Where Have China's Disabled People Gone? | Elephant Guild

Why do you so rarely see disabled people on China's streets, and why are the few you do see usually begging? Why does China have so few baby-care rooms? Why does Chinese society seem so cold and cruel next to the way developed countries accommodate their most vulnerable?

When you leave the subway, have you noticed the two steel rails fixed to the wall beside the stairs? Do you know why elevators have a mirror? Many people could even be asked this: do you know why some sidewalk tiles have raised lengthwise ridges?

The rails beside the subway stairs are part of an accessibility lift that helps wheelchair users get down to the trains. Before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and the World Expo in Shanghai, every subway line in both cities was fitted with accessibility equipment. Yet it almost never gets used: a disabled person can at last travel from street to platform without obstacles, but the route from home to the station entrance is full of them.

No wonder visitors from developed countries, on their first trip to China, are often surprised at how few disabled people they see on the streets. Some have even guessed that this must be a result of China's unusual family-planning policy. Probably the only country where disabled people are harder to spot than on China's streets is North Korea.

Mirrors and Japanese, but No Braille

Why do elevators have such a large mirror? Most people assume it's for passengers to check their appearance. In fact, it lets wheelchair users see the floor indicator without turning around.

Before the reform and opening-up era, China's few elevators had no mirrors, and certainly no Braille or chimes announcing each floor. When China opened its doors and chose which foreign technologies to adopt, it kept the mirror. Braille, chimes, handrails and the second, lower control panel were in most cases left out.

The same goes for trains. On China's Hexie ("Harmony") trains you can still sometimes spot Japanese text that someone forgot to remove, which critics cite to question how homegrown China's intellectual property really is. But unlike Japan's Shinkansen, China's high-speed trains have no baby-care rooms and no Braille (perhaps understandably, since some of the signs posted on board aren't even clear, idiomatic Chinese). That alone proves they are a genuine Chinese original.

China does not seem to be a country that welcomes disabled people out of doors. Tactile paving for the blind that leads straight into hazards (so-called "death paths") can be found in every major city. Guide dogs and other working dogs are still barred, like pets, from many public places and from public transport; in fact, China has no guide dogs at all. The "beep-beep" signals at crossings have not spread across the country the way hit songs do. Few buses have ramps for wheelchairs. Steps and thresholds in public buildings stand guard like "door gods," keeping disabled people out. And most public toilets have no separate stall for disabled users.

Walk past a wall of TVs in a shop and most of the programs on screen carry neither sign language nor subtitles. Apart from a few big shopping malls in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, commercial complexes never have baby-care rooms. Before the 1980s, China barely had public toilets outside the walls of work-unit compounds (see Elephant Guild's The Gap in "Toilet Civilization," reply with the keyword "Gap" to read it).

Does China Simply Have Fewer Disabled People?

According to the China Disabled Persons' Federation (CDPF), by 2010 China had more than 80 million people with disabilities of all kinds, about 6% of the population. More than 25 million of them were severely disabled. Yet we rarely see disabled people out on the streets, let alone at work or in other parts of public life.

In another sense, of course, China is the country where you see disabled people most. In every city's public spaces, disabled people beg in all sorts of ways, selling cruelty and pain as their "work." As a result, the first image most Chinese people have of a disabled person is a beggar in rags holding out a bowl.

If only disabled people, the largest vulnerable group, were pushed to the margins and ignored, today's prevailing attitudes in China might explain it. But at a time when children are spoiled almost everywhere, young mothers with infants are overlooked at every turn too. That can only mean that mainstream Chinese society is, as a rule, cruel and indifferent toward others.

How a Savage Society Became Civilized

Developed countries today, by contrast, offer vulnerable groups a convenience and warmth that China does not. Whether in publicly funded facilities or in privately built commercial spaces, they go as far as they can to make life easy for the vulnerable. Chinese variety shows feature a few disabled people telling stories of suffering and triumph over adversity; disabled people in developed countries often simply live fuller and more confident lives.

Still, Europe, the United States, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan were not "civilized societies" from the start, and prejudice against and neglect of disabled people and other vulnerable groups is hardly a "Chinese characteristic."

The developed West has a history not only of laws that discriminated against disabled people but also, before World War II, of state campaigns in the name of "eugenics" to persecute and even exterminate them on a large scale. The most notorious case is Nazi Germany.

The United States was not much better. In 1907, Indiana became the first state to pass a eugenics law, which barred people with mental illness from marrying and having children. Similar laws soon spread to 27 other states. In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Virginia's sterilization of Carrie S. Buck on grounds of intellectual disability did not violate the Constitution. That ruling has never been overturned. The irony is that before her sterilization, Buck had given birth to a daughter, and the girl's school records show that her intelligence was entirely normal.

Not until 1974 did the last of America's "ugly laws," which banned people with visible physical disabilities from appearing in public, come to an end. Measured against China, the West's past treatment of disabled people and other vulnerable groups makes it a textbook savage society.

Western efforts to bring disabled people into society began with the care of wounded soldiers after the two world wars. But what gradually made society friendlier to disabled people was the postwar civil rights movement.

