Thursday, February 26, 2009

The Political Involvement of Deaf Chinese: The People's Republic of China

Hello Everybody!

Please allow myself to welcome YOU again. My name is Toronja Williams and last month, I posted my blog entries explaining about my experiences at the University Presidential Inauguration Conference (UPIC) in Washington, DC. Currently, I am making the Deaf Perspective on International Politics a main focus in this blog segment, today.

It becomes critical that I cover about the political involvement of Deaf Chinese of the People's Republic of China as a more specific focus in this Deaf Perspective blog segment on International Politics. As a former scholar in the International Scholar Laureate Program (ISLP) Delegation on Diplomacy & International Relations in China in spring 2007, I visited cities in China such as Beijing, Xi’an and Shanghai. During my 15 days of duration there, I learned about the International Politics and China's role and impact in global affairs in several workshops and lectures sponsored by the Chinese colleges and universities and government programs. Thus, after attending these programs, they were all beneficial, informative and interesting to me.

One afternoon, I had the opportunity to visit the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China. At this workshop, I asked the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yang Jiechi questions about the Deaf participations in the political process in the country. He explained to me that, since the Deaf Chinese were unable to gain quality education and to secure qualified jobs, they were, therefore, unable to participate in the political process of convincing the government officials to change and to enact the laws. Most importantly, the Deaf Chinese did not have the right necessary amount of political information they needed in order to be part of the political process in their own country.
Many Deaf Chinese individuals were not aware about the importance of becoming more assertive and more proactive in forming and making political decisions in forums, schools, and governments as well.
In such a situation similar to this, they, most likely, became inactive in political process in other places such as the United Nations. Therefore, the Deaf Chinese were indeed suffering from inequality and inability to gain access to political information. I remember at one point, the internet did not have any political information accessible for internet users. This example showed how the government controlled the amount of political information that citizens could receive.

We need to come together as Deaf, Hearing, Americans and Chinese-Americans to exchange information about showing the Deaf Chinese the importance of becoming more politically involved in the political process in their countries. I look forward to share more of the general perspectives of the Deaf Chinese in China in the next coming days and to provide you with valuable information about the importance of helping the Deaf Chinese to seek and to gain political information in order for them to have a successful political turnout which would come from their political involvements. Finally, I leave enough space for everyone to opine here. Your voices, thoughts and opinions count!
Stay healthy and come back again!
Toronja-

1 comment:

Gary A. Fitts said...

Thanks. I will be in Shanghai, China myself two weeks to attend World Expo 2010 first week of July next year. The only thing I know is that they will be accessible to Deaf loaning out mobile device that have both captioning and sign language modes as seen last year in Zaragoza.
Smokey