The Lord of Heaven in the Inner Chambers: Jesuits, Women, and Domestic Christianity (ca. 1580-1690)

The study focuses on gender norms and practices in Chinese Christian communities established by Jesuit missionary activity during the long seventeenth century. It analyzes how European and Chinese gender norms and practices affected each other in the context of the Sino-Western cultural contact initiated by the missionaries. The thesis consists of two parts. First, it analyzes the ways in which European Jesuits engaged with Chinese gender relations in the course of their mission in China. The study demonstrates that the Jesuits’ adoption of the Chinese scholar-gentry’s habitus entailed a partial adaptation to Confucian gender norms. The latter placed great emphasis on gender segregation and therefore discouraged direct communication between missionaries and Chinese women. This resulted in the emergence of organizational and devotional arrangements of Christian communities specific to China. Second, the study discusses Chinese Christian women's religious culture that emerged in the absence of a strong missionary presence among female devotees. It points out that Chinese Christian women created their own ritual culture and religious sociability in the domestic context, and that they actively took part in shaping Chinese Christianity as masters of domestic rituals.

Photographs of dental casts or digital models: rating dental arch relationships in bilateral cleft lip and palate

Yardsticks have been developed to measure dental arch relations in cleft lip and palate (CLP) patients as diagnostic proxies for the underlying skeletal relationship. Travelling with plaster casts to compare results between CLP centres is inefficient so the aim of this study was to investigate the reliability of using digital models or photographs of dental casts instead of plaster casts for rating dental arch relationships in children with complete bilateral cleft lip and palate (CBCLP). Dental casts of children with CBCLP (n=20) were included. Plaster casts, digital models and photographs of the plaster casts were available for all the children at 6, 9, and 12 years of age. All three record formats were scored using the bilateral cleft lip and palate (BCLP) yardstick by four observers in random order. No significant differences were found for the BCLP yardstick scores among the three formats. The interobserver weighted kappa scores were between 0.672 and 0.934. Comparison between the formats per observer resulted in weighted kappa scores between 0.692 and 0.885. It is concluded that digital models and photographs of dental casts can be used for rating dental arch relationships in patients with CBCLP. These formats are a reliable alternative for BCLP yardstick assessments on conventional plaster casts.

The Gender of Chinese Christianity: Evaluating a New Research Perspective

This paper will discuss how the gender perspective can be applied to the study of the Early Modern Jesuit China mission. I will show that the category of gender provides a promising research perspective on Sino-Western cultural exchange, for it brings to the forefront important aspects of social life in the “contact zone” of Chinese Christian communities. I will argue that through the intercultural contact initiated by the Jesuit China mission, gender roles started to shift slightly on both sides. On the one hand, the Jesuits adopted the Confucian ideal of the separation of the sexes (nannü zhi bie), building for example separate Churches for women, something unknown in Europe. On the other hand, Chinese Christians were urged to reconsider aspects of their traditional gender norms, when for instance some men left their concubines in order to become Christian. The paper will be divided in three parts. First, it will focus on the history of concepts and discuss what gender relations meant in the context of the Early Modern China mission. Then it will turn to the representation of female religiosity in Jesuit Annual Letters and show how the gender perspective can lead to a re-evaluation this source genre. Finally, it will reflect on how the gender perspective can give us fresh insights into well-known paradigms on Sino-Western relations, taking the accommodation paradigm as an example.

Bilateral exchange rates and jobs

We study the labor market effects of realignment in fixed bilateral exchange rates, such as China's peg to the US dollar. We employ the open economy model by de Melo and Robinson to identify the core parameters of the real, trade side of the economy driving the unemployment effects of bilateral exchange rate realignment. A small open economy version of the model is explored analytically and a large multicountry version numerically. Analytics in the small open economy model show that unemployment effects of adjusting of a bilateral peg hinge on the fraction exported to and imported from the trading partner. A larger fraction exported to and a smaller fraction imported from the trading partner make it more likely that revaluation of a trading partner's currency has beneficial effects. Numerics in the large economy model show that Chinese revaluation can generate both positive and negative unemployment effects depending upon underlying parameter values. Adverse unemployment effects can go along with an improving trade balance.

Sino-African State Trading in Services: Added-Value through Angola-Model loaning, GATS commitments or FTAs?

Paper presented by Charlotte Sieber-Gasser at the 5th Annual TRAPCA Conference, Arusha (Tanzania), 25-26 November 2010. Despite the increasing volume of trade between China and African countries, not one single conventional free trade agreement (FTA) or economic partnership agreement (EPA) has yet been signed between an African country and China. Initially, Sino-African trade relations were to a very large extent centred on investments secured through bilateral investment agreements (BITs). The more recent Chinese investments on the African continent, however, are more informally based on FDI contracts with the state at the receiving end and a government-owned private company as the investor, or loosely attached to loans commonly known under term ‘the Angola-Model’. This rather unusual basis for economic integration and development assistance, outside the trodden path of free trade agreements and ODA, requires further analysis in order to understand how the current legal framework between China and the African continent impacts economic development and national sovereignty, and what kind of distributive consequences it may have.