I'm afraid the Sunday Telegraph article merely ripped off the earlier New York Times article & made it much less informative:
***** The New York Times May 23, 2001, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section A; Page 3; Column 1; Foreign Desk HEADLINE: College Entrance in China: 'No' to the Handicapped BYLINE: By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL DATELINE: CHANGSHA, China
When Liu Wenxiu was growing up in central Hunan province, she never thought of herself as disabled. She limped, as a result of a misplaced injection when she was a toddler, but she was smart and popular -- that was who she was.
So when she did well on China's tough college entrance exam, the shy teenager felt confident setting her sights high: for Nanjing University, where she hoped to study library science. Her score was among the top 150 in the province, well over the minimum generally required at the prestigious school.
But her hopes were shattered, as she was rejected not only by Nanjing but also by all the colleges to which she had applied. Most offered no explanation. Her fallback application -- to a school of traditional medicine -- said her scores were too high.
"There is severe discrimination against disabled persons," said Ms. Liu, through tears, at the technical school where she later enrolled with help from the Hunan Province Disabled Persons Federation. "And I feel that I have been refused not just by the school but by society as well. Before this I felt quite positive about myself; everyone has imperfections, right? Now I have lost all self-confidence."
Bias against people with disabilities runs deep in China, where they often find themselves fighting cultural stigma, deprived of both jobs and educational opportunities.
While China has strict laws against discrimination, they are often undercut by policies that allow schools and companies to reject candidates whom they deem physically unsuitable. This is a society where want ads specify "young, tall and thin."
"The law stipulates that schools shouldn't reject these students because they are disabled," said Zhou Chengsheng, director of the Education and Employment Department of the Disabled Peoples Association in Hunan province. "But the schools all emphasize 'moral, intellectual and physical development,' and they know these students are not physically perfect. So they turn them down."
A recent editorial in The Peoples Daily implicitly acknowledged the problem, and said the State Council had vowed to improve college access for the disabled in the next five years. But that will require a sea change: Beijing's dozens of universities have altogether enrolled only 236 students with any kind of disability in the last five years, a Beijing youth daily reported.
In some ways, the estimated 60 million disabled Chinese have never had a stronger advocate: Deng Pufeng, the son of China's late leader Deng Xiaoping, is the vocal and visible president of the national Disabled Persons Federation. He is paralyzed and uses a wheelchair.
The number of disabled children being educated rose to 77 percent last year. And Mr. Deng has used his influence to push through laws that require companies to hire a certain percentage of disabled people. Still, people with even minor disabilities tend to be sequestered in low-paying jobs. And official policy is often contradictory.
A 1994 regulation passed by the State Council says universities "must admit disabled students who meet the state enrollment standard and not reject them because of their disability."
But ministry guidelines on the Physical Standard for National Higher Education Enrollment, revised in April, specifically and severely restrict educational options.
For example: Students whose legs have a difference in length greater than two inches or who have a spinal curvature of more than 1.6 inches are barred from a wide variety of majors, including geology, marine science, civil engineering, forensic medicine and veterinary science. They are not even allowed to sign up for short courses in cooking, sculpturing and archaeology. Those who cannot walk may not be enrolled in education, diplomacy, law or journalism, the guidelines say.
On top of that, the ministry gives each province wide leeway in "deciding whether to enroll" based on "the demands of the major."
Although university entrance is based largely on the results of a national exam, universities have some discretion in admissions. After the exam, universities receive the files of students who met their minimum scores (which vary from province to province and year to year).
The universities may turn away a small percentage of candidates after reviewing those files, which contain a list of physical defects. And some administrators vigorously defend their right to reject disabled students. They note that a university's reputation depends on its post-graduation employment rates, and that disabled students have a hard time finding jobs.
"These days no college is willing to take a disabled student," a vice president of a university in Hunan told The China Youth Daily. "Once a college gets one, the media will publicize it, and then there will be more disabled students applying next year. Of course, the school should bear certain social responsibilities, but it's not a welfare organization."
And so, year after year, Mr. Zhou, of the Hunan Disabled Persons Federation, finds himself appealing to the universities or to higher authorities on behalf of disabled students who have been rejected. He says almost all qualified students now do find places -- a great improvement from a decade ago. But he acknowledges that they are often at schools far below what their test scores merit, or in a profession not of their choosing.
When Yuan Xin, 19, applied to southern China's most prestigious medical school, at Zhong Nan University, he got the same response as Ms. Liu: silence. He heard nothing from the university through the summer and early fall. He stayed behind as his high school classmates headed to college.
Mr. Yuan, a skinny, slightly rumpled 19-year-old with thick glasses, had one of the highest exam scores in the province, and his dream was to be a doctor. But he was born feet first and a nerve was injured during delivery, leaving his right leg weak. He can run, but "gets tired quickly," and has a scarcely noticeable limp. Because of his limp, the medical college contends that he is not suited to patient care.
"We really take an interest in disabled people," said Zhou Songqiu, director of the admissions office. "We are a medical university so it is our responsibility to take care of the weak."
But, he added, the university "decided that it was not convenient for him to work in clinical medicine, which requires standing for operations and running to emergencies and things like that."
After lobbying by the provincial Disabled Persons Federation, the university agreed to admit Mr. Yuan, but they assigned him to a program in laboratory research.
Interviewed in a conference room with university officials, Mr. Yuan said he was initially disappointed but had come to accept the decision. "My physical condition is not bad for me, but I see now it's not fair to patients," he said.
After Ms. Liu was rejected everywhere she applied, the provincial Disabled Persons Federation helped her secure a spot studying accounting at the Hunan Advanced Specialized School of Finance and Economics, a junior college where teachers and administrators have shown a strong commitment to helping poor and disabled students, Mr. Zhou said.
They have supported her through bouts of depression, and coaxed her back when she recently tried to drop out. "I thought: What's the point of studying if I have to face the same treatment when looking for a job?" Ms. Liu said.
In an interview, an admissions official at Nanjing University, who would give only his surname, Zhao, defended the decision to reject Ms. Liu, saying she had been turned down because her score -- 594 -- was one point below last year's cutoff. Statistics from the university for last year are not publicly available yet, but its cut-off for liberal arts students from Hunan in 1999 was 557.
In any case, Mr. Zhao defended the university's right to base admission on the ministry of education's physical standards as well as scores. "We look into each case and decide according to their situation," he said. *****
Yoshie