Disability in Contemporary China

"This book offers the first comprehensive exploration of disability and citizenship in Chinese society and culture from 1949 to the present. Through the analysis of a wide range of Chinese sources, from film and documentary to literature and life writing, media and state documents, it reveals the standards against which disabled people have been held as the Chinese state has grappled with expectations of the 'ideal' Chinese citizen. It demonstrates how culture offers a potent site where the norms of disabled citizenship are negotiated, a dynamic space where collective social, political and cultural understandings of what it means to be disabled are both imbued and contested. The book proposes an exciting new theoretical framework - 'para-citizenship'. A far more dynamic relationship of identity and belonging than previously imagined, this new reading synthesises the often troubling contradictions of citizenship for disabled people to better capture the ways in which they can be isolated and marginalised, viewed as different and not 'normal', and considered ancillary to the 'mainstream', yet simultaneously be subject to compelling and affective discourses of equality and inclusion"--