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Generally speaking, Laoshe is a writer who tended to incorporate heavy local color into his own works. However, there is an important phenomenon in China’s literary history that Laoshe intentionally abandoned his depiction of Beijing’s local color in his writing in the early period of the Anti-Japanese War and stopped writing in his most skilled Beijing dialect. It’s not until around 1943 that Laoshe restarted to bring Beijing’s local customs into his novel writing. In this paper, the author tries to interpret this literary phenomenon by analyzing the reasons why Laoshe reused local color in his 1940s writing. In the final part of this paper, the author concludes that the reason why Laoshe abandoned Beijing’s local color in his writing in the early period of Anti-Japanese War is that he worried that the depiction of a certain region might not reflect the new image of Chinese people in Anti- Japanese War thus couldn’t encourage the whole nation. However, in around 1941, with Laoshe started to regard local color as an effective carrier and means of narration, the application of Beijing’s local color again became the most important characteristic of his works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1990s, urban neighborhoods have seen a rapid growth of protests by homeowners for their "rights." This paper tries to study the origin and development of the rights movements from the perspectives of political process and mobilization structure. Based on field work in several homeowners committees in Beijing, the author argues that the rapid changes of the social structure, mobilization structure and general discourse on the movements contribute to the increase of homeowners' rights movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the data of 606 questionnaires collected in 23 neighborhoods in Beijing in 2008, this paper analyzes the degree, motivation and implications of homeowners' political participation. First, urban homeowners tend to participate in the rights movements. Second, gender, occupation and the level of income have significant influence on homeowners' participation in these movements. Third, as an important part of Chinese middle class, Beijing homeowners tend to support the incumbent regime and to be in favor of the status quo. Most of them are in favor of the social order and economic growth. However, those who have a strong sense of "status inconsistency" and a strong sense of internal efficacy are more likely to participate in rights movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]