The Survey Says: Foreigners, Set an Example!

There has been an explosion of posts over the past few days and hopefully this pace will continue (as long as I keep having things to blog about at least). Hey, everyone, it's hard being on a server that is blocked in China, so again, please vote for me! I'm still considering changing to one of the other popular blog servers, but then again, there is no guarantee one of those won't get blocked again in the near future, so we'll see...

Speaking of being blocked, China Law Blog was blocked for awhile here, but thanks to their fancy email subscriber, I was still able to read their posts behind the Great Fire Wall. I know this is the second time today I'm talking about it, but it has been so relevant lately that it's hard not to talk about it. If you don't know about the blog or haven't heard of the writer of the blog and you consider yourself informed on Chinese issues, you must have been under a rock recently because its gottehttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifn itself splashed all over the place. Not that they need anymore free advertising over there, but thought I'd put in a good word (haha, perhaps being overly polite is enough to jump onto a blog roll?)...

In this post, though, the gloves will come off a bit. Dan had a great post a few weeks ago entitled "Take Advantage of China's Rampant Employment Discrimination." It's a topic that in one respect or another, I've been talking about since the start of this blog (come on, a restaurant in the dark that doesn't hire blind employees???). His post is based on an article from Xinhua on a survey conducted, the most interesting (to me at least) results of which is that 86% of people responded that discrimination is a problem and 51% viewed it as serious (the article can be found here). The survey also stated that 22% of those surveyed stated that they'd been denied a job due to their physical disability (though no data was available as to what percentage this was of disabled participants, my guess is close to 100%).

Every kind of imaginable discrimination exists in China. If you aren't a graduate from a top college who is fully healthy, has a big city hukou, and is relatively young (and of course not gay or HIV-positive), you might have a chance getting a good job with a top company/firm in Beijing, Shanghai, or Shenzhen. If you don't satisfy those criteria, good luck. I'm not sure how it is for women or older people or even homosexuals, but if you're disabled, you're basically screwed. First, if its a sensory disability, umm, sorry, you're screwed. If it's a problem with one or more limbs (due to amputation, paralysis, polio, etc), you're luck is a little better, but it all depends on if your parents were able to convince the school to let you in and possibly even be forced to carry you to school everyday. Okay, it seems I'm repeating myself, because I am, just go back and read this post.

It is a bad sign for a country when you need foreigners to solve your problems for you. Yet when it comes to job discrimination, Chinese are just going to go on discriminating, its slowly improving, but I doubt we'll see a Chinese ADA with teeth in my lifetime. Therefore, it is up to those foreign companies in China to take up the torch for the disabled (or the women, or those from the countryside) and give them opportunities. These foreign companies, the US ones at least, in the US would be forced to follow the ADA, so why shouldn't they be held to the same standards in China?

It's time for people like Mr. Harris and other foreign business leaders to step up and use their clout for the purposes of good. Take a chance on hiring a skilled disabled (or women, old, rural, whatever) employee, they are out there and they're probably also even harder workers than those who didn't have to fight so much on a daily basis to get where they are.