Mao's legacy: Paralympics come to Beijing but little to celebrate for disabled Chinese
Banners and bunting for the Paralympics have replaced those of the Olympics on Beijing's streets, and the first of the 4,200 disabled athletes who will compete in the Games have started arriving.
Yet with less than a week to go before they open, China's vast and growing army of disabled citizens has little cause to celebrate.
Hosting the Paralympics has been talked up as an opportunity to challenge the deep-seated prejudice which the disabled face in China, just as the Games themselves were supposed to spur China to improve its dismal human rights record.
Yet in May, an official guide for Olympic volunteers characterised the disabled as "stubborn and controlling" and "unsocial", and last week Li Caimao, the director of the city of Beijing's Disabled Person's Affairs Committee – himself a polio victim – admitted that "there is still discrimination".
For years, disabled people were prevented from attending university, because all Chinese had to pass a medical examination before being allowed to take the college entrance exam. "I was lucky because I was able to attend a normal school. But when I graduated I had to rely on a friendly doctor, otherwise I wouldn't have passed the medical," said Gao Shan, who has been visually impaired since birth....
Until recently, the Chinese used the phrase "can fei", meaning deficient and useless, to describe the disabled. The pejorative term dates back to the 1950s and the Mao Tse-tung era, when the communist party was determined to project an image of a healthy, strong population. Forced sterilisation of the disabled was common, while marriages between disabled people were forbidden.
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Yet with less than a week to go before they open, China's vast and growing army of disabled citizens has little cause to celebrate.
Hosting the Paralympics has been talked up as an opportunity to challenge the deep-seated prejudice which the disabled face in China, just as the Games themselves were supposed to spur China to improve its dismal human rights record.
Yet in May, an official guide for Olympic volunteers characterised the disabled as "stubborn and controlling" and "unsocial", and last week Li Caimao, the director of the city of Beijing's Disabled Person's Affairs Committee – himself a polio victim – admitted that "there is still discrimination".
For years, disabled people were prevented from attending university, because all Chinese had to pass a medical examination before being allowed to take the college entrance exam. "I was lucky because I was able to attend a normal school. But when I graduated I had to rely on a friendly doctor, otherwise I wouldn't have passed the medical," said Gao Shan, who has been visually impaired since birth....
Until recently, the Chinese used the phrase "can fei", meaning deficient and useless, to describe the disabled. The pejorative term dates back to the 1950s and the Mao Tse-tung era, when the communist party was determined to project an image of a healthy, strong population. Forced sterilisation of the disabled was common, while marriages between disabled people were forbidden.