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Why study China’s Christian universities in the Republican era today? Christian universities were brought by Western missionaries and evolved as an educational system in China at the beginning of the 20th century. They were eliminated during the restructuring of the Chinese higher education system in the early 1950s; however, Deng Xiaoping’s reform policies in the 1980s brought profound changes in China, encouraging Chinese scholars to bring back pre-1949 Christian higher education in China. Since then, new approaches and reconceptualizations have been developed, such as in the fields of Eastern–Western cultural exchange, interdisciplinary studies (from xixue to guoxue), and the adaptation of global and local perspectives. This paper is an attempt to report how the reconceptualizations of China’s Christian universities in the Republican era were brought about in the various processes of indigenization, contextualization, internationalization, Asianization, and Sinicization, with the subsequent development of a new legacy moving toward the Sinicization of Christian universities.

Religion has long been a significant factor in the process of globalization. In this article, the author attempts to explore and review religious factors involved in the history of Malacca (Melaka) and in the missionary work of Robert Morrison in the early 19th century. Malacca has long been a meeting place for various religions in their respective processes of globalization. Robert Morrison was the first Protestant Missionary to come to the Chinese Mainland. He arrived in 1807. However, after 10 years of working in Canton and Macau, he made a proposal for setting up a mission school in Malacca, hence the Anglo-Chinese College of 1818. It was found that, indeed, Morrison had learned much from his experiences in China and in Malacca, especially in paying due respect to Chinese culture.