Paralympic boon to China's disabled
The Games for the physically impaired start Saturday in Beijing, but they already have left one group of Chinese citizens heartened.
BEIJING — Never mind the prospect of a swimmer competing in the butterfly who has only one leg, or a long jumper who is blind. To Zhou Rong, it was miracle enough when she saw a television report showing a disabled person in Beijing navigating a wheelchair onto a public bus.
"I was so happy," said Zhou, 29, who works in the southern city of Changsha for the Hunan province Disabled Persons' Federation and uses a wheelchair. "I'd never seen anything like that in my life."
If the Summer Olympics were a coming-out party for China as a whole, the Paralympic Games will be an even greater event for the country's disabled. In preparation for the 11-day international competition that opens Saturday, Beijing is being retrofitted with ramps for wheelchairs and street crossing signals for the blind. The city also has acquired 2,000 "kneeling buses."
Even the Great Wall, once so forbidding to invaders, is now accessible to the disabled with the recent installation of a double-doored elevator and ramp that allow wheelchairs to enter and exit in the Badaling section close to the capital.
Rules prohibiting large dogs in the capital were relaxed to allow the blind to bring their guide dogs.
The Chinese government is determined to give the participants at least a taste of the hoopla that accompanied last month's Summer Games. A lavish opening ceremony is planned for Saturday night at the 91,000-seat National Stadium, called the Bird's Nest. State-run CCTV has been showing many of the 4,200 participating athletes arriving at the now very wheelchair-accessible Beijing airport.
Every day this week, newspapers have been filled with flattering photos of the disabled -- not only athletes but children whose limbs were amputated after the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan province.
"The Paralympics are a platform for ordinary people to accept the disabled and for the disabled to accept themselves," said Qian Zhiliang, a professor of special education at Beijing Normal University.
Qian says the disabled in China have suffered because of widespread belief, particularly among rural people, that they must have done something wrong in a previous life.
"There is a difference in Western and Eastern culture in these attitudes toward the disabled. A lot of these ideas about human rights for the disabled were introduced from the outside and are only slowly being accepted," Qian said.
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