Using The Perspective Of ‘Peopleship’ To Conceptualise Disability In China

This chapter looks at how Chinese disabled people are positioned in the spectrum of peopleship, a contextualised concept expressing relationships between people and the nation more clearly than citizenship, and questions the application of universal understandings of disability in China. While enjoying the peopleship rights, the people, including disabled people, are expected to be self-enterprising to participate in national development. Disabled people are officially constructed as partially or wholly lacking ability, and their rights entitlement is in the sense of offering them extra help due to traditional compassion-based humanness, resulting in unstable social status and rights enjoyment compared to other people. We argue that the construction of disability, in tandem with peopleship cannot be explained by a universal understanding of disability. The chapter closes with a call to decolonise disability studies through greater attention to local contexts and formations of disability.