From the 16th to the 18th century, Jesuit missionaries in China pioneered inter-cultural exchange by integrating cultural accommodation with groundbreaking linguistic research. By adopting Confucian scholarly practices and systematically studying the Chinese language, they developed innovative approaches to Chinese phonetics, grammar, lexicography, rhetoric, and teaching. Their linguistic achievements not only facilitated missionary work but also contributed to early modern sinology and cross-cultural communications. This paper examines the Jesuits’ dual strategy of cultural accommodation and linguistic research, demonstrating how their deep engagement with Chinese intellectual traditions enabled them to study the Chinese language successfully, to communicate with local elites smoothly, and to disseminate Christianity effectively. Through the combination of local philological traditions with Western linguistic techniques, they introduced new perspectives on the Chinese language, influencing both Western sinology and China’s linguistic development. Their translations of religious, scientific, and philosophical texts also played a key role in shaping Sino-Western intellectual exchanges. By analyzing the Jesuits’ linguistic activities and the strategies they employed in the process, this study highlights the Jesuits’ impact on Chinese linguistic scholarship, the transmission of Christianity, and their role in cross-cultural communication. Their work also exemplifies how language, culture, and religion can effectively collaborate in cross-cultural encounters, shaping historical narratives and fostering dialogue between civilizations.

This study explores the discursive construction of educational philanthropy in China through the Maitian Program, a grassroots non-governmental organization (NGO) focused on rural education. Drawing on the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), the research integrates topic modeling and semi-structured interviews to analyze how language constructs values, social roles, and legitimizes practices. Findings reveal a hybrid discourse formed by institutional texts and volunteer narratives, with strategies of nomination, predication, and argumentation. Maitian emphasizes emotional care, relational equity, and long-term empowerment, framing children as cultural inheritors and volunteers as civic actors. While highlighting positive ethical and pedagogical contributions, the discourse selectively emphasizes desirable outcomes, with limited visibility of structural constraints and the perspectives of children and families. The study highlights four discursive shifts in line with broader socio-political changes: from resource redistribution to access equity, from poverty alleviation to holistic development, from charity to relational ethics, and from individual aid to generational empowerment. This discourse offers a culturally grounded alternative to Western NGO models, illustrating both opportunities and potential limitations in replicating such approaches across diverse contexts, and contributes to discussions on ethical, participatory, and sustainable public engagement.

In the context of polarized media discourse, this study examines how outlets with distinct political leanings constructed multimodal representations of the 2025 Los Angeles protests. Adopting a corpus-assisted Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) framework, this study integrates Entman’s framing theory with Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar to analyze news coverage of the protests. The results reveal a divergence in multimodal strategies. Fox News employs a delegitimization frame through a dominant strategy of reinforcement, where images serve as direct evidence for textual claims. Conversely, CNN constructs a conditional legitimacy frame via a more nuanced strategy, through which the outlet strategically utilizes multimodal contradiction to negotiate with the “protest paradigm” and mitigate the visual reality of disorder. The findings demonstrate how partisan media leverage distinct multimodal strategies to reconstruct opposing social realities. The study contributes to political discourse research by going beyond textual bias to reveal how multimodal strategies function in media polarization environments.