Imagethief

I was just in China, bj, hk, kunming, etc. I use a wheelchair. Only people I saw in a chair were old people, and few of those. There have to be many many disabled people in China but they are hidden as if they don't exist. Not surprising that "the Chinese people" greet paraolympians, as if they have no disabled in China. Almost 0 accessibility, not even public transport. I imagine what they are thinking is that they will have 1-2 accessible buildings for gimps and just drive them to the venues and back at night. It's absurd. I was told by police that if I tried to drive I'd be arrested! I was the first chair user on 12 of the 13 planes I took there; they had NO idea what to do with me. I had to get onto the ground and drag myself into and out of planes. China should not have gotten the OGs. It's all just Hypocritical propaganda for the CCP.

tre, what's up with you man?

::passes the bong::

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Well, in China's defense, the fact that you have a wheelchair means you are a rich, bourgeois westerner. Laobaixing can't afford such a contraption, especially considering the cost of medical bribes these days. Making facilities wheelchair accessible is similar to making facilities Mercedes accessible, to a point.

On the other hand, if you consider more proletarian accessories, such as a walking stick or a bad pair of shoes, so far in my experience, every major city in China has blind man's grooves on their street. You have raised bumps in the street tiling, allowing the blind or newly blind to know the path of the street. This was apparently imported from Japan.

So the fact that I come from the west means that China hiding its crips and putting on a paternalistic face of welcoming all the poor disabled to this Glorious Wheelchair Free zone is ok? You are simply a biggoted able-bodied guy with no respect for human dignity. If you had seen what I have in China, the suffering of people injured or born with a disability, you wouldn't make such frivolous airhead remarks. It isn't about my comfort, my enjoying a life of ease and grandeur as a western rich bourgeois in a wheelchair and being upset the same services were not afforded me in China, my mindless bigotted friend. I had no problem negotiating these issues, in fact I enjoyed doing it for the senser of accomplishment. I pointed those facts out simply because it contrasts with the "welcome" given. If you don't know what you are talking about why take the time to come up with some half-ass dismissive comment, just leave it at the highschool level of the first post, take another toke and slip back into your daze. Exercising your cliche, non-thinking repetition of pseudo-political views (that I am a spoiled westerner and therefore am just talking whiney shit) on a case as serious as hundreds of thousands of people being hidden from view, of not being allowed to live a life because it embarasses in Chinese society to have a cripple in the family, is disingenuous and frankly stupid.

For your information (though it is obvious you don't give a shit about anything but yourself so it is useless for me to write this) less than 1% of the world's population who need wheelchairs have them, so that need is nothing new to the world. However, wheelchairs are expensive and for us rich bourgeois (sic) running dogs because the manufacturers can get that money from us. We are "rich bourgeois" so they can squeeze it from us since we need them in order to have lives. Part of the problem is also that if a person from China buys a western chair, there are no parts for maintenence. But why depend on the west to make expensive chairs when China can make cheap and locally maintainable chairs? Your position is the conservative one, "why should we make a bathroom accessible, no one in a wheelchair ever uses the one we have" (but then, how would they is they wanted to doesn't seem to dawn on them). Take it as it is, China wants to pretend to be a modern and forward thinking country but in this case they have no notion of going about it since they give no thought to the subject. It is this propaganda that pisses me off, though, this paternalistic "welcome" to gimps the world over. Oh, look, we are also very disability friendly, when in fact they are the opposite.

I was too harsh with my last comment. Like I said, I saw some pretty horrible things in China the last time and I over-reacted, both to the "welcome" idiocy and to your comment, which I didn't read well enough. Actually, while those bumps you see on the road (I think I know what you're talking about) are posibly convenient for the newly blind, they make life worse for the wheelchair user. In BJ, for instance, on all the ramps (and there were some surprisingly) they had raised slats every foot or so to prevent people from slipping I assume. Try negotiating that in a wheelchair; you have to do a wheelie to be able to get over them, both up and down the ramp. Better than a stairway, true, but not by much. I am afriad they (the CCP) did or are doing all their accomodating in that thoughtless, able-ist way, relying on non-disabled ideas of what is helpful. Like the elevator in a shopping center in the 2nd circle in BJ conveniently available, you just walk up that staircase there to get to it. Going to be a lot of pissed western athletes (you probably have no notion of the level of wheelchair athletics, no doubt confusing paraolympics with special olympics as many do).

First, I want to apologize for the rich, bourgeois westerner comment. I'm very self-deprecating and this habit starts extending itself to others without my conscious knowledge sometimes. I did not mean to insult you, just to point out that developing countries have different priorities when it comes to public works. In such a country, when you have tens of millions of people starving, wheelchair accessibility tends to be the least of your worries.

If you want to point out the contrast between the official statement and the unofficial reality, I suppose you're right. I'd like to say the discrepancy is a bit clichéd, but I'd then be a hypocrite as I myself have no other source of irony. However, some part of me considers this to be the hallmark of social evolution. If the lie cannot be exposed as a lie, then the society is now more sensitive to the emotions of its members and simultaneously more decadent (in that the truth can no longer be said). While some people may choose to overtly oppose this phenomena, others opt to coopt it. The lying phrase takes on a new meaning, and the language becomes richer.

First, let me apologize, but I'm addicted to omnislashing. (The Wikipedia article on Omnislashing was taken out because it referred to a specific user on Relic Forums, so I can't link from Wikipedia. Omnislashing refers to taking apart a person's post and addressing each segment individually, usually making one's argument appear more compelling than it actually is).

