisure and identity from a comprehensive perspective of philosophy, sociology and psychology, enriching the existing literature on leisure and identity. Secondly, combining theory with reality, it shows people how to construct a stable identity against the backdrop of globalization, urbanization and leisure age from the angle of leisure and offers people a practical way toward a beautiful life which is being highlighted by the Chinese government and enthusiastically pursued by the Chinese people at present. Future researches may extend the ways in which leisure contributes to identity construction and explore in depth on how identity is related to people's leisure motivations, choices and behaviors, etc.