by JAMES PALMER
11-year-old He Zili’s grandfather cries as he holds his mentally disabled grandson’s foot. Zili’s family say that they have no choice but to restrain him as he tends to attack those around him. November 27, 2013. PHOTO/William Hong/Reuters
Disabled people in modern China are still stigmatised, marginalised and abused. What hope is there for reform?
Mia could win over anybody who knew her. But to get those chances meant battling past a wall of entrenched prejudice and fear. Willy had been able to get past his initial feelings about her, motivated largely by his desire to ‘not be a peasant’, but others were complacent in their bigotry. Despite her intelligence, she had not received any university offers, and her chances of employment were worryingly slight. Chinese universities routinely reject qualified candidates with the excuse that their ‘physical condition does not meet the needs of study’ – a policy of discrimination written into some schools’ constitutions. Meanwhile, figures published in Chinese state media last year show that only a quarter of disabled people are able to find any form of employment.
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If you judged the country by its laws alone, China would be a global leader on disability rights. The ‘Laws on the Protection of Persons with Disabilities’, introduced in 1990, offer strong and wide-ranging protection of the civil rights of the disabled, guaranteeing employment, education, welfare, and access. But despite the high concerns of the law, Chinese cities make little concession to disabled people. As the sociologist Yu Jianrong has documented, raised pathways for the blind often lead into dead ends, bollards, trees or open pits, or else spiral decoratively but misleadingly. Wheelchair access is non-existent, especially outside Beijing or Shanghai, and guide dogs are effectively forbidden from most public spaces, despite the authorities’ repeated promises of full access.
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Ambitious government pledges go unfulfilled across the country. The law says that children with special needs are entitled to proper schooling, but there are no provisions for funding. Local authorities regularly turn away children, telling them to go to ‘special facilities’ elsewhere that don’t exist, or that are far out of their parents’ financial or geographical reach. As a result, according to a 2013 report by Human Rights Watch, 43 per cent of disabled Chinese people are illiterate, compared with 5 per cent of the general population. Only a third receive the services they need, according to Handicap International, and only a fifth get assistive devices, such as walkers, prosthetics, or adapted software. And, since welfare funds are often stolen, delivered late, or impossible to access – thanks to the Byzantine turns of the country’s regulation system, which limits aid to the recipient’s province or even village of birth – only around 15 per cent receive any funding.
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Every so often, pictures of children chained up like dogs surface online – such as the photos of the 11-year-old boy He Zili last November – prompting a brief-lived spasm of anger and pity. Most commonly, these children are confined by parents who simply have no choice; without community or government aid, and with child kidnappings and abuse common, parents lock away children simply to protect them. China does have child welfare laws, but they are rarely enforced because there is no professional or financial interest for ‘social workers’ or police to do so: there is no monthly tally of children to rescue, unlike existing quotas of foetuses to abort, prostitutes to arrest, or petitioners to block from reaching the capital. Disabled children fall victim to the country’s faltering orphanage system: John Giszczak, a former China programmes manager for Save the Children says ‘95 per cent of Chinese orphans have special needs’.
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