Discrimination against students with medical conditions is rife in Chinese colleges and universities despite being formally prohibited by China’s Constitution and various related laws, according to a report published by three NGOs.

Rather than treating child trafficking as an isolated issue, the government of China should respond by creating comprehensive and integrated child protection mechanisms, Save the Children’s Kate Wedgwood, He Ye (何叶) and Sun Tiezheng (孙铁铮) argue in the following excerpts from a recent presentation to the Foreign Correspondents Club in Beijing.

Musapir, a native of Kelamayi (克拉马依) in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, is a police cadet in the Peoples’ Public Security University of China. In July 2006 he posted the following story on a website devoted to Uighur affairs.

During this summer vacation the school arranged for us to go to Shenzhen on a two month internship. The people and events in this story are all real, but for their security and for other reasons some names have been changed.

The danwei where I did my internship was a local police station (派出所) in Shenzhen city’s Bao’an (宝安) district. Around midday the day before yesterday we received a call saying some of our people on the beat (巡防人员) had arrested a thief in front of a commercial plaza. After taking the call, a police officer and I went together to the scene and found that the thief was a boy from Xinjiang, the same place I come from. He had been stealing a cellphone from someone’s bag, but the victim noticed.

China’s top leaders recently recognised the need for a corps of professional social workers. Chang Tianle (常天乐) reports on ongoing efforts and challenges in building the new profession.

An informal, national network of around 45 NGOs serving autistic children and their families has provided both a learning opportunity and an inspiration to the Beijing-based Capacity Building & Assessment Centre (CBAC, 倍能组织能力建设与评估中心), which is now hoping to facilitate similar networks with funding support from an international development agency in Germany.

Although oceans apart in some respects, social entrepreneurs from the UK and China share common experiences and challenges in their organisations, as they found at a symposium in Beijing on October 18.

Yang Qingfeng (杨青风), a 25-year-old blind man who is studying massage and acupuncture at a special college for people with disabilities, has been making school radio programmes since he was 16. But until recently becoming a professional broadcaster seemed an impossible dream.

An independent non-profit organisation that provides community-based care for mentally handicapped youngsters is managing to raise enough funds in China to expand its services without increasing dependence on international donors—despite a restrictive legal framework that leaves the fundraising market dominated by a handful of large, state-backed players.

‘Community construction’ is the government’s watchword for coping with the social transformation of Chinese cities. Nick Young and Tina Qian visited Ningbo, where local authorities are working with a Chinese NGO to invest the phrase with real meaning, and to give ordinary citizens a somewhat greater role in community development.

On a weekday morning in the prosperous coastal city of Ningbo, thirty elderly residents of a relatively low-income neighbourhood are gathered in the sunny atrium of the Xujiachao (徐家漕) Neighbourhood Centre, listening to a volunteer teacher read newspaper articles aloud in the local, Zhejiang dialect. In a community diner downstairs the pensioners can buy a hearty meal for as little as one yuan (USD 12 cents), and an air-conditioned common room is also set aside for them to meet, chat and play mah jong.

In January Beijing launched a new crackdown on gambling, with a spate of high profile arrests and sieges of underground casinos. However, the government now seems interested in taming and channelling the betting instinct, rather than eradicating it. Moves towards legalisation of gambling may also bring more transparency to the distribution of funds from the multi-billion dollar state lotteries. Matt Perrement investigates the current state of play.