As thousands of para-athletes across the globe converge on Beijing to compete in the 2022 Paralympic Games, China is expected to top medal counts once again after dominating in the last five Winter Games.
What’s the secret to China’s success in the Paralympic Games? The nation invests substantial resources into identifying talented athletes and cultivating their skills. Yet the experience of ordinary Chinese citizens with disabilities is drastically different from that of their athletes. Instead of having the full support of the government and its resources, Chinese citizens with disabilities encounter huge barriers in daily living including inaccessible cityscapes and a shortage of employment opportunities.
And thus lies the Paralympic paradox—para-athletes are given an environment that allows them to thrive while other Chinese with disabilities struggle with barriers to essential accessibility. The lack of accessibility for the population would indicate that the country’s support for its Paralympic athletes is a calculated PR move intended to present the country as a disability-friendly environment to boost its image on a global scale.
Is China’s Paralympic prowess all a façade? General accessibility efforts pale compared to the resources put into the state-run para-athlete training program. That being said, much progress has been made in recent years regarding education and infrastructure.
Tracking accessibility progress in China
One positive side effect of Beijing being chosen to host the 2008 Olympic and Paralympic Summer Games and the 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games was that it spurred accessibility efforts as city officials prepared for an influx of hundreds of thousands of visitors to the city and surrounding areas.
Though the number is likely higher due to underreporting related to social stigma, about 85 million Chinese citizens report a disability, about 7% of the population. Despite so many citizens with accessible needs, Chinese cities have historically lacked accessible infrastructure, Beijing included. Basic things like curb ramps and access to public transportation were not available in many Chinese cities. But after being chosen to host two Olympics, city officials put accessibility efforts into high gear, installing curb ramps in most of Beijing, entrance ramps and accessible handrails in over 70,000 public and private buildings, and making 12,700 bus stops, underground stations, and parking lots fully accessible.
These improvements are welcome, but the rest of the country lags far behind in accessible infrastructure. Outside of Beijing and Shanghai, access to public spaces and transportation is spotty at best, especially in rural areas.
Physical inaccessibility is accompanied by inequities in education and employment. Until 2014, students with disabilities were segregated from the general student population. First, students with visual impairments were integrated into public schools. Then in 2017, a new law allowed students with other disabilities to enter public schools and universities. Despite these new laws, education still fails to achieve equity due to a lack of training to fully prepare teachers to support students with disabilities.
Education disparities have led to high illiteracy rates among Chinese with disabilities, about 40% are illiterate, compared to just 3% of the population. Illiteracy drastically hinders a student’s job prospects as they become an adult, leading to many Chinese with disabilities unable to find employment due to lack of qualifications.
For those that are qualified, stigma and discrimination persist, hindering the ability of Chinese citizens with disabilities to secure gainful employment. Though China has passed many anti-discriminatory laws related to employment, many employers choose not to follow legal mandates, opting instead to pay the associated fines rather than comply.
Stigma, shame, and invisibility
Accessibility legislation like this is ineffective likely because of cultural attitudes toward the disabled community. In China, disability is conceptualized as something that should elicit pity. This view leads to stigma, shame, and efforts to make disability invisible, with many of the country’s children with disabilities hidden away from public view.
Likely because of this characterization of disability, though there are many laws on the books designed to support and protect Chinese with disabilities, there are often no financial resources allocated to carry out these laws, or as in the case of employment mandates, they aren’t followed or enforced.
Government support of para-athletes
This conceptualization stands in stark contrast with how the country’s Paralympians are viewed. Para-athletes will be the first to acknowledge that athletic ability is one of the few surefire ways a person with a disability can receive any support or resources from the government.
China spent about $3.3 billion on Paralympic athletes in 2021, around half of what it spent on Olympic athletes. That $3.3 billion funds the China Administration of Sports for Persons with Disabilities, a recruitment and training system in which local training centers scout and train children with disabilities. The most gifted are chosen to train with state sponsorship from those local centers, with the best of the best making it onto the national team.
State sponsorship allows these athletes to have the comfort, stability, and security necessary to focus their total energy and effort on training, versus putting much of their energy into the struggle of navigating China as a person with a disability.
A worrying possibility regarding the successes of Chinese Paralympians is that it could send the message to other Chinese with disabilities that the only way to be accepted as an equal member of society is to achieve something grand enough that it outshines any disability. This line of thinking would only serve to perpetuate stigma and confirm the toxic notion that disability must be invisible.
On the other hand, many para-athletes hope that their successes in the Games will bring greater visibility to Chinese with disabilities and the barriers they face, enough visibility that more work is done to remove those barriers. Greater visibility would ideally alter the “disability deserves pity and charity” narrative in Chinese culture, leading to people with disabilities being seen as equal members of Chinese society who have the right to participate in every aspect of it visibly.
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