"But why depend on the west to make expensive chairs when China can make cheap and locally maintainable chairs? Your position is the conservative one, "why should we make a bathroom accessible, no one in a wheelchair ever uses the one we have" (but then, how would they is they wanted to doesn't seem to dawn on them)."

I presume they're already involved in wheelchairs. If the market exists, the Chinese, Übercapitalists, will spring upon it. Probably the main reason you don't see so many wheelchairs is that, if you're crippled, you can't make the money necessary to acquire a wheelchair; and given how badly off your relatives are, you're probably not going to manage to borrow enough money to get a wheelchair. Besides, you know how bad quality the Made-In-China-for-Chinese products are. Would you trust your life in such a contraption? In a Western wheelchair, you know your wheelchair won't suddenly break from the low-quality metallurgy. In China, it's quite likely the wheelchair will collapse on its own after a few years of use, and you've gone from being paralyzed waist down to paralyzed neck down.

Speaking of lies, I think I've finally figured out (not that I've been trying; it just came up) why Imagethief is the most Sinophilic blogger of all the informed and experienced expat blogs. Asiatic societies seem to have a lenient concept of honesty. They seem to let a blatant lie pass for the purposes of maintaining harmony. So, what offends many western bloggers is that Chinese seem to say one thing while doing another.

In this case, Imagethief is a PR-consultant. In his occupation, he is obliged to, uh... stretch the truth to an extent. From this experience, perhaps you are more understanding of Chinese "face" and other bullshit?

@ Inst:
I'm so happy to see that there's another Imagethief reader unafraid to psychoanalyze our host. I was starting to fear I was the only one. I think that Imagethief is simply a post-modernist/relativist, and considers Chinese behavior perfectly valid from the reference of its own domain, and that external frames of reference are not analytically meaningful.

@ Imagethief:
Dude! Lucky Cow Happy Happy! <snort><long, rapturous, stoney guffaw>.

Oddly enough, both of the above snippets of text arise from my college experience. Curious.

Oh no! I've accidentally insulted our host! :( I mean that Chinese "face" and the values associated with this are those that meet disdain from Westerners on a day to day basis, not that you're a purveyor of bullshit. ::seppuku::

By the way, I'm told that Chinese is very flexible in translation. So, perhaps, the cow is really the "Fortune Cow of Joy and Ecstasy." It's too bad that Ecstasy is an emphatic, not a psychedelic though.

That cow is super cute!

Let's make a mascot for the imagethief site. It could combine a "post-modernist / relativist" (see Bob, above) and a “[PR consultant who] is obliged to, uh... stretch the truth to an extent” (see Inst, above) in a wheelchair with a copy of "Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics" in one head, a coelacanth that he found on a Madagascan diving trip in the other, and Xinjiang belly dancer on his lap.

By the way, those bumpy paths for the blind aren't only bad for wheelchairs, they also are high heel killers...

I lost track of where the replies were coming from, but I'll just address a couple of topics; if I mix them, please to excuse.

By Chinese-for-Chinese made wheelchairs, I agree with you about the quality. I worked for a NGO that helps teach people ikn developing countries how to make wheelchairs from locally available resources, so there is no need either for the quality to be bad or for the price to be high - for instance Whirlwind Wheelchair International, which, granted, is a dumbass name but a worthy org. There are several like them out there. In mentioning them I am not saying they are the solution to the wheelchair woes of China, just alluding to the fact that I have much experience with wheelchairs, wheelchair need in developing countries, and with the results of NOT having wheelchairs (the technical aspects of which, health primarily, life quality, etc., I won't enthrall you). At any rate, the "industry" is not limited to the poor, however. There is maybe 120 million people in CHina making money enough to buy things from the west (something they don't mention when they talk about trade deficits) and possibly 10 million wealthy there. The kids of said wealthy are, if they are like western kids, trying high risk behaviors which inevitably will lead to spinal cord injuries. Are the wealthy ready to give a kid up for loss because he can't walk? Until now they have been. But developments in the West making life not only viable but for all intents and purposes as good as anyone elses, potentially, might, or should change that. If it weren't for the Culural and especially political bias against it.

As to the cultural subjectivity...let us say, for instance, that China believed in female genital mutilation (clitoridectomy, in other words), that local communities had special nannies who went around with a broken piece of glass and scraped of the clit of girls over 12 because that is what the culture believed in. Is it ok for them to do that merely because they are a different culture than western-informed cultures and it "works fine" for them? I don't believe that you can not compare cultures when it comes to such humanity, or lack there of. If it were as strong as China practices euthanasian on disabled people (which in fact they do) would it not make you think, hey wait a minute? No, probably not. The reason for this is that we disabled are even in the west looked on as semi-human (withness all the people who say, reflexively, that they couldn't live if they became paralyzed, for instance, which is totally bullshit and ridiculous and denigrating to the life of someone inthat position), so you (or anyone able-bodied) would feel some empathy, have some understanding towards a culture that drowns their disabled offspring.

and on that note, I need to go. Thanks for the thoughtful converation. For even including the item on the blog. Peace, Tre

Well, having had the Five Friendlies for the Olympics, I thought that the Paralympics might feature the Six "Specials".

Oops, spoke too soon. I guess a blog can't expect all it's readers to be intelligent and thoughtful.