Some of the athletes at the Paralympic Games are visually impaired

Banners and bunting for the Paralympics have replaced those of the Olympics on Beijing's streets, and the first of the 4,200 disabled athletes who will compete in the Games have started arriving.
Yet with less than a week to go before they open, China's vast and growing army of disabled citizens has little cause to celebrate.

Hosting the Paralympics has been talked up as an opportunity to challenge the deep-seated prejudice which the disabled face in China, just as the Games themselves were supposed to spur China to improve its dismal human rights record.

Yet in May, an official guide for Olympic volunteers characterised the disabled as "stubborn and controlling" and "unsocial", and last week Li Caimao, the director of the city of Beijing's Disabled Person's Affairs Committee – himself a polio victim – admitted that "there is still discrimination".
For years, disabled people were prevented from attending university, because all Chinese had to pass a medical examination before being allowed to take the college entrance exam. "I was lucky because I was able to attend a normal school. But when I graduated I had to rely on a friendly doctor, otherwise I wouldn't have passed the medical," said Gao Shan, who has been visually impaired since birth.

Officials insist that barrier has now been removed, but the attitudes remain. And it is not just education that China's estimated 83 million disabled have difficulty accessing: jobs and healthcare are also in short supply.

With 12 million blind people, China has the largest blind population in the world. But for most, their only option is to work in the many blind massage parlours that dot China's cities. "The biggest problem disabled people in China have is that they don't have the same opportunities as able-bodied people," said Mr Gao.

Their most visible presence is normally on the streets of Chinese cities. In Beijing, disabled beggars, some of them children, congregate near tourist hotspots like Tiananmen Square. But their desperate existence is at odds with the image of the modern, developed China the authorities wanted the world to see during the Olympics, so they were cleared from the capital's streets before the Games.

As a result, even though more than 6 per cent of China's population has some sort of disability, over the last few weeks they have been all but invisible in Beijing.

Xie Yan knows what it is like to be looked down on by society. The strongly-built, 6ft 1in Beijing resident had little understanding of the problems the disabled faced until he was 27, when he was diagnosed with bone cancer and his left leg was amputated above the knee. Now, the former basketball player has a prosthetic leg and gets around on crutches.

"At first, I didn't want to go outside and spent almost all my time in my apartment alone, because whenever I went downstairs the people in my building looked at me as if I was strange, or they tried to avoid me altogether," said Mr Xie. "I lost almost all communication with the outside world. Then one day, I realised I had to get out and start living again."

In March 2006, the 34 year-old joined forces with Mr Gao to found 1+1, an organisation that produces a weekly radio show on disability issues that is broadcast across China. Operating out of a tower block in unfashionable south Beijing, the presenters and producers are all blind or visually impaired. They encounter prejudice daily. "I've gone up to people in the street to interview them and when they've seen that I'm disabled they've walked away," said Mr Gao.

Until recently, the Chinese used the phrase "can fei", meaning deficient and useless, to describe the disabled. The pejorative term dates back to the 1950s and the Mao Tse-tung era, when the communist party was determined to project an image of a healthy, strong population. Forced sterilisation of the disabled was common, while marriages between disabled people were forbidden.

Some 75 per cent of disabled people live in rural areas, where prejudice against them is especially strong. "It would have been impossible for me to start this radio station in my hometown," said Mr Gao, who comes from a small town in southern Fujian Province. "I think there's a big gap in understanding between the cities and the countryside. We're still a largely agricultural society and disabled people are always going to be discriminated against in farming areas."

Emily Oelrich, 20, a student from Northampton who recently spent three weeks on a clandestine Christian mission trip to China, said: "It is a very hard country for the disabled people we were working with, as false impressions mean many people believe that disfigurement is a sign of bad luck which can be infectious.
"Missionaries described to us how when they first began their work, the people would shun them and not want to be touched out of a deep seated shame. Until recently people with leprosy would be banished to government compounds and in more remote areas people with that disease still take themselves away from their families to live with other sufferers, fearing that otherwise they will infect their relations."

China topped the medals table at the Athens Paralympics, with Britain a distant second, and is fielding a team of 332 athletes next weekend - a team which it hopes will once again win more golds than that of any other country. But there is little sign so far that the Chinese public will embrace them in the way they embraced their Olympic heroes. Despite pricing even the most expensive tickets at just 80 Yuan (£6), so far less than one third of the 1.66 million Paralympic tickets available have been sold.