My thesis focuses on a specific Dehua porcelain Guanyin statue in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A 19-1886), a mother-like Guanyin holding a boy-like child in her arms with Buddhist symbols...Show moreMy thesis focuses on a specific Dehua porcelain Guanyin statue in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A 19-1886), a mother-like Guanyin holding a boy-like child in her arms with Buddhist symbols around them. This statue and its variations flooded into Europe in the eighteenth century, arousing discussions about the iconography of Child-giving Guanyin. Their popularity in Europe has been generally attributed to the resemblance to Madonna and Child. This thesis disagrees with the conventional interpretation, and explores Buddhist images in the context of transcultural objects from the 15th to the 18th century. This approach highlights the interactions between material change, religious representations and transcultural objects. Porcelain Guanyin statues worked as mediators between the deity and worshippers. V&A 19-1886 depicts Guanyin of the South Sea holding a child, which represents compassion and nurturing. Such Buddhist images emerged in the late Ming, when the cult of Guanyin underwent popularization and secularization, and attracted a universal appeal in the transcultural context. Instead of reducing the Child-giving Guanyin porcelain statues to mere visual parallels with Madonna and Child, this analysis underscores the significance of contextual shifts in transforming religious objects across diverse cultural landscapes, and enriches our understanding of the dynamic process.Show less
The debate around the issue of abortion rights is not new in American politics. However, in recent years American politics has been polarized along partisan lines. This is also the case in the...Show moreThe debate around the issue of abortion rights is not new in American politics. However, in recent years American politics has been polarized along partisan lines. This is also the case in the abortion rights debate. The abortion rights debate has an effect on policy making in U.S. politics. Abortion rights also play a role in foreign policy making. Under the Trump Presidency, the Mexico City Policy was reinstalled and even further strengthened, entailing that no government funds were allowed to be given to actors that provide or promote abortions. Republicans, after years of supporting the initiative, now also threaten to defund PEPFAR, the successful initiative that has saved millions of lives in the fight against HIV/AIDS. They threaten to do this since they claim that the program funds abortion services. This thesis investigates and reveals the impact that this partisan polarization on the abortion rights issue has on American foreign policy and therefore on the United States’ image and influence in Africa. Furthermore, this research investigates China’s efforts to benefit from America’s impacted foreign policy by the abortion rights discussion. This thesis indeed reveals that the United States’ image and influence in Africa is negatively impacted by the partisan polarized abortion debate in American politics and that China is actively using its propaganda apparatus to portray the United States as hypocritical and unreliable and China as the better alternative.Show less
This thesis investigated how Chinese language and culture education as supported by the Confucius Institutes is perceived by secondairy education students in the Netherlands and assesses whether...Show moreThis thesis investigated how Chinese language and culture education as supported by the Confucius Institutes is perceived by secondairy education students in the Netherlands and assesses whether these students experience Chinese influence on their education by conducting interviews. The analysis from the interviews concludes that students have a generally positive experience with learning Chinese, that there is a lot of attention paid to culture education, and that students do not appear to experience any Chinese influence on their education.Show less
The thesis analyses the process of 'hybridization' in Hollywood movies and how this has been perceived by the PRC audiences. The case studies taken into analysis are "Mulan" and "Kung Fu Panda".