The civil rights movement is often reduced to the fight for women's rights and racial equality, but disability rights were an important part of it too. The independent living movement of the 1950s to the 1970s sought to free disabled people from nursing homes and asylums and, with the help of basic accessibility features, let them live independent, ordinary lives.

In the half-century since the disability rights movement began, the range of places disabled people can reach in daily life has grown enormously. More important, the movement made people see that what holds disabled people back, in their own lives and in what they can contribute, is not physical or mental impairment but the isolation, ignorance, discrimination and poverty that come with being pushed to the margins.

Changed attitudes alone, clearly, do not make a society accessible. Even before 1958, people in the West were calling for accessibility features in public and private buildings. In 1961, the United States published its first building standard with accessibility requirements. Yet a survey of 3,000 architects that same year found that only 35% knew the standard existed. Accessibility requirements for public buildings were not widely accepted until 1976.

Winning rights for disabled people also took disabled people speaking for themselves. Dr. Fred Fay, a founder of the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities; the noted lawyer Harriet McBryde Johnson; Max Starkloff, a co-founder of the National Council on Independent Living; and Marca Bristo, former head of the National Council on Disability, all became disabled through one cause or another. Most were highly educated. Besides building their own careers, they used rallies, speeches and writing to make the public aware of how disabled people actually lived. It was the combined effort of many disabled people that finally won the disability rights movement its victory.

Western history suggests that without a civil rights movement, there is no civilized country.

The Silent 80 Million

China has, of course, made progress. But that progress has been driven entirely from the top, by the government.

The words people use show how far Chinese society has come. Chinese people used to call disabled people by a string of names ending in "-zi": cripple, blindie, deafie, idiot. All of them were lumped together as canfei, "crippled and useless," a word even officials used. In the early 1980s, after the Cultural Revolution, the government ran its "Five Stresses, Four Beauties and Three Loves" campaign, and one part of "stressing civility" was teaching children new words for disabled people: "blindie" became "blind person," "idiot" became "intellectually disabled," and canfei became "disabled person."

The CDPF's leaders have also done something for disabled people's rights. Zhang Haidi, chair of the federation's presidium, for example, made it possible for some disabled people able to drive on their own to get driver's licenses.

But most of China's disabled population seems strangely silent. At a time when social injustice and stereotypes are challenged constantly, they still live shut away from the world. Neither disabled people nor the general public sees anything wrong with them staying quietly at home. Nor does anyone notice that most disabled people in China and their families are still barely scraping by.

The limits placed on them in education, work and elsewhere are taken for granted. CDPF figures show that as of 2008, China had only 1,640 special-education schools and 46,000 special-education teachers, far too few for its huge disabled population. Because basic schooling is so scarce, school-age disabled children enroll at much lower rates than other children. In 2006, the illiteracy rate among disabled people was as high as 43.29%.

Beyond basic schooling, the medical check required for the national college entrance exam is another barrier that keeps disabled people out of higher education. Until 2014, blind people could not sit the exam at all, and the only majors open to them were massage and music performance. According to the CDPF, only 35,000 disabled people entered regular colleges and universities between 2008 and 2012. By comparison, in 2003 alone China had more than 7 million university graduates.

Too little education inevitably leads to too little work and income. The Law on the Protection of Disabled Persons, passed in 1990, explicitly bars employers from discriminating against job seekers because of disability. But the government has not set a good example: in a 2007 survey by China University of Political Science and Law, 40.9% of respondents said civil-service recruitment discriminated against disabled people.

Figures from 2014 show that of China's 80 million disabled people, only 21 million (4 million in cities and 17 million in the countryside) had jobs. The 2006 national sample survey of disabled people put their employment rate at only about 31%. Beijing Normal University's 2013 China Labor Market Report found that from 2007 to 2012 it was still only about 45%.

Joblessness inevitably brings poverty. According to Disabled Peoples' International, most of China's disabled people still live in poverty. CDPF data for 2012 show that even by China's discounted poverty line of 2,300 yuan a year (79% of the UN's $1.25 a day), about 40% of disabled people in rural areas lived below it.

Is China simply not yet rich enough to care about disabled people?

In 2014, real GDP per person in wealthy regions such as Tianjin, Beijing, Shanghai and Jiangsu already exceeded that of the United States in the mid-1950s. And in Beijing, Shanghai and similar places, average years of schooling and the share of people with a college education are already far higher than in the United States when its civil rights movement began.

Yet because of the limits placed on them in education, work and elsewhere, disabled people in China fall far behind America's vulnerable groups of the mid-1950s in income per person and in education.

Given China's particular circumstances, the happiness of all its people depends mainly on the all-knowing, all-powerful government, and disabled people are no exception. And Chinese society does seem to be growing friendlier toward disabled people and other vulnerable groups. As early as 1989, China issued its first rules on accessible design, the Design Code for Urban Roads and Buildings for the Convenience of Disabled Persons (Trial), and the latest Accessibility Design Code took effect in September 2012.

But we all know one thing: events like the Olympics and the World Expo have done a great deal to make Chinese society more civilized. So the most effective way for Chinese society to lose its cruel, indifferent face may be for every city to host an Olympics or a World Expo of its own.