HONG KONG - On the heels of a grandly successful Summer Olympic Games, China
now begins its second Olympic quest. The Paralympics kicked off with another
dazzling opening ceremony on Saturday night and advocates for China's 83
million disabled people (more than 6% of the population) hope the 11-day event
will translate into more enlightened attitudes toward the handicapped among
ordinary Chinese.
This time around the success of the Games should not be judged by their
ceremonial majesty, their state-of-the-art infrastructure or by the number of
gold medals the Chinese team accumulates. The Paralympics can be deemed a
success if the spectacle of
4,000-plus mentally and physically disabled athletes performing in a
challenging array of sports manages to change widespread, deeply ingrained
prejudices against the handicapped in Chinese society.
As fate would have it, the string of anti-China protests that preceded the
Games placed the disabled in a heroic light. Remember that it was Jin Jing, a
28-year-old former Paralympic fencer, who was hailed nationwide as the defender
of the sacred Olympic flame during the Paris leg of the ill-conceived torch
relay.
Selected to carry the flame through the French capital in April, Jin, who lost
a leg to cancer, fended off waves of attacks to keep the torch alight in a
15-minute ordeal captured on video and replayed ad nauseam throughout China.
For her courage and perseverance, she was feted as a "wheelchair angel" and
regarded as China's first Olympic hero, with many more conventional ones to
follow.
"Jin is a smiling angel in the wheelchair," the official Xinhua News Agency
gushed. "Her fearlessness was infectious and touched the heart of the entire
nation."
In her new role as national hero, Jin even threw in a few digs at supporters of
a longtime nemesis of the Chinese leadership and the primary source of
inspiration for the Paris protests, the Dalai Lama, criticizing US Under
Secretary of State Paula Dobriansky for meeting with Tibet's spiritual leader
and thereby "condoning secession activities of the Dalai clique".
Let's hope some additional national heroes emerge from among the 332 athletes
representing China in the Paralympics. In the 2004 Athens Paralympic Games,
Chinese athletes topped the medals table - winning 63 golds and 141 medals
overall - and their dominance is expected to continue in Beijing. The Athens
triumph did not create a big national stir, but this time, with China hosting,
may prove different.
"Holding a completely successful Paralympics will encourage a wider
understanding and knowledge of disabled people," the vice chairman of the China
Paralympic Committee, Lu Shiming, has said.
While there have been small improvements in the lives of the disabled over the
past 10 years, they have been largely left out of China's tremendous economic
boom. Once commonly referred to as can fei (deficient or useless), the
disabled are now putatively protected by more than 50 laws and regulations
guaranteeing their basic rights, including the right to employment. Deng
Pufang, the paralyzed son of former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, has been a
champion for the disabled in his country.
Despite these legal advances and the efforts of junior Deng and others,
however, outside the country's iconic Olympic sports venues, China's disabled
remain largely unseen and unheard. That attitudes have been slow to change was
clear from the publication of a handbook for Paralympics volunteers that
cautioned them to be on guard against the "unusual personalities" and
"unsocial" and "introspective" behavior of the disabled. The handbook has been
changed, but the mindset of those who wrote it remains widespread in China.
Concerns about the lasting effects of the Paralympics are much the same as the
worries associated with the preceding Olympic Games: Will China again dazzle
the world with pyrotechnics, showmanship and infrastructure but, once the Games
are over and international attention has turned elsewhere, return to its old
ways, including deep-rooted prejudices against the handicapped?
The Olympic Village in Beijing has been modified to accommodate disabled
athletes, and the city has also spent 600 million yuan (nearly US$88 million)
improving public access for the disabled. Tellingly, however, the wheelchair
elevators that can now be found in the subway system and the new
wheelchair-accessible buses are rarely used.
The infrastructure is there but, so far, Beijing's disabled residents,
estimated at nearly 1 million, out of the city's total 17 million population,
are not. Similarly, laws are in place that impose fines on employers who refuse
to hire qualified disabled applicants, but many employers choose to pay the
fines rather than hire the handicapped.
While conditions are bad for the disabled in China's cities, they are far worse
in the countryside, where a majority of the country's population of 1.3 billion
still lives. Less than half of the urban disabled have access to health care,
according to government figures, but only 2% of those in rural areas enjoy any
kind of medical coverage.
These are figures worth pondering as you watch Chinese and other handicapped
athletes shine in the Paralympics. You might also consider that China's
disabled population has no doubt swelled as a result of the devastating
earthquake that struck Sichuan province in May.
Prior to the opening of the Paralympics, the head of the Beijing Disabled
Persons' Federation, Zhao Chunluan, called for "new policies to educate people
about the reality of the millions of physically and mentally disabled" living
in China today.
"I have repeated many times," she said, "that people do want to understand the
disabled, but that they are ignorant of their condition. Chinese society itself
is not inhumane. But our society is not fully informed of the disabled people's
suffering."
Clearly, then, with a Paralympic boost, the nation is poised to confront its
long-standing, rampant discrimination against the disabled - whose numbers, to
put things in perspective, are larger than the populations of most countries in
Europe.
But, as with the much-vaunted but still-unfulfilled promises of reform that
convinced the International Olympic Committee to select Beijing as host for the
2008 Summer Games, it will take more than elaborate choreography, fancy venues
and rhetorical pledges to improve the lives of the disabled in China.
In the end, the most important story of the Beijing Olympics will not be about
the medals won, the records broken or the flawless organization of the host
country. It will be about what happens next - for the disabled in China, and
for everyone else.
Kent Ewing is a teacher and writer at Hong Kong International School. He
can be reached at kewing@hkis.edu.hk.
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