Over the past few decades, the worldwide lesbian and gay movements have diversified and increased their rights claims. The achievement of gay rights claims in society is the result of an interplay among various social factors and forces. Media is one of most influential players in building homosexual images and promoting mutual understanding. Chinese homosexuals were not treated as criminals or mental illness patients anymore in 1997 and 2001, respectively, after decriminalization and depathologization. Thus this article aims to explore how homosexuals were portrayed in the official media of China, particularly the People's Daily, to illustrate the changing perception of homosexuals in China's political and social spheres. It argues that representation of homosexuals in the People's Daily changed gradually from a negative perception to a more positive one with less discrimination and prejudice as shown by the article's quantitative and qualitative results.

Environmental pollution threatens public health and has become a social concern in recent years. Despite the conditions for public participation in environmental governance have improved considerably, the level of public engagement in government projects still falls short of expectations. Therefore, this article introduced two key variables, hoping to answer the following research question that how environmental concerns and governance performance affect public environmental participation. Through principal component analysis of the data from the “Survey of Chinese Urban Residents’ Attitudes toward Environmental Protection”, the findings of this article are as follows: First, public environmental concerns have no significant impact on their environmental engagement; second, the improvement of residents’ confidence in the government performance of environmental management reduces their willingness to participate in official projects. The higher the confidence in the government’s performance, the lower the level of public engagement is. Moreover, due to the consideration of self-interest or lack of environmental awareness, those who oppose waste incineration in waste terminal disposal tend to take a non-participatory role in waste sorting programs. Therefore, we suggest that the government have more diverse shareholders in environmental protection, so it should expand public participation through education, publicity, mobilization, and incentives.

In China, Confucian authoritative familism has long established the tradition of paternal grandparents caring for grandchildren. With urbanisation in progress, many older people choose to settle in cities with their children, mainly to look after their grandchildren, and are known as ‘migrant grandparents’. Through a study of this group in Shanghai, the article reveals four other roles of migrant grandparents in addition to the role of caregivers: namely, workers, leisure seekers, in-laws (qingjia) and spouses. The prioritisation of grandparents’ roles demonstrates their increasing subjectivity in self-determination, transformative social values and personal life expectations. This article argues that Chinese older adults have begun to individualise and that these practices have contributed both to the destruction of the collective single-core family model in traditional and neo-familism and the emergence of independent, dual-core familism between two generations.