Online support boosted
With the Internet now enabling once-isolated individuals to form communities, Ruan Yanjun and Ruan Xianhua spend most of their leisure time chatting with other "little people" online.
About 270 people who define themselves as midgets regularly log into half a dozen cyber-chat forums devoted to their interests.
Many have even more time than the Ruan sisters for this pursuit, since unemployment is a major problem.
Their conversations reveal that those without jobs prefer to stay home rather than go out and face mockery; that local governments tend to be unresponsive to their needs; and that their status remains unclear.
In the past, China's definitions of disability did not explicitly include dwarfism.
That seems to be changing. A national survey on disability concluded in December last year classified clearly people shorter than 1.3 meters as disabled for the first time ever.
This decision gives little people like the Ruan sisters legal access to the range of preferential policies that apply to disabled people generally.
Qian Pengjiang, education and employment director for the China Disabled Persons' Federation, described new measures designed to promote employment opportunities and support business start-ups by the disabled.
New regulations from China's State Council on employment of the disabled direct the federation and its local affiliates to provide the disabled with psychological counselling, professional training and job placement services, and call for employers to hire at least 1.5 percent disabled people as a proportion of total staff.
Qian said the federation will monitor hiring and censor violators, with companies that fail to meet the standard paying into an unemployment insurance fund for the disabled.
The new regulations also encourage disabled people to start their own service businesses by granting them exemptions from taxes and licensing fees.
Qian said the federation now operates about 3,300 employment promotion organizations with 20,000 staff across China. Consciousness of disability rights is spreading to the countryside as well. During the recent session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Congress, a CPPCC member, Wang Jianlun who is former vice-prime minister of Ministry of Labor and Social Security, advocated that disabled people in rural areas be granted allowances, pensions and preferential job opportunities.
The day that abnormally small folks like the Ruan sisters are welcomed rather than scorned in the villages may be some time off, but that's the goal.
(China Daily 03/21/2007 page18)
