From Justin to Nathan:
>The report is appalling, but one should avoid misusing terms. The
>Chinese dictatorship is not fascist. It lacks the domination of
>capital--capital is rising but stringly subordinated, the
>authoritarian populism, the military aggressiveness, the public
>commitment to racial superiority, the antomodernist blood-and-oil
>ideology and antirationalism, and many other attributes of either
>classical or neo-fascism--the latter being typical of the Latin
>america of the 1970s, say. We have to apprehend the specifity of the
>Chinese regime on its own terms. --jks
Also, we'd have to examine change in the treatment of the disabled: pre-capitalist China; China under capitalism & imperialism; China after the Chinese Revolution; & post-Mao China under the market reform.
I have to wonder why leftists like Marta & Nathan show less understanding of China, paying no attention to its politico-economic changes, than even the U.S. State Department & the New York Times:
***** U.S. Department of State
China Country Report on Human Rights Practices for 1997
Released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, January 30, 1998.
...People With Disabilities
In 1990 the Government adopted legislation protecting the rights of the country's approximately 60 million disabled persons. According to the official press, all local governments subsequently drafted specific measures to implement the law. The central Government reported in 1996 that, in the 3 preceding years, the NPC Standing Committee conducted nationwide inspections to verify compliance with the law; it "found that the handicapped generally received good services and help in both their dealings with officials and in public life." The press publicizes both the plight of the disabled and government efforts to assist them. A rehabilitation program launched in 1988 has reportedly treated 2.32 million people who suffer from cataracts, polio, or deafness. Beijing city's rehabilitation program was said to have trained 5,000 disabled people in 1997, of whom 1,000 were expected to obtain jobs within the year.
However, reality for the disabled lags far behind legal dictates. Misdiagnosis, inadequate medical care, pariah status, and abandonment remain common problems. The latest available statistics, compiled in 1993, show that approximately 50 percent of the disabled lack adequate food and clothing. The same figures show that 68 percent of the disabled are illiterate; 67 percent require family support; 49 percent are unemployed; only 6 percent of blind and deaf children enter school; and only 0.33 percent of mentally retarded children enter school.
Deng Pufang, son of the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, heads the China Welfare Fund for the Handicapped, the government organization tasked with assisting the disabled. In a June speech, Deng Pufang said that the Government had helped 600,000 disabled citizens solve their food and clothing problems in 1996. The Government reportedly spent some $24 million in 1996 to carry out these poverty-relief measures. In May the official press noted that the Government's goal was to clothe and feed all of the country's disabled by the end of the century, as well as to provide rehabilitation services for 3 million disabled citizens, educate 80 percent of disabled children, and find jobs for 80 percent of disabled adults. The Government requires all state enterprises to hire a certain number of disabled workers, but authorities estimate that nearly half of all disabled persons are jobless. According to Beijing municipal authorities, however, 75 percent of the disabled population in the capital have jobs.
The Maternal and Child Health Care Law forbids the marriage of persons with certain specified contagious diseases or certain acute mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. If doctors find that a couple is at risk of transmitting disabling congenital defects to their children, the couple may marry only if they agree to use birth control or undergo sterilization. This law mandates premarital and prenatal examination for genetic or contagious diseases, but it specifies that medically advised termination of pregnancy or sterilization requires the signed consent of the patients or their guardians.
Standards adopted in 1994 for making roads and buildings accessible to the disabled are subject to the 1990 Law on the Handicapped, which calls for their "gradual" implementation. Lax compliance with the law has resulted in only limited access to most buildings....
<http://www.state.gov/www/global/human_rights/1997_hrp_report/china.html> *****
***** The New York Times January 25, 1999, Monday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section A; Page 3; Column 1; Foreign Desk HEADLINE: China's Disabled Are Victims of a New Economy BYLINE: By ERIK ECKHOLM DATELINE: BEIJING, Jan. 24
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 Mr. 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, and to feel they were contributing to society.
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 that long seemed secure.
"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 Mr. 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 alike 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 1980's, 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. Mr. Deng's legs were paralyzed years earlier when, facing persecution in the Cultural Revolution, he jumped out a window. Now Mr. 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 and so hang around the house, helping with farm work as they can.
In part because of the lack of funds, in part because attitudes still tend to range from paternalism to disdain, disabled Chinese have only slowly entered universities and professions. An antidiscrimination law was enacted in 1991, and progress has been greatest for those with problems such as paralyzed legs, hundreds of whom have attended a university.
But blind people are still 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 1950's, when everyone was expected to help build the new socialist state. In recent years, tens of thousands of these factories have employed about one million disabled people doing everything from folding book pages to making matchboxes or toys.
Whatever the social merits of this approach, in the 1990's economic forces began forcing officials to rethink strategy as most of these factories, small and backward, sank into debt.
Now the Government is pursuing integration by trying to require all companies and institutions to hire some disabled people. In the mid-1990's 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 Mr. Zhou, the sociologist, who has studied the program. During 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, Mr. 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, surprisingly, 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.
"Still, it has become clear that welfare factories are no longer a viable path," Mr. Zhou said. "This system of proportional employment is really the only way we can go."
Blind people, with their special educational needs like braille, still usually attend separate schools here. The training programs in massage and piano tuning are opening up new opportunities, if typecast 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 are 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. *****
Deplorable, yes, but not fascist & better than many underdeveloped nations.
Yoshie