China’s rocky road to rights

83 million disabled people may appear to have rights, but Stephen Hallett says repression lurks just beneath the surface.

On the surface, China looks like a country with a strong record in protecting the rights of people with dsabilities. Its quasigovernmental China Disabled Persons’ Federation (CDPF), headed by the son of late supremo Deng Xiaoping, has branches throughout the nation. Its Disabled Persons’ Protection Law, passed in 1991, enshrines a host of basic rights. In March 2007 China signed the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. The Chinese Disabled Persons’ Arts Troupe performs regularly around the world. And disabled Chinese athletes swept the board at the Athens Paralympics – and promise to do the same in Beijing next year.

The situation on the ground is often rather different. True, disability has a much higher profile in today’s China than it did in the past. China’s reforms and the strengthening of its legal system have helped, at least on paper, to give disabled people some of the rights many in the West now take for granted. Yet implementing these rights in a country of 1.3 billion people is less than easy.

CDPF chairman, Deng Pufang, was himself paralysed after falling (or jumping from) an upper floor window during the purges of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). After his father was rehabilitated and rose to supreme leader in the late 1970s, Deng Pufang began lobbying internally, establishing the CDPF in its present form in 1988. There is no question that it has been a force for good in China, though it is often criticised for being corrupt and ineffective: a means of control, as much as a support, for disabled people.

The independent disability lobby is practically non-existent. The main reasons for this are that most of China’s 83 million disabled people are poor and live isolated lives in rural communities: their greatest concern is basic survival. Secondly, the few independent voices in the disability movement in China are vulnerable to censorship and harassment by local officials, who are generally intolerant of criticism.

One well-known example of this is self-trained legal advocate Chen Guangcheng. Chen, blind from infancy, grew up in a village in Shandong Province, studied Chinese medicine and, from the late 90s, became active in the field of diability rights. Discovering regular abuses by corrupt county officials, he assisted dozens of disabled people to fight for tax exemptions and other rights enshrined in Chinese law.

In 2005, Chen became aware of widespread abuses of Chinese family planning law, under which rural women were being forced to undergo late terminations and sterilisations, often under brutal conditions. Chen’s campaign to assist these women brought the wrath of local officials upon him. Abducted from the streets of Beijing and held for a year under house arrest, he was later convicted on spurious charges and is now serving a four-and-a-half year prison sentence in a Shandong jail.

By taking on the local establishment - and stepping outside the bounds of disability – Chen provoked the fury of the Chinese Communist Party. This is true of other disabled activists, such as Qi Zhiyong, who lost a leg after being hit by a soldier’s bullet in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. But it is more accurate to describe these courageous individuals as “activists who are disabled” rather than “disability activists”.

• Stephen Hallett, himself visually-impaired, has lived in China for nearly 20 years and is a specialist in Chinese affairs. He is a broadcaster and documentary producer and is currently China country director of the BBC World Service Trust.