One of the common problems faced by modern states is how to effectively build a connection mechanism between the government and the people. As a practical model of "pairing governance" with distinctive Chinese characteristics, it is increasingly playing an important role in promoting rural revitalization and development. In the process of implementing pairing policies and completing pairing tasks, the "pairing governance" behaviors of village-resident cadres show a logical shift from departmental and territorial pairing at the normative level to personalized pairing at the practical level. The practical manifestations of this shift include localized social relations, daily life interactions, and family-like assistance actions. Its personalized operation is closely related to the choice of the strategic action mechanism of "bureaucracy as the foundation, emotion as the instrument".

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The rejuvenation of time-honored brands faces dual challenges of upholding tradition and pursuing innovation. Taking Beijing Daoxiangcun Zero Store as an example, this paper constructs an analytical framework covering four dimensions: brand cultural inheritance, brand fun richness, in-store service and creative activities, based on brand authenticity and customer experience management theories. Empirical tests are conducted using factor analysis and regression analysis with 314 questionnaire data samples. The results show that all four dimensions have a significantly positive impact on purchase intention. The study reveals the synergistic mechanism of original authenticity and constructed authenticity management for time-honored brands, as well as the practical path of customer experience management, providing theoretical support and practical reference for their digital transformation.

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This essay critically compares articulation-based and perception-based approaches to sound change. Articulation-based accounts explain sound change primarily through production pressures such as coarticulation, reduction, assimilation, lenition, and gestural timing, offering strong explanations for gradual and phonetically natural changes. In contrast, perception-based accounts emphasise the role of listener interpretation, normalisation, cue weighting, and reanalysis, making them especially useful for explaining changes such as dissimilation and perceptual misattribution. This essay evaluates the strengths and limitations of both perspectives in terms of explanatory scope, evidence, directionality, actuation, and diffusion. It argues that neither approach alone can fully explain the emergence, selection, and stabilisation of sound change. While production pressures often provide the phonetic source and direction of many gradual changes, perception-based mechanisms are essential for understanding listener reanalysis and certain non-reductive developments. The essay, therefore, supports an interactionist position: sound change is best explained through a type- and stage-sensitive model that integrates articulation, perception, lexical diffusion, and wider social and systemic factors.

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This study interrogates how Chinese American women city supervisors discursively construct ethnic and gendered identities through their Facebook political communication. Drawing on a sociocultural linguistic approach to identity, the study conducts a discursive analysis of 370 posts published by two supervisors on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors between November 2024 and January 2026, aiming to elucidate the mechanisms through which discursive narratives fashion identity and what sociocultural factors make them possible. Two correlated political identities are coded: the context-sensitive ethnic navigator, who strategically shifts among Chinese-specific, pan-ethnic, and ethnically neutral registers depending on issue context, and the care-oriented female leader, who constructs governance legitimacy predominantly through covert care discourse, supplemented at particular symbolic moments by overt celebration of female role models. To account for the amalgamation of these two identities, this study proposes an overarching identity assemblage—the compassionate guardian—that transforms ethnic visibility work and gendered governance into a distinctive form of political authority, sustained through Facebook's media affordances. The findings illuminate how Chinese American women negotiate the intersecting constraints of racialized and gendered political expectations at the local level, advancing scholarship on minority women's political communication in municipal politics.

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