While the spread of the Covid-19 has been reasonably controlled in China, the social impacts of the pandemic are still ongoing. Focusing on the social consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, our Chinese collaboration network has organized several webinars since this autumn, with the purpose of sharing insights on e.g. human rights protection, social inclusion, both from a domestic and global perspective.
On October 17, our research team attended the webinar ‘Equal Participation and Inclusive Society for Persons with Disabilities’, which was organized by our project partner Wuhan East-Lake Institute of Social Advancement (EISA) and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. In the keynote session on ‘Implication of Covid-19 Pandemic on Disability-Inclusive Policies’, Professor Rune Halvorsen gave a key note titled ‘Social Citizenship and Welfare Governance under Covid-19’. Professor Halvorsen shared insights on how to realize social citizenship under covid-19 on the dimensions of ‘security’, ‘autonomy’ and ‘influence’ and how disabled people’s organizations and other civil society organizations could contribute to the realization of citizenship. Halvorsen’s presentation will be published on EISA’s website ‘Disability Rights Resources Portal’ soon (in Chinese).
November 14-15, Professor Rune Halvorsen and Research Assistant Biao He attended the 2020 Annual Conference of the Chinese Association for Social Welfare Research (CASWR) and the adjunct Sino-Nordic Social Welfare Conference (SNSWC). The CASWR annual conference was hosted by Zhejiang University of Technology and SNSWC was organized collaboratively with the Sino-Nordic Welfare Research Network (SNoW) chaired by Professor Stein Kuhnle, the University of Bergen. Professor Halvorsen gave an opening speech for the conference and a keynote speech on ‘Social Citizenship and Resilience – Three Approaches to Global Challenges in Social Policy’. In his keynote speech, Professor Halvorsen introduced three approaches to overcome current challenges in various realms and achieve social resilience, namely the socio-liberal approaches, the market-liberal (libertarian) approaches, and the civic-republican approaches. He argued that the three approaches outline different contractual relations between individual citizens’, citizens groups, and society (‘the state’), and how governments may promote or facilitate those contractual relations. He emphasized that we ought to become more sensitive to how contrasting approaches to social citizenship may be combined and reconciled in new and unexpected ways.
In the session ‘Social Inequality and Social Needs under the Covid-19 Crisis’, Biao He presented a paper on ‘Digital Inclusion for Persons with Disabilities in China under Covid-19: How Far Has China Come? – A Policy Review’. He pointed out that the Covid-19 pandemic may further broaden the digital divide that many persons with disabilities experience. He presented an overview of the Chinese policy framework that aims to promote digital inclusion for persons with disabilities pre- and under Covid-19. He argued that, despite the efforts that China has made since the 1990s, the current social regulative and redistributive policy initiatives still have scope for improvements to ensure the accessibility of ICT solutions and increase the uptake of ICT products and services among persons with disabilities. Contextualized in the Covid-19 situation, he claimed that the Chinese framework has made few adjustments or policy changes to accommodate the extraordinary needs and respond to the new risks of digital exclusion under the pandemic.
Additionally, together with EISA we are planning to organize a webinar in January 2021, with the topic of labour market inclusion for persons with disabilities. We will invite scholars, representatives of disabled people’s organizations and the governmental sectors, from both the Chinese and Norwegian side. We will update and post the latest news and details regarding the webinar soon. Just keep following us on our website and Weibo (search the username ‘SINIPO2020’). Just keep following us on both websites and Weibo (search the username ‘SINIPO2020’).