Reconfiguration Of The Disabled In China Social Welfare System

At present, the survival state of Chinese disabled people is not optimistic. This group is confronted with three prominent problems. The first problem is the fast growth of the large quantity of people with disability .The second problem is that most disabled people live in poverty. The third problem is the low level of social participation of this group. The material conditions and the attitude environment in which the disabled people living need urgently to be improved. The positive actions of the disabled people who with subjective obstacles are also lack.As one important part of the material environment, social welfare system even restricts disabled people to achieve basic social rights because it is based on the succor pattern whose basic theories are medical pattern and natural integration mode. Succor pattern only regards disability as a misfortune of the disabled people and considers that low level of social participation is due to the disabled peoples their own. This pattern leads to the absence and drawback of the social welfare system. Therefore, the international society's views on people with disabilities are changing from the medical pattern to the social pattern. Social pattern regards the social environment as the greatest obstacle on social participation of people with disabilities. People under this pattern hold the view that disability is a human rights issue and advocate for disabled people on empowerment and social support.As the development of the social pattern, in this paper the empowerment social pattern of view on people with disabilities is presented. This pattern not only emphasizes the social environment reform and the elimination of barriers, but also stress that the individual should take positive action and be responsible for their own. On the perspective of empowerment social pattern, the government should eliminate various restrictions and barriers of social environment, take measures to help disabled people to get healthy lifestyle conceptions. "Remove obstacle" pattern is the operational approach of empowerment social pattern. In this pattern, obstacles often been regarded as the absence and the defect of the policies. Government needs to adjust and supplement policies to remove those obstacles.Some quantitative and qualitative approaches were used in this research, such as secondary literature analysis, statistical data analysis and in-depth interviews. In this paper I chose 30 disabled people who living in Tianjin to had interviews and got the first-hand information of the living conditions of the disabled people.Social environment including attitude environment and institutional material environment is the biggest obstacle on disabled peoples'social participation. There are four chief environment obstacles that prevent the people with disability to achieve completely social participation. Three of those obstacles come from the institution environment. They are obstacles in survival, obstacles in realization of basic social rights and obstacles in protection of social rights realization. The fourth obstacle comes from the attitude environment which including the attitude, view and ideology on disability of disabled people and people without disability. Chinese social welfare system can't eliminate those four barriers effectively and can't create a good social environment for the disabled people.The conclusion of this research is that currently Chinese social welfare system of peoples with disabilities is still succor pattern-leading system. In this system government provides selective succor on providing social welfare service. It is a family and social network-based, government low-level intervention system which originated from the unique Chinese social structure and traditional integration way. The selective and relieving characters of the system make system can't remove the obstacles effectively for the disabled people. Under the succor pattern, there are contradictions between the needs of disabled people and institutional environment, social welfare system can't provide good services to the disabled people, can't improve the living conditions of people with disabilities fundamentally, can't promote the development of persons with disabilities, meanwhile, prevent disabled people from participating in society. Therefore, Chinese social welfare system of disabled people should transform to the " remove obstacle" social welfare pattern which based on the empowerment social pattern. In this pattern government has a high degree intervention, the third sector and families have active participation, they cooperate with each other to eliminate obstacles of the survival and development process of disabled people. "Remove obstacle" pattern includes four levels of measures for disabled people, namely, survive level, achieving basic social rights level, social rights protection level, disabled people subjective level. In addition, to help the disabled people to eliminate social environment obstacles of social participation, government should take the measures according to the classification from different obstacle levels, different ages, different types of disabled people's needs.