The BBC World Service Trust is focusing on health and livelihoods in China. We have trained visually impaired people to produce weekly radio programmes about disability issues. We have also trained and mentored documentary film makers to produce documentaries about disadvantaged groups in western China.
Context
China is the world's most populous country. It has a continuous culture stretching back nearly 4,000 years.
China now has the world's fastest-growing economy and is undergoing what has been described as a second industrial revolution.
A downside of the economic boom has been environmental degradation.
China contains many of the world's most-polluted cities and is the largest oil consumer after the US, and the world's biggest producer and consumer of coal.
Rapid economic growth has pulled millions of people out of poverty, but disabled people remain disadvantaged.
Disability
China's disabled population, estimated at 83 million, is roughly equivalent to the entire population of Germany.
Around 12 million people in China are blind, giving the country the largest visually impaired population in the world.
Over 80% of disabled people in China live in the countryside and have very limited access to education, services and employment opportunities.
Prejudice and discrimination are widespread and blind people, in particular, are further handicapped by a lack of access to information.
Facts
- China has the largest population (1.3 billion in 2006) and the fastest-growing economy in the world
- The economic disparity between urban China and the rural hinterlands is among the largest in the world
- China has more than one billion television viewers.
- State-run Chinese Central TV, provincial and municipal stations offer a total of around 2,100 channels
- An international group of academics concluded in 2005 that China has 'the most extensive and effective legal and technological systems for internet censorship and surveillance in the world'
Working in partnership
We worked in partnership with Chinese media professionals and a Chinese disability organisation to establish a sustainable radio production centre for disabled people in Beijing, and trained visually impaired people to produce weekly radio programmes about disability issues in China. More
We also worked in partnership with the West China Documentary Association to train and mentor documentary film makers in China. Eighteen documentaries about the lives of disadvantaged groups in western China were produced during the two-year training programme.