Ep 16: Representation of disability through Chinese Cartoon
Hello and welcome back to the podcast! This episode we discuss the representation of disability through a Chinese Cartoon production, in fact, the first animation production in China featuring disabled people as main characters is called Dream Catching.
This cartoon first aired on the Children’s channel on China Central Television (CCTV), the national television network on March, 2015. The show is based on the real stories of five disabled people who found success in various fields: The computer scientist Luo Runfa who has Osteogenesis imperfecta, armless calligrapher Chen Weiqiang, armless calligrapher Ding Jinghua, disabled entrepreneur Wang Zhili, and Paralympic champion Lou Xiaoxian. The animated show was promoted as based on and representing stories of self-improvement, optimism and the successful return of the handicapped to society. The goal of the show, noted in various promotional advertising and press releases, was to inspire young people to work hard, and be resilient toward the difficulties of life. The animated show was the first approved cartoon about disabled characters by China’s central government and was “deemed” inspirational by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. Dream Catching is an example of state-directed intentions to “showcase” success stories of disabled characters in an effort to create public goodwill, but ultimately display the limitations the government and the general populace in China may have on disability and the disabled.
I aim to examine the implications of the portrayal of these five disabled characters and how the narratives constructed in the show about their success and failure is depicted for its intended audience: not children, but the able-bodied. The show ostensibly aims to depict how disabled people exist in society and how viewers watching the show can learn to interact with disabled individuals in their own lives, yet the autobiographical nature of the cartoon focuses on making visible the assumption that certain criterias of “normative function,” such as physical fitness criteria, have to be met in order to achieve social inclusion. Dream Catching represents this as one of the fundamental events that disabled individuals are forced to experience. Moreover, this recurrent theme of having to adapt to meet certain criterias for normative function can be viewed as individual characters overcoming the difficult situations brought by their disabilities, but it can also be interpreted as how society has refused or failed to offer help.
The show depicts multiple instances where these individuals’ disabilities lead to isolation from others, hunger and poverty, and moments where they face rejection from opportunities they desperately want. In fact, all the characters are represented as feeling as though they are the burden of their family and the society. The show emphasizes the humiliation and pain these disabled feel in their life, to contrast with their eventual hard earned, self-made success and fame. The characters are depicted to need others in life for help in order to be alive, what Eunjung Kim calls a “proxy” for the cure in her book Curative Violence: “someone who is motivated to perform extraordinary tasks for the sake of cure accompanied by supernatural, religious, and moral rewards, including reincarnation, class elevation, and social recognition.” The existence of (almost always) the Mother to care for the disabled kid breaks the interdependence formed in a reciprocal, equal and loving relationship that does not demand “change” or “improvement” of a disabled person, thus forms a binding disabled family that is pressured to perform, with the role of government and society disappearing or backgrounded, with almost all communal functions replaced by the disabled’s family as the sole support system.
Even though the stories are taken from real life experiences, they fall into the generic convention of an ableist narrative of the disabled. While the presentation of disabled needing to be “saved” by family and friends is problematic, what is more concerning is the lack of opportunity in naming or examining the origin of oppressive behavior exerted on the disabled. The production team, including the five disabled successful “role models,” even with the goal of raising the level of awareness on disability issues in China has not attempted to shift priorities from victimizing the suppressed to critiquing a culture that views disability as a form of failure and to depict disabilities not as weaknesses or wounds to be overcome as part of a personal quest for victory and success, a plot device, but rather as differences that constitute the variety of people that already exist in society. Comparing Dream Catching with cartoons from the West that have taken a different approach in portraying disability, I argue that using autobiographical narratives to recast challenges these characters face not as a weakness, but as a source of strength, the characters in Dream Catching construct a world with greater understanding around disabilities. However, this understanding of disability is not necessarily one that leads to the audience walking away with greater empathy and awareness of meaning of difference. To use various visual, written, and spoken mediums in an autobiographical format should result in broader changes in perception of disability instead of reinforcing already existing stereotypes and misconceptions, eventually cartoon should exert an effort to change the discourse around disability in society.
The most fundamental area of discussion is how the cartoon has defined disability. Using autobiographical sources from the real people behind these five characters, the cartoon tries to stay true to their character’s real life stories, however, the portrayal is in many ways biased, since it only cuts out and depict the very first years of their life, eliding the vast majority of their lives to focus mostly on their childhoods, when they are only less than 10 years old, leaving less than one minute showing the characters to be independent and hardworking as the famous and successful people who the show assumes people in China see them as as today. As Susan Wendell writes in her essay “Who is Disabled? Defining Disability”: “How a society defines disability and whom it recognizes as disabled also reveal a great deal about that society’s attitudes and expectations concerning the body, what it stigmatizes and what it considers ‘normal’ in physical appearance and performance.” As disabled children, the characters are portrayed not just disabled in some contexts, but in all contexts. Scenes focus almost exclusively on how they are frustrated inside about their physical disability. However, one can also argue that much of the insecurity, dependency, and difficulties (being bullied or denied of opportunity) comes from their identity as children, not their label as disabled. The arrangement results in each episode’s story spending almost three fourth of the time on how the young overcoming the cruelty from the society, and only one fourth on their success.
Furthermore, the characters depicted in Dream Catching are all physically disabled, and mental disabilities are not included. It may reflects the lack of “successful” examples within the mentally disabled group, but also the difficulty the production team, or even in a larger sense, the nation has in discussing mental disability. The straightforward presentation of the disabled as merely or solely physically disabled dismisses the fact that the very definition of disabled includes, as Wendell points out “social practices that involve the unequal exercise of power and have major economic, social and psychological consequences in some people’s lives.” To simplify the issues of disability to a biological one is an escape and allowed for Dream Catching to utilize the construction of simple narrative arcs that begin each episode with failures allegedly stemming from the character’s disability but aim for some sort of triumphant resolution or overcoming of hardship by episode or plot arc’s end, which would itself be unraveled and reset for the plot of the next episode or plot arc. But such a form of serialized plotting and an arc of accumulating strength despite repeated humiliation may have been what the show intended to do, because as one watches the cartoon, it simply is not about the disabled.
The theme song of the cartoon sends a message that reveals its target audience. As it sings: “What we are chasing is the Chinese Dream, let us dance, let us be positive … with kindness from you and me, let us achieve our country’s dream,” the juxtaposition of the lyrics and a few able-bodied dancing characters in the background raises question of whether the cartoon is using a certain representation of disability as a means to achieve nationalism. The show’s emphasis on displaying disabled people overcoming difficulties as a moralizing and the correct way to behave showcases this nationalist approach to incorporating disability narratives for individuals into their overall ideology. The phrase “Chinese Dream” refers to a phrase brought up by President Xi Jinping as the embodiment of the political ideology of his leadership. The nation-state emerges as the visible recipient of the disabled influencing others with their positivity, as Matthew Kohrman points out in his research of disability and institutional advocacy in the making of modern China, “Disability has been intertwined with the government complex management of China’s “modernization,” more specifically, with efforts to sustain the party-state’s preeminence while shifting China to a more market-based political economy.” Even though he is referring to a trend that began almost thirty years ago, the same sentiment is still prevalent today, as disabled people are mainly celebrated because they embody the set of personal and national ideals, and are often treated as in the cartoon as token model minority when their personal experience fits their overall narrative. These characters start off their stories often being reduced to solely their disabilities, then they overcame similar hardships in life (being marginalized, rejected from school etc), giving the impression that these characters are not too different in their own ways. The narrative not only fails to depict a more nuanced life experiences of the disabled characters that are as complex as those of abled people, but also reinforced the social stigma society on the disabled.