China has an estimated 83 million disabled people. Until recently, the prevailing attitude was that they didn't need accessible buses, crosswalks or ramps because they weren't expected to go anywhere.
Zhou, the woman who works at the federation for the disabled, had polio as a young child. But her parents supported her education and pushed hard for her to have the same opportunities as other children. She quickly discovered the impediments when she tried to become a doctor. Although she scored 568 on an examination for which the cutoff was 520, she was denied a place in medical school.
"They said it was because I was disabled. They didn't need an excuse," Zhou said. She was eventually accepted into a program to study law and ethics.
Even today, Zhou knows few other disabled people who work at regular jobs -- in fact she has seen few who go out in public as she does. Zhou lives close enough to her workplace that a relative can push her to work in her wheelchair.
"People always stare at me. But I will say that the stares are getting friendlier. People smile and look in an understanding way," she said.
Since the 1980s, the Chinese government has made a concerted effort to expand the rights of the disabled, with some critics suggesting that this may have been a way to compensate for shortcomings in other aspects of human rights. One catalyst for change was the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, whose son was paralyzed in 1968 after being thrown out of a third-floor window by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. The son, Deng Pufang, founded and still heads the Chinese Federation for the Disabled.
Although the Paralympics came to Beijing as part of a package deal with the main Olympics, China bid aggressively to host the Special Olympics last year in Shanghai. (The Special Olympics is for the intellectually disabled, the Paralympics for the physically disabled.)
The Chinese government recently ratified a United Nations agreement that guarantees equal treatment for the disabled. But millions of disabled Chinese still live in abject poverty, often forced into begging or slave-like labor in order to survive.
"The Chinese government deserves praise for enacting laws and ratifying the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities," said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, in a statement released Thursday. "But so far, these protections have meant little to persons with disabilities and their advocates in China who struggle to promote their rights, and in particular, to fairly compete for employment."
