User:SamuelJia97

Preparatory Assignment

Feminism in Chinese Communism
This entry lacks a significant amount of information concerning historical backgrounds of the so-called "Feminism in Chinese Communism", including important figures, literature, political campaigns, and historical events. For example, in the section of "Early Days", the entry mentions the great importance of the May Fourth era for people to understand this particular discourse, without mentioning important figures like Lu Xun, Lu Yin, Feng Yuanjun and many others. Some important literature works are also missing, like "My Views on Chastity", "After Victory", "Thoughts on March 8" and so on. In talking about the revolutionary time periods in the 1950s and 1960s, I am surprised that the entry does not even mention "iron girls", which was indeed such an important campaign related to gender issues at that moment. In addition to the missing historical backgrounds, I think this entry should also take a review of the discourse from multiple perspectives, examples like some scholar critiques of the so-called "communist feminism" which appears to grant women more rights and greater level of freedom, but actually reproduces patriarchal ideology of male dominance.

Ding Ling
Ding Ling is indeed such an interesting figure in the history of modern China. As a left-wing female writer, she was denounced as a "rightist" and purged from the Communist Party. Taking such complexity into account, I think the entry should elaborate a little bit more in the section of "Political persecution". The original entry does mention some of her arguments in her essay "Thoughts on March 8", as well as the afterwards consequences of her arguments - "Her article was condemned by Mao Zedong and the party leadership, and she was forced to retract her views and undergo a public self-confession." However, the party's attitude towards her still remains a mystery to the readers. In other words, more background information can be, and should be provided to explain what actually happened at that moment. The Yan'an Forum and Mao's speech at this forum are hugely important for people to understand Ding's political life as well as the party's non-conventional understanding of "left" and "right".

Sexuality in China
The message appears at the top of this entry page says that "this article is written like a personal reflection, personal essay, or argumentative essay that states a Wikipedia editor's personal feelings or presents an original argument about a topic", which I also agree. There are many argumentative statements in this entry, or "factual" information which does not have references of verification, and thus sounds like argumentative. In addition to that, the scope as well as amount of "factual information" provided is also problematic. In addressing such a complex subject like sexuality in China, this entry obviously ignores the complexity of its subject. First, it takes "sexuality" as a modern invention and only provides historical and social accounts of sexuality in the "modern" China after the economic reform since 1978. Second, it takes "sexuality" as a pure Chinese category which ignores western influences in shaping Chinese construction of the sexuality discourse - as argued by anthropologist Lisa Rofel, the category of sexuality in China was "the site of cultural production in the discrepant dialogue with Western power". I think it is extremely important to acknowledge the influence of massive European scholar works introduced into China during the New Culture Movement, works from sexologists and psychiatrists like Magnus Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis, Iwan Bloch, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Sigmund Freud, and such information should definitely be included in the entry.

Reflections on Writing in Wikipedia
I think the major challenge of writing in Wikipedia is how to write from a neutral stand. One can easily make mistakes like the entry of "sexuality in China" did, either getting personal opinions involved into the writing or not providing enough references and verification. The great difficulty of writing an encyclopedia entry are twofold: to provide a very comprehensive summary of existing factual information and scholar works, and to address extremely complicated subjects. In terms of both depth and broadness, it is not an easy task. This whole mission gets even more difficult as one needs to decide what kind of information is important and thus is supposed to be included (which is to say, personal opinion will always be a part of the writing) while also distancing oneself away from personal ideas to make the entry as neutral as possible.