After the lunchtime rush on May 17, National Day for the Disabled, a group of waiters in Lijiang, Southwest China's Yunnan Province sat together to discuss their performance in the afternoon.
But hardly a word was said at the discussion, as 14 waiters out of the 21 working at the restaurant have hearing or speaking disabilities, local news website yunnan.cn reported on Tuesday.
China has 85 million people with disabilities. Experts said that their employment situation has been improving in recent years, but supporting policies could be made more flexible to allow more people with disabilities to truly enjoy the right to work.
Treasure the job
Heyijia Silent Restaurant is the first of its kind in Yunnan.
Guests use iPads to order food, and notebooks and pens are placed on every table to assist communication.
There are pictures and slogans on the walls of the restaurant to remind people to show their support for people with disabilities.
"Guests here are really tolerant, no matter whether the waiters are slow, or it takes time to communicate," Zhang Yushou, the owner of the restaurant, said.
"We have never received a complaint since we started this scheme two years ago," Zhang said
Zhang said his employees are "incredible." "They make more effort than other people. For instance, none of them have ever been late for work, even though they cannot hear alarm clocks in the morning."
"They treasure this job," Zhang said.
A home
In 2012, a man with hearing disabilities started working in Zhang's restaurant. The waiter's responsible attitude caught Zhang's attention, which made Zhang to decide to open the "silent" restaurant.
Zhang spent two months learning sign language before the restaurant was reopened in 2015 so he "could join them and get to know them better."
Xiao Yang, 22, had never worked in the same place for more than two months prior to coming to Heyijia. But now she has become one of the most experienced employees of the silent restaurant and greets guests when they enter.
"People with disabilities need our respect and spiritual concern. Our restaurant not only provides a platform for them to show themselves, but also is helping them to become better day by day," Zhang noted.
"The restaurant is a home to these employees with disabilities, and I have tried my best to offer them jobs," Zhang said, adding that even though the restaurant has encountered some problems, he still hopes to open more silent restaurants in the future.
Enter the workforce
"In China, disabled people mainly work in welfare factories designed for them or in scattered places. A small number are self-employed," Zhou Haiwang, deputy director of the Institute of Urban and Demography Studies under the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
In general the employment situation of people with disabilities has been getting better in recent years, not only because of supportive government policies, but also new technologies that allow them to work online at home, Zhou said.
Data released jointly by the China Disabled Persons' Federation and Internet giant Alibaba shows that in the past year, there were 160,000 shops owned by people with disabilities on e-retailer Taobao, with a total revenue of 12.4 billion yuan ($1.8 billion).
According to an official 2015 survey, among China's 15 million people with disabilities of working age, over 40 percent are employed, almost the same level as some developed countries, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
From 2012 to 2015, 4.96 million impoverished rural people with disabilities were lifted out of poverty and 3.17 million poor disabled residents of rural areas received training, according to a government report reviewing human rights during this period, published in June 2015.
By 2015, the state had established a living benefits system for financially-challenged people with disabilities and nursing care allowances for those with severe disabilities.
However, Zhou said that the preferential policies for companies that hire people with disabilities should be more flexible and the subsidies on offer need to be consistently distributed on time so that more people with disabilities can enter the workforce.
Meanwhile, to increase their rate of employment, training for people with disabilities could start as early as middle school, so that they could have advantages in the future.
"More channels for job hunting should be opened for people with disabilities by the government," he added.
