Xuan Li founded a small agency providing housekeeping services in February last year in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, and now employs 500 full-time and part-time workers.
Xuan, 30, who has been wheelchair-bound for years, has two home-study college diplomas, but had found it difficult to get a job before she decided to start her own business.
Her housekeeping agency earns her more than 20,000 yuan annually, enabling her to be fully self-dependent.
More and more people with disabilities are striving to overcome their problems and to employ themselves.
About 90,000 disabled people in Zhejiang are self-employed, raising the employment rate of the disabled to 82 percent, according to the provincial government.
Unable to walk because of muscular atrophy of his legs, Luo Runfa faced the same problem as Xuan. He opened a computer training center as he was interested in new technology and knew more about computers than the average person three years ago.
The center has developed from an eight-square-meter room with two computers to a 300-square-meter studio with 200 computers in three years. It admits 10,000 students every year.
Society admires these disabled people for their courage and willpower, but still they need help, especially from the government, says Huang Shuliang, a social worker with the Disabled Persons' Federation in Zhejiang.
Zhejiang was the first province in China to provide massage training for the visually-impaired in colleges. There are now 250 massage parlors with around 4,000 employees in the province.
The government set up a fund here for the disabled to start business and about 1.4 million yuan has been used in the past 11 months.
Zhu Yan is one of the 300 disabled people who benefited from the fund. She invested about 20,000 yuan in opening a computer-aided design studio last May and 7,000 yuan came from the government fund.
"I did put all my eggs in one basket at that time and the fund helped me a lot," says Zhu, whose left leg was afflicted with infantile paralysis.
Zhu's studio started to earn money last October and she has enrolled in a design course in a local academy of fine arts.
The Disabled Persons' Federation here has launched a project to fund the disabled in vocational training. Those who pass the exam do not need to pay their tuition and those who perform well receive a scholarship.
Under the project, 186 people have received training in colleges since the beginning of this year in Hangzhou.
Post offices here are also endeavoring to employ the disabled. In the last two months, they have hired disabled people to run 50 newsstands.
(People's Daily December 9, 2002)
