Note that the article cites one of the chief reasons that blind persons do
not proceed on to the universities is the high cost of computer adaptation
and accommodation. Speech synthesizers and other costly accomodations to
information technology are necessary to participate in the emerging
service and information based economies. Hence, the necessity to steer
people into the careers of massage and piano tuning.
kelly
New York Times
January 25, 1999
China's Disabled Are Victims of a New Economy
BEIJING -- The blind man in a frayed cotton jacket stood on the
sidewalk, hawking cheap plastic shopping bags without much success
to shoppers who scurried past.
The man, Li Bohui, 43, was trying to supplement the $30 he receives
each month for his years of service in a failed state-owned brush
factory.
China's drive to wring out money-losing state industries has been
hard on many workers, but perhaps roughest of all on people with
disabilities, like Li.
For decades, China has employed many disabled people in subsidized
"welfare factories," where they worked at simple tasks for modest
salaries. In a country that rarely provided welfare payments to
anyone, this allowed the disabled to earn a living of sorts.
But now that system is collapsing because few such companies have
been able to compete in the emerging market economy. As a result,
hundreds of thousands of people with impaired vision or hearing,
paralyzed limbs or other disabilities have lost jobs.
"The economic problems have hit the disabled much harder than the
general population," said Zhou Yongshen, a sociologist with the
Beijing Academy of Social Sciences.
The government's new strategy is to integrate the disabled into the
mainstream work force. But these efforts are running up against a
cultural legacy of discrimination and neglect.
Like other laid-off workers, the disabled are supposed to continue
receiving small subsistence payments from the companies where they
worked. Experienced only at welfare factories, their education
usually minimal, the middle-aged disabled have little prospect of
finding new jobs.
"When I was young, it was hard to get any schooling," said Li,
explaining why he turned to peddling. "I think it's much better for
younger people today, if they can get an education and a trade."
Across town at the Beijing School for the Blind, 19-year-old Wang
Xiuming is one of those younger people, gaining a skill that
represents the latest push among advocates for the blind.
Along with many of her classmates and hundreds of other young blind
people around the country, she is studying therapeutic massage --
an ancient tradition in Chinese medicine that is increasingly being
taken over by blind masseurs, trained at special institutes for
work in hospitals, clinics and hotels.
Tens of thousands more of China's blind people already work as
masseurs -- most of them illiterate and lacking the advanced
training provided by this Beijing school, perhaps offering their
services in beauty parlors or along roadsides.
Preparing young blind people to become medical masseurs or, second
in popularity, piano tuners, is seen by officials and students here
as a step forward, offering the chance of more independent careers.
"I thought about many occupations," said Ms. Wang, "and I decided
that this one was suitable for me."
But the channeling of bright blind students into these
"appropriate" professions also shows how far China remains from
bringing disabled people into the mainstream, a goal sought more
avidly in the United States and other Western countries.
In the late 1980s, the concerns of the disabled began receiving
serious attention here as Deng Pufeng, a son of the late leader
Deng Xiaoping, helped create a national federation that he still
heads. Deng's legs were paralyzed years earlier when, facing
persecution in the Cultural Revolution, he jumped out of a window.
Now Deng, who uses a wheelchair, is a well-connected advocate for
greater opportunity for the disabled.
Most disabled children in cities now receive the universally
required nine years of schooling, with special help if needed. But
in rural areas, where there are no funds for special schools or
classroom helpers, many still do not get a basic education.
In part because of the lack of funds, in part because attitudes
toward them still tend to range from paternalism to disdain,
disabled Chinese have only slowly entered universities and
professions. An anti-discrimination law was enacted in 1991, and
progress has been greatest for those with physical problems such as
paralyzed legs; hundreds of such people have attended university.
But blind people still are kept largely in separate domains and
even today, officials at the Beijing school say, few if any blind
students are attending ordinary university classes anywhere in
China.
One reason is that China lacks the money for widespread
introduction of computerized speech synthesizers, which are
increasingly used by the blind in schools and workplaces in the
United States. The Beijing school is experimenting with computer
techniques but is also developing its own college-level course in
medical massage.
The welfare factory system had been developed on a large scale in
the late 1950s, when everyone was expected to help build the new
socialist state. In recent years, tens of thousands of these
factories have employed about 1 million disabled people doing
everything from folding book pages to making matchboxes or toys.
Now the government is pursuing integration by trying to require all
companies and institutions to hire some disabled people. In the
mid-1990s in Beijing and eight other cities, trial efforts began to
require companies to hire at least 1 percent of their workers from
the disabled, with fines for noncompliance.
"The intent was good, but so far, these policies have not been very
successful," said Zhou, the sociologist, who has studied the
program. Over a recent two-year period in Beijing, only about 400
disabled people got jobs through this policy, he said, "and if that
sounds bad, in Shanghai over three years only 100 people got work
that way."
Smaller firms see the requirement as a hardship, Zhou said, while
larger, successful state enterprises often find it easier to pay a
fine than to comply. Government offices often do not follow the
guidelines, and Beijing's 10 major universities at first applied to
be exempted on the grounds that they had many overseas guests and
scholars and were worried about maintaining their image.
Blind people, with their special educational needs such as Braille,
still usually attend separate schools here. The training programs
in massage and piano tuning are opening up new opportunities, if
stereotyped ones.
At the Beijing Massage Hospital, an advanced center for traditional
medical massage that offers treatment for a wide range of
orthopedic ailments and pains as well as some internal diseases, 31
of the 46 massage professors are blind.
One of them, Zhou Jianzhong, who is 40 and attended the Beijing
School for the Blind, said many of his old classmates who had
entered welfare factories had been laid off and were now trying to
learn massage along with the younger generation.
"I think this is well suited to blind people," he said of massage.
"It's safe, you don't have to be highly mobile, and they tend to
have a good sense of touch."
"The Chinese trust blind people in this job," he said. But finding
good massage jobs is getting difficult, too, he added.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
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