Meeting China’s leading DPO ‘1+1’ Group for Disability

When online social media started to gain its popularity in China, I remember spotting a very interesting account on Weibo named ‘1+1’, which was publicising groups of Chinese disabled people’s self-advocacy activities. At that time, it was rare to hear voices from the disability community to campaign for rights, recognition and better services. What does ‘one plus one’ mean? In Chinese language, if you write the character for ‘one’ (‘一’) twice but in a crossing way, it would become ‘人’, meaning ‘human/person’. The name also gives a sense of ‘coming together’ – one person working with another. Throughout years, ‘1+1’ grew into a leading Disabled People’s Organisation in China, which submitted a shadow report for China’s CRPD review (see Hallett, 2014).

It was exciting to meet with its founders XIE Yan and CAI Cong, and learn more about how the Chinese disability movement evolved. From our conversations, I noticed the issue that policy-makers and researchers in China had also not sufficiently engaged with the disability community. The disability community resists the dominance of a medial/charitable discourse of disability in media in the country. ‘We were told that the social model was outdated in western countries thus disabled people should not join together’. More intellectual support and better links with DPOs in other countries are needed, however, language barrier (English) was significant as very few disabled people in China gained satisfying educational achievements.

Education is one of the areas that the ‘1+1’ DPO has been working on for change. For example, they have successfully campaigned for accessibility in the National Higher Education Admission Exam for students with visual impairments, who before could be easily excluded from the exam thus losing chance to receive higher education. Following the experiences of those students who were admitted, they found that there was little support available in universities, which again excluded students. They have been running programmes to broaden education and employment prospects for disabled people, focusing on capacity building. They hope that the frequent incidents of bullying towards disabled students could be put to a stop: ‘If bullying happens all the time to disabled children, the education is hardly inclusive, right?’. Besides education, the organisation has supported a growing network of projects and NGOs dedicated to a wide range of themes, such as disabled women’s voices and accessibility in physical and digital environment.

What’s driving the organisation to keep going in spite of all the difficulties and pressures? Perhaps it is the hope to seek alternative lives for disabled people and transform expectations, as said by CAI Cong: ‘Yes, I am blind, so does my best destination have to be doing massage for the rest of my life? Nothing wrong with that job, but we should have more choices.’

Hallett, S. (2014) ‘Enabling the disabled: The growing role of civil society in disability rights advocacy’. In Fulda, A. (Ed) Civil society contributions to policy innovation in the PR China. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 173-195.