Accounts of the treatment of persons with disabilities over the course of China’s long history are almost all unreservedly bleak. Without gainsaying the great challenges that persons with disabilities faced historically in China (and every other society), this talk contends that there are at least five important threads – in philosophy, imperial policy, law, social practice, and self-help by persons with disabilities – that suggest a more nuanced portrayal is warranted. This is important both for our understanding of the Chinese past and to address arguments, both from within and beyond the PRC, about the limits of what is possible in contemporary Chinese society.

William Alford is the Henry L. Stimson Professor of Law at Harvard University, where he also serves as the Director of East Asian Legal Studies and the Chair of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability.

Professor Alford has served as a consultant to the U.S. government, the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, foreign governments, law firms, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations, and has been a dispute resolution panelist under the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement and the North American Free Trade Agreement. He has met with current and previous presidents of China and Taiwan, and is one of a small number of foreign law specialists to have delivered an address at the Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party.

Professor Alford is the founding Chair of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability which provides pro bono services on issues of disability in China, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Vietnam and several other nations. He served from 2005 to 2014 on the board of directors of Special Olympics International (which serves individuals with intellectual disabilities in more than 180 nations) chairing its Research and Policy Committee and serving on its Executive Committee. In 2008, Special Olympics honored him for his work for persons with intellectual disabilities in China.