Building the Babel with Knowledge

Against the backdrop of the comprehensive promotion of the rural revitalization strategy, Social Work Service Stations emerge as a new governance force capable of leveraging their professional expertise to enhance people’s livelihood security and foster community vitality. However, the development of rural social work stations within the realm of rural governance is a dynamic process involving interaction and cooperation among multiple stakeholders. This interplay of forces presents several challenges for rural social work stations, such as aligning with administrative systems while avoiding over-reliance, ensuring continuous professional development, addressing insufficient resident participation due to weak interest relationships, and overcoming difficulties in cultivating rural social workers. Consequently, the prospect of constructing a “rural governance symbiosis system” emerges, which entails fostering collaborative relationships among various stakeholders, maintaining a symbiotic mode of operation and creating symbiotic spaces. This transformative approach enables rural social work stations to shift from mere “embedding” into full “integration”.

The “Ascending Dragon” fireworks performance held in Tibet in 2025 was initially framed through filing procedures as authorized and environmentally controllable. After images circulated widely on social media, it became a public controversy over scorched alpine meadows and regulatory failure. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), this article treats compliance as an evidentiary accomplishment and asks how compliance evidence is assembled, contested, and institutionally re-stabilized. Based on desk ethnography and process tracing of administrative and regulatory documents, corporate statements, news reports, and platform materials, this study traces evidentiary trajectories before and after the incident. The analysis shows that administrative classification, spatial boundary work, and documentary closure produced a compliant appearance while leaving key measurements and responsibility chains institutionally invisible. In the controversy, platform-based adversarial evidence reordered authority and prompted re-evidencing through investigation and accountability, revealing how procedural compliance can coexist with governance failure.

The introduction of the Anthropocene concept reflects humanity's reflection on the accelerated destruction of Earth by human forces. Using fisheries as a case study, the depletion of fish resources and decline in species diversity can be attributed to the combined effects of modernization, marketization, technological innovation, and changing consumption patterns. Within China's modernization journey, the vision of “modernization featuring harmonious coexistence between humanity and nature” emphasizes restorative ecological justice. However, the resource-utilization demands of retired fishermen clash with this approach, trapping livelihood transitions in a stagnant threshold, the foremost challenge in implementing fishing bans. The principle that “the environment is the people's livelihood” can rebuild aquatic ecosystems' regenerative capacity and drive regenerative development in fishing communities. Therefore, guiding fishermen's demands to align with national will during the transition from resource exploitation to ecological restoration is pivotal for achieving both ecological renewal and livelihood transformation. This framework underscores our steadfast dedication to green development while embodying China’s proactive engagement and global accountability in rethinking the Anthropocene.

This article examines how New Taiwanese Hakka immigrants in California negotiate ethnic identity amid intergenerational language decline. While much scholarship on the Chinese diaspora has focused on Cantonese-dominated migration, the Hakka, long recognized as a minority within a minority, remain underexplored. Drawing on interviews and participant observation with 20 families across three generations, this study explores how first-generation immigrants navigate social integration and language practices, and how cultural traditions such as language, cuisine, and festivals are transmitted or reconfigured among descendants. Findings show that while Hakka language use has diminished, situational and symbolic use persists as a marker of belonging. This enactment of new ethnicities, for instance, expressing Hakka identity through food, festivals, and community participation rather than fluent speech which illustrates how cultural identity is redefined in everyday life. Intra-ethnic relations further reveal divergent experiences of inclusion and exclusion shaped by migration timing and community dynamics. The study contributes to assimilation and diaspora theory by challenging deterministic models of language loss, demonstrating how hybrid ethnic identities are enacted through everyday cultural practices, and highlighting the heterogeneity of Chinese diasporic formations.