In contemporary Chinese society, Deafness is still widely considered a disability in the traditional medical sense. This is despite the development of the Deaf rights movement in the English-speaking world which often defines Deaf people as a cultural and linguistic minority. Recent decades have witnessed the rise of Deaf activism in China, and this movement has gradually begun to challenge the medicalized understanding of Deafness as a disability. This ‘awakening’ of the Chinese Deaf population is commonly attributed to the influence of Western NGOs and ‘political correctness’ in post-socialist China, especially in the twenty-first century. However, the idea that Deafness can be distinguished from medical understandings of disability has a longer history stretching back to the early twentieth century.
In the late nineteenth century, Deaf people in the United States were regularly forced to replace their own sign language with an imitation of hearing people’s pronunciation. Due to their difficulty adopting spoken English as a foreign language, Deaf people were referred to as ‘disabled’ in the pejorative, medical sense. Alongside other types of discrimination encountered at school and in the workplace, Deaf people endeavoured to disprove this idea and to promote their community as a unique linguistic minority. In the mid-late-twentieth century, Deaf people began organizing as a political movement and their activism raised awareness of the importance of having their own language, American Sign Language. Owing to the prolonged history of Deaf activism in the United States, it is assumed that Chinese Deaf people’s political awareness was inspired by their Western counterparts. However, this Eurocentric perception overlooks a forgotten fact: that the Chinese Deaf community were socially and politically active in the early twentieth century. This article traces the early history of the Chinese Deaf community.
Let us first examine the early history of Deaf education in China. In 1887, American medical missionaries Charles Mills and his wife Annetta T. Mills founded the first Deaf School in China. Having trained as a hearing-Deaf teacher at the Rochester School for the Deaf, Annetta Mills brought modern pedagogy and knowledge of Deaf education to China. She began adapting popular educational methods into a Chinese context and helping Deaf children to both use signs and imitate hearing people’s pronunciation. Mills’ early efforts to enrol Deaf children were not easy and her methods were initially interpreted as the work of a demon. Walking through the countryside in North China and working among poor peasants, Mills tried to persuade local parents to send their Deaf children to her school. She eventually managed to enrol dozens of students during the first decade of the twentieth century, which won the respect of local businessmen and bureaucrats. They appreciated Mills’ achievements and donated money to sponsor her miraculous project.
Parallel to Mills’ dedication to sharing her knowledge of Deaf education, Chinese elites also began to recognise its importance. The disastrous failure of the Sino-Japanese War and the War of 1899 frustrated the entirety of Chinese society, and the Qing government agreed on various political reforms. Following the model of Meiji Japan, the Qing government also sent high-ranking officials to visit foreign nations. Surprised by the rapid modernization of Japanese society, they observed its significant progress in Deaf education and treated it as a miracle of modernity. Inspired by the Japanese example of combining Deaf and blind education in the same school, the former official and later entrepreneur, Zhang Jian founded the Langshan Deaf and Blind School. This served as an integral part of Zhang’s agenda to modernize his hometown of Nantong, and the new school offered novel educational opportunities for local Deaf children.
The disparate origins of Deaf education sponsored by American missionaries and Chinese elites converged in the early-twentieth century to promote the formation of a Deaf community. Aside from being the first Deaf school in China, Mills’ school also functioned as a base for training Deaf educators, as some of its graduates later worked as teachers in other Chinese Deaf schools. The collaborative relationships between different Deaf schools established connections between well-educated Deaf people. Despite their different regional origins and residences, these Deaf elites knew one another through the alumni network in Shanghai and its surrounding areas. Consequently, representatives of Deaf people across China convened in Shanghai to form the first national Deaf organisation in 1936.
While the Chinese Deaf elites celebrated the inauguration of their national organisation, the Deaf community as a whole encountered an unprecedented national crisis when Imperial Japan invaded Beijing in 1937. During the first few months of the war, the Japanese military occupied the national capital, Nanjing, Shanghai and surrounding areas, which constituted the locale of most Deaf elites. Alongside their hearing counterparts, Deaf people also became victims of warfare, and many lost their families and fortunes. The official magazine of the national Deaf organisation, titled Yin Duo, featured reports of those seeking refuge after escaping their hometowns which were occupied by the Japanese military.
In the face of this national crisis, the Deaf Chinese community responded by setting their own agenda for actively participating in wartime arrangements. Owing to their hearing impairment, most Deaf men were not permitted to serve as soldiers on the frontline. However, they discovered other ways to support the national war effort. For example, it is reported that the Deaf Shanghainese activist Lin Jimu, served as a civic volunteer. Besides individual efforts, the national Deaf organisation introduced several patriotic tasks into its agenda in 1938. It arranged an exhibition of Deaf painters’ artworks, the profits of which were donated to a fund for soldiers. Deaf elites who were relocating to Sichuan and Chongqing provinces in Southeast China also committed to rebuilding wartime Deaf schools to avoid Deaf education being disrupted by the national crisis. Furthermore, they organised a printing house which offered employment opportunities to members of the educated Deaf population, who were often marginalized in the job market. All of the measures implemented during this difficult period strengthened the Chinese Deaf community. Instead of being seen as a burden to their hearing compatriots, Chinese Deaf people actively participated in wartime arrangements responding to the threat posed by Imperial Japan.
This article has explored the early experiences of the Chinese Deaf community from Mills’ educational mission at the end of the nineteenth century to wartime mobilization in the late-1930s. Although their voices were often muted during the socialist period of the later-twentieth century, Deaf people remained an active force in Chinese society. As I have demonstrated, it is important to challenge both the hearing-centric and Eurocentric perspectives that have dominated existing narratives of Chinese Deaf history.