Paralympics: China: Lots of medals, little social participation

Medals are always a measure of success at the Paralympic Games. This is one of the reasons why Karl Quade, as chef de mission of the German team, drew a positive conclusion at the final press conference of the Paralympics in Paris: “We won medals in eleven sports, which is three more than in Tokyo.” The decline “in the total number Medals and stopped at the so-called final places four to eight.” Julius Beucher narrowly missed tenth place in the national rankings, which Julius Beucher had set as his goal, but the President of the German Disabled Sports Association was also happy about an “upward trend.”

If you take the medals as a benchmark, then China is by far the most successful country. And that has been the case since the 2004 Games in Athens. The People’s Republic also dominated at the 17th Summer Paralympics in Paris: its athletes won almost twice as many medals as the team from second-placed Great Britain. The Chinese haul of gold medals alone is almost twice as high as the total number of German medals.

The medal table from Paris

But you could also apply a different yardstick to the Paralympics. How much does sporting success affect the everyday lives of people with disabilities? On their visibility, their health care, their opportunities in education or on the job market. “The effects of the Paralympics on society in China are very small,” says British scientist Stephen Hallett, who lived in China for a long time with a visual impairment. »The Paralympians are an elite. This group does not stand for participation, but rather for isolation.

For centuries, people with disabilities in China were considered a burden, partly because of deep-rooted traditions. In Confucianism, healthy children were viewed as ideal because they could carry on the family line and care for older relatives. In Buddhism, a disability was sometimes seen as a punishment for a previous life. Disabled people in China were hidden, especially in rural areas. The facilities for people with disabilities that had long been few and far between date back to the 19th century and were founded by Christian missionaries.

»The effects of the Paralympics on society in China are very small.«

Stephen Hallett British scientist

It had to be an influential personality who challenged this system. In 1988, Deng Pufang founded the Chinese Disabled People’s Association. The son of Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping was tortured and pushed out of a window by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Since then, Deng has been paralyzed and dependent on a wheelchair. With his association, Deng set up hundreds of special facilities for disabled people in the 1990s: schools, nursing homes and sports facilities.

“This association was relatively closed and seemed more like a state control body,” says Hallett. “People with disabilities who were not connected to the party apparatus were hardly able to contribute ideas.” And so the isolation of disabled people became entrenched.

At the beginning of the millennium things looked like things were changing. In 2001 the Olympic and therefore also the Paralympic Games were awarded to Beijing in 2008. In a relatively open social climate, activists and NGOs campaigned for the rights of disabled people. The People’s Republic was one of the first states to ratify the new United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This convention expressly stipulates the inclusion of people with disabilities and their equal participation.

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In sports, this would mean that swimming pools, school lessons or coaching courses are equally accessible to people with and without disabilities. But once again China chose a different path. The world’s largest Paralympic training center was built in a suburb of Beijing. Hundreds of special schools and rural hospitals should report young people with recent amputations to local sports offices. Several thousand people were seen every year for Paralympic sports. Til today. And the choice is large; around 80 million people with disabilities live in China. “The athletes have to live in spartan accommodations for months,” says Hallett, who researches at the University of Leeds: “Those who don’t develop quickly enough are sorted out again.” And even the many medal winners are often left with nothing after the end of their careers.

The United Nations has repeatedly warned China that new ramps, guidance systems or wheelchair-accessible buses in Beijing or Shanghai are not sufficient for a modern inclusion concept. The Communist Party rejects such suggestions as Western paternalism. Instead, they interpret the Paralympic dominance as superiority over political rivals from the USA and Europe. And domestically, they market their medal winners as symbolic figures for the social state.

But a lot of it is propaganda. It is true that since the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing, people with disabilities have increasingly been featured on Chinese television. Authorities and companies have adopted employment quotas for disabled workers. However, implementation is slow; 75 percent of people with disabilities continue to live in rural areas. In addition, families often have to look after their relatives with severe disabilities themselves because the health system is not geared towards this.

For 20 years now, Chinese dominance at the Paralympics has been covering up the isolation of disabled people in the People’s Republic. The International Paralympic Committee (IPC) and many Western Paralympians also avoid a critical debate about it. Ultimately, this would also put their movement’s positive narrative of inclusion into perspective.

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