This article outlines the political, social, economic, and cultural factors affecting disability representation in Chinese cinema from the founding of the PRC onwards, particularly after 1976. With reference to a wide variety of films that include main characters with visual, hearing, speech, physical, and learning impairments, it demonstrates how socialist realism, the equation of a “healthy” body with a healthy nation, and the great economic endeavor of the Mao era all contributed to the limitation of disabled people on the big screen, whilst the opening-up reforms, spiritual civilization campaigns, and commercial and critical demands of the post-Mao era effectively promoted their inclusion. At different times, the marginality of disabled people has resulted in them being overlooked as irrelevant, rejected as impaired, employed as a political tool, or identified as a marketable commodity. The representation or nonrepresentation of disability in Chinese film is closely linked to the politics of looking good.